Akiko Hibbert

Akiko “Aki” Yamagawa Hibbett died at the Golden Pond assisted living facility in Hopkinton on Sept. 13. She was 102 years old.

Aki was a poet, a casual historian, a librarian and an incomparable wife, mother and grandmother. She was born on July 21, 1924, in El Centro, California, the fourth child of Kitaro Yamagawa and Hana (Kaneshi) Yamagawa. Her parents had arrived from Okinawa, Japan, by way of South America. They first settled in Peru, where they spent years working as contract laborers, then snaked their way up the continent and crossed the Rio Grande into California. Aki chronicled this tale in her 2010 book “From Okinawa to the Americas: Hana Yamagawa and Her Reminiscences of a Century,” a work of cross-continental history told through the lens of her mother’s memoir. She credited her mother, who dictated the story over years’ worth of interviews, as the author, but it was Aki who conducted the interviews, pored over supplemental research, and wrote a rich, historical narrative.

Aki spent her formative years in Boyle Heights, a racially diverse neighborhood of Los Angeles where her family moved and ran a small hotel after farming in the Imperial Valley. She described her childhood and teenage years with some of the typical markers of a happy American upbringing: playing basketball in a Japanese-American league, attending picnics and dance socials hosted by the local Okinawan club, and begging her parents to dye her jet-black hair red because a boy she liked had the same. Then World War II arrived, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, empowering the U.S. military to incarcerate anyone of Japanese descent in concentration camps.

The Yamagawa family chose a route known as “voluntary” relocation. They gave up their home and business and fled to Colorado, where Gov. Ralph L. Carr had protested the clear immorality of the internment and spoken up against “race hatred” of Japanese Americans. Aki recalled writing a letter to Carr seeking asylum, and soon the family was in Littleton, Colorado, and back to farming.

From there, Aki’s life crisscrossed the country: She moved to New York City, where she took classes at Hunter College, made religious trinkets in a likely illegal apartment factory, and eventually secured a job at Columbia University’s Butler Library. Once Japanese people were permitted to move back to the West Coast, she returned and finished her bachelor’s degree at UCLA, where she met Howard Hibbett, and completed a master’s in library science at the University of Southern California.

Aki moved back east with Howard, a professor of Japanese literature at Harvard University, and married him in Newark, New Jersey, on Jan. 25, 1960. They lived briefly in Boston’s Back Bay and then moved to a house on Spy Pond in Arlington, where Aki worked as a librarian at the Boston Public Library. They had a son, David, on Nov. 29, 1962.

Aki and and Howard lived together in Arlington until Howard’s death in 2019. They traveled the globe, sometimes bringing David along, sometimes letting him roam free. Back in Arlington, she was well known for her daily swims at dawn at the Boys & Girls Club, where she belonged to a close-knit group of regulars. She cared with ferocity for her aging mother, who also lived beyond a century, and later for her grandchildren, Maia and Otto, who adored her until her final day. She spent her last years at Golden Pond, where she was known for cracking creative jokes and bubbling over with affection for anyone in her presence.

In the waning years of her life, Aki delighted in the world’s simple pleasures. She savored every bite of her favorite foods, she thanked her companions profusely for their time, and she was awed every fall by the changing of the leaves. Aki is survived by her son, David Hibbett; her daughter-in-law, Margaret Carroll; and her grandchildren, Maia and Otto Hibbett.

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