Dr. Robert M. Fukada (STH ’60)
Bob Fukada died on June 25, 2022, in hospice care at home in Pitzer with his family, after a long and arduous battle with kidney disease.
Bob was born in 1933 in Riverside, California, to Tanetsugu and Shisa Fukada, who had been converted to Christianity by the great Japanese evangelist and social reformer, Toyohiko Kagawa. Bob’s father was serving a Japanese congregation of the Methodist Church. In 1937, the family moved back to Japan when Kagawa invited Rev. Fukada to serve a church and social settlement in Tokyo. Bob and his older sister, Yasuko, attended a “unique Christian school,” Jiyu Gakuen, until their education was interrupted by World War II. He and other elementary students spent a year in the countryside outside of Tokyo. When he was 16, Bob returned to California and completed high school in Palo Alto, then moved on to Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, where Yasuko was already a student – and where he met fellow student Laura Allen. Bob and Laura were married in 1955, at his father’s church in Japan, in a ceremony officiated by Kagawa.
In 1960, Bob graduated from Boston University School of Theology, and was ordained an Elder in the Methodist Church. That same year, he and Laura were commissioned as Methodist missionaries to Japan and sent to work with the Kyodan (the United Church of Christ in Japan). While Laura studied at Kyoto Japanese Language School, Bob taught at an Osaka high school, but he soon moved to the faculty of Doshisha University, in Kyoto, where he taught practical theology courses for 38 years. Bob’s studies had always emphasized social ethics, and he noted that his courses always “tended to spread out into social reality in whatever subject we were dealing with.” On sabbatical in 1978-79, he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree at the School of Theology at Claremont, writing his doctoral project on preaching, language, and culture.
Bob not only taught at Doshisha, he and Laura also worked with the Nishijin Community Center, the Kyoto YWCA, and, very specially, with a new church start-up. The Kamigano Church was the Kyodan’s experimental effort to develop a house church that Bob described as “a small, intimate and open fellowship, not bound by traditions and tightly interpreted rules.” It met in the Fukada home for 31 years.
After 44 years of service in Japan, Bob and Laura retired to Pilgrim Place in 2003, but it’s no wonder that he cherished his annual returns to Kyoto to work with the Kamigano Church. Laura joined him for summers at their beloved Lake Nojiri. Here in Claremont, they faithfully attended Claremont United Methodist Church. At Pilgrim Place, Bob pruned trees, worked with Books and the Christmas Décor Committee (even sharing some of his precious Japanese super-adhesive tape), and was a stalwart Many Hands Mover. Many of us remember the birthday greetings he sent each year.
Bob was a good neighbor – a quiet, caring presence. As Ron Evans so perfectly put it, “He was a skilled translator, not only of words but also of cultures.”
~ Betty Clements,
with thanks to Eleanor Loeliger and Ron Evans
A Memorial Service for Robert Mikio Fukada was held on Friday, August 26 in Decker Hall on the Pilgrim Place grounds. The recording of this service is found at the following link: