Tone Shimizu, 1938-2025: Yokohama to Seattle
Born in the Philippines to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother, raised in Yokohama after the war, educated in Seattle — and a judo instructor for most of a long life on the American west coast.
- Born
- 30 March 1938, Negros Oriental, Philippines
- Died
- 4 November 2025, age 87, in hospice care following a stroke
- Parents
- Kameki Shimizu and Sotera Fernandez
- Educated
- St. Joseph International School, Yokohama; Seattle University
- Known for
- Judo instruction
His family moved to Japan after the Second World War and he grew up in Yokohama, attending St. Joseph International School before graduating from Seattle University. The United States Judo Federation published his obituary. His family directed memorial gifts to the USJF’s Keiko Fukuda Judo Scholarship endowment — named for the highest-ranked woman in judo history, and a fitting destination.
He is survived by his wife, Barbara Houston-Shimizu.
What a school owner should take from Tone Shimizu
The scholarship endowment is the detail worth taking. A memorial fund attached to a named scholarship is one of the few structures that converts the end of a teaching life into the beginning of someone else’s.
Very few martial arts schools have one. It costs nothing to establish while you are alive, it gives your community somewhere to direct grief when the time comes, and it means a student who could not otherwise afford to train does. If you have taught for thirty years and have no such mechanism, that is a gap worth closing this year rather than leaving to your family to improvise.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- We have not described him as an international judo referee, and neither should anyone else without better evidence. His obituary calls him “a judo instructor and international referee,” but the passage immediately following is about soccer — where he was an accomplished player, coach and referee — and no judo governing body lists him on its international referee rosters. The refereeing career appears to have been in soccer. We flag this because it is the sort of ambiguity that hardens into fact once repeated.
- Single-sourced. The United States Judo Federation is a national governing body and reliable for the fact of the death, but we found no funeral-home record, newspaper notice or second obituary.
- His name is not garbled. We checked. The Japanese-Filipino parentage accounts for an atypical given name; the USJF gives no kanji or alternate spelling.
- Principal source: the United States Judo Federation obituary, November 2025.
Corrections and first-hand recollections are especially welcome on this one.