Jan Yanehiro is a Farrington High School Governor who went on to become an iconic presence in California television, an author and an inspiration to Asian and Pacific islander youth, before "finally" fulfilling her father’s desire that she become a teacher.
Yanehiro will receive the Kulia i ka Nu‘u Award from the Hawai‘i Chamber of Commerce of Northern California in San Francisco on Thursday, an award presented to Hawaii expats who embody "strive for the summit," a phrase attributed to Queen Kapiolani.
Yanehiro grew up in Kalihi Valley. Her father worked for SIDA Taxi, and her mother worked for Love’s Bakery. Her father told her she should become a teacher "or a nurse, because that was a good job for a woman," she told TheBuzz.
A trailblazing Japanese-American television anchor in the U.S., Yanehiro is now director of multimedia communications at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has become an educator — "finally," she said, laughing.
Her sisters are educators as well. Cindy Martin is the staff development coordinator at Leeward Community College, and her sister, Linda Uyehara, "went back to our alma mater and taught at Farrington," she said.
Her three children, Jaclyn, Jenna and son JB, either are working in or have been employed in the media industry.
Yanehiro was asked by Academy of Art University to develop a broadcast department.
"I’m an old, bossy broadcaster and I’ll do it for you," she said of her reply. She developed a four-year degree program and a three-year master’s program five years ago.
Her rise to broadcast icon started during her senior year at Farrington, where she was the Page One editor for the school paper (if you niele, she wen grad in 1966, li’dat).
"My dream was to work for either the Star-Bulletin or the Advertiser and to see (my) byline," she said.
"I didn’t think I could be on radio or TV because I didn’t see anybody like me" working in those professions. Nobody encouraged her to try for a radio or television job. "A woman, an Asian woman, a Japanese-American who went to public high school … it wasn’t even thought of," she said.
From the University of Hawaii she transferred to Fresno State University in California to study journalism. For the girl whose family had never left Hawaii, "I thought Fresno was New York City," she joked.
She thought she would return home with a journalism degree and work for the Bulletin or the Advertiser, but exposure to the world outside Hawaii made her want to see more.
She became a stewardess for TWA (TransWorld Airlines) in the days before political correctness thrust the term "flight attendant" into our vocabularies.
On a 1972 stopover in San Francisco, she interviewed at KFRC radio, "the biggest rock station in California back then," and got hired as a secretary for the all-male, 10-member news department. "They thought it was cute that I was a stewardess," she said. She worked her way up to a reporting job and, after four years in radio, auditioned for an experimental show on KPIX-TV.
"We shot the pilot in 1975 and went on the air in 1976," she said.
"It was an experimental show and everybody said it would fail. Nobody knew what a magazine show on television was; it was before ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ ‘Access Hollywood,’ before the Food Network and ESPN."
"Evening Magazine" pioneered the use of videotape outside the studio, launched the 28-year-old "hungry young kid" into household-name status and won her Emmy Awards and other industry accolades over the next 14 years.
After the show’s end she stayed with the station through the end of 1994. Her husband died of brain cancer the following year.
Over the years she has co-authored books on child-rearing and one titled "This Is Not the Life I Ordered," about surviving loss and other life challenges.
Yanehiro will be surprised with a locally generated honor at Thursday’s event, to which Edwin Lee, San Francisco’s first mayor of Asian-American descent, also has been invited, said HCCNC President Daryl Higashi. (Higashi moved to the mainland in 1985.)
Local expats, who in the Hawaii tradition of creating ohana where no blood relations exist, created HCCNC through their longing to connect with one another and serve the community — and it will honor Yanehiro at its annual Five Star Aloha Gala, a scholarship fundraiser.
Chefs from San Francisco area restaurants, as well as Les Tomita of Da Kitchen, on Maui, will feed the crowd, and HCCNC will present this year’s scholarship awards to Maluhia Stark-Kinimaka of Kapaa High, Stanford University freshman Gina McGuire of Hawaii island and Alyssa Yee of Punahou.
Yanehiro previously has served as emcee for the event, and when officials told her she would be this year’s honoree, "first I said to them, ‘You don’t need to do that,’" she said.
They persisted.
"I’m honored, I’m humbled and almost embarrassed," she said, but as a longtime supporter of the HCCNC, she believes in its work.
One mission is to award scholarships to Hawaii kids (and other students with Hawaii connections) so they can attend school in the Bay Area.
"The world is so much bigger than Hawaii," she said. Young people should "see beyond our 50th state."
"We can always call Hawaii home. … We can always go home to Hawaii, but I think … we’ve got to make sure our kamaaina of the future are educated and see the world so that they can make Hawaii strong and robust," Yanehiro said.
Yanehiro often comes home to Hawaii. She owns a condo in Honolulu, has about 100 relatives — siblings, nieces, nephews and cousins — and regularly gets together with classmates and their old yearbooks.
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
