Joshua Yasuo Suzuki

Joshua Yasuo Suzuki, age 78, passed away on April 19th, 2020 from COVID-19 complications. He was born in a small town called Hizume in Iwate Prefecture, Japan in July 1941. He was one of five siblings in a working-class family that ran a general store in town. As his parents had a high school education, his proudest and most defining moment was his admission to Tohoku University, equivalent in Japan to an Ivy League school. He graduated from its medical school and became a resident physician at the US Air Force hospital in Tachikawa, Japan during the Vietnam War. He chose to forgo a comfortable future in Japan and continued his training in the US. At a hospital in Connecticut, the chief resident, a Jewish man, declared: “Yasuo sounds like how we say Joshua in Hebrew,” and he was Joshua from that day forward. He went on to become a board-certified OB/GYN. “It was the only kind of doctor where people are mostly happy,” he would later tell his children. He practiced medicine in Seattle for over 20 years, based out of the Polyclinic. He raised his family in Shoreline and is survived his sons: Ken, Joe, Dan, and Ian; grandchildren Avery, Piper, Kira, and Tyson. His surviving siblings in Japan are Keiko, Ryuhachiro, and Hideo Suzuki.