Okaeri was founded in 2013 and was integrated into Little Tokyo Service Center in 2025. (Photo courtesy Eric Arimoto)
In 2012, Eric Arimoto was in his late forties, studying to become a marriage and family therapist, when he encountered something he hadn’t before. At his internship, his cohort gathered to listen to two speakers — an event that was announced at the last minute. In stepped Aiden Aizumi, a young transgender man, and his mother, Marsha.
Eric remembers Marsha tearily apologizing to Aiden for not knowing how to support him when he was first transitioning and struggling with his gender identity.
“I was crying so hard,” Arimoto told the Blade. “Because she said the words that I never heard from my own parents. I’m a 61-year-old Japanese American gay man, and my parents loved me to pieces. But, they weren’t advocates, and they didn’t understand what it was like walking in the world as Japanese American and gay, and not feeling a part of any community — like I belonged anywhere.”
This surrogate experience of familial acceptance was pivotal for Arimoto, who began to mend and reckon with his fractured identities. Marsha encouraged him to become a facilitator at PFLAG San Gabriel Valley Asian Pacific Islander, the local Asian American chapter of an organization dedicated to creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people, friends and allies to learn from and connect with one another. Marsha was fundamental in developing the group in 2008, and now, in 2013, was ready to create another queer-affirming space: Okaeri.
Okaeri’s origins
The name comes from a Japanese custom — when you return home, you are greeted with, “Okaeri.” Welcome home. The essence of the group lies in this simple phrase, brief but brimming with endearment. Okaeri is dedicated to increasing visibility for Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, who identify as LGBTQ+: creating events, projects, educational initiatives and programs that embrace and affirm who they are.
Since its formation, Okaeri has grown into a diverse, far-reaching connective system that continues to branch out. It’s home to the first U.S. conference focused specifically on LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans, which has been held biannually since the organization’s very beginnings. There is also Okaeri Connects: online, monthly discussion groups for queer folks and allies, hosted in both English and Japanese. This April, Okaeri hosted its first Connects group for the trans and gender diverse Nikkei community.
Okaeri also preserves the vast, nuanced stories of their community members in “Okaeri Voices,” an archival oral history project that features interviews and stories shared by queer Nikkei, as well as their family members and friends.
The group’s growth has only continued to gain momentum, and in 2025, it was integrated into Little Tokyo Service Center as a community program. For over a decade, Okaeri has drawn the curiosity of queer Japanese Americans across generations and across the country: reminding them that they are not alone, that queer and trans Japanese Americans have always existed and will continue to exist. Okaeri provides them with metaphorical and physical places to imagine and create their own futures as well as reconnect with their lineage and cultural roots.
This path ahead was forged largely by Marsha, who nurtured her community and brought people into her purpose. “She never turned away from difficult topics or discussions,” Arimoto said. “She was here to learn and lean into the discomfort of learning about a different culture. She also played the role of the loving, compassionate, amazing Japanese American mom. She was just the mom for everybody, right? I told Marsha: I don’t need you to be my mom. I have a mom, and I loved my mom. I need you to be Marsha. I need to be you, because you are an amazing advocate and friend.”
Marsha died in late 2025, and her legacy is one that continues to be a light for her friends, family, and fellow community advocates. Marsha illuminated, for them, what is possible.
Aiden’s story
“My mom became my champion,” said Aiden Aizumi, who is now an activist and worker in educational spaces. Growing up, he felt he could only go “so far” when it came to forming connections or finding belonging as a queer kid. He didn’t dress like the girls around him, nor did he fit into the rigid and high-pressure academic environment at school. “There was a disconnect there for me: a gap I just couldn’t ever bridge.”
When Aiden realized he was transgender, it felt like he’d found the one missing piece of a lifelong puzzle. “I think I had picked up these pieces of myself throughout my life…but I still didn’t feel comfortable in who I was. Suddenly, it was like: Oh, that would have solved everything if I had known before.”
At 20, he came out to his parents and remembers his initial frustration around their delay in using his correct pronouns and chosen name. A therapist helped him reframe the situation; she asked how long it had taken him to realize this about himself. Two years, Aiden replied.
“I’m not saying it should take two years,” Aiden remembers her saying, “but you have to think: you gave yourself time. I think you owe them the chance to adjust.” This didn’t take away the pain of their mistakes, but it was enough to soften them for a while. Marsha, specifically, actively tried and was able to come around more quickly. Spaces like Okaeri and their monthly discussion groups are important for this adjustment period: for growing and learning while minimizing the hurt you might, even unintentionally, inflict on your loved ones.
“This is your opportunity to try and practice,” Aiden said. “It’s a muscle, and this is your chance to try it and mess up without your kid here. Try to start working that muscle.”
Okaeri’s future and its blossoming young generation
Okaeri has provided a luminous liminal space for Nikkei allies to practice, “mess up,” and learn about their queer friends and family members. It’s also been the space where young queer folks like Xander Omoto, who is one of the co-facilitators of Okaeri’s latest trans and gender diverse discussion group, got to discover and “test” their true self.
Omoto lives in Oregon and found Okaeri online in 2023, while struggling with his gender and sexual identity. He was closeted to his family, so finding Okaeri was finding a space he could finally feel safe and fully accepted within. “I fell in love with these people that lived so many miles away from me and that I never met before, but they became very much like family,” Omoto told the Blade. “I joke about having these gay uncles who immediately became close friends.”
After being part of an English-speaking Connects group, Omoto remembers logging onto the monthly Zoom one day and finally entering the name he wanted to be called. “[It] wasn’t the name everyone knew me by and, immediately, people called me this name that I was always hoping could be mine, and automatically used pronouns I’d never had used for me before.”
It was the beginning of his “fresh start,” where he was being seen for who he was for the very first time. “As I got more and more practice doing that, I felt more and more confident and was able to work up toward showing more of myself to the people that I already knew. It was this really important incubation period where everything was very new and scary, but I had people who had been through it, or people who were just there to accept me as I am.”
Through this Connects group, Omoto befriended another Japanese American trans man, Kai Mita, the co-facilitator of their new trans and gender diverse discussion group. Mita grew up in Illinois, and they both realized they shared similarities in their upbringings and media touchstones. “We really identified with the story in Mulan,” Mita said, laughing.
The two also grew up in predominantly white communities and grew up feeling disjointed from their Japanese American heritage. Okaeri was the bridge that brought them closer to their histories — in a way that also honored their trans identities. Omoto found this “surprising” and had once accepted that his queerness would remain separate from his cultural identity forever. “That’s the really cool thing about Okaeri: I get to be both at once,” Omoto said.
There was also a singular, stark moment that brought him closer to his relatives, who were forcibly relocated and incarcerated during World War II. When President Trump was inaugurated for the second time, Omoto was struck with the violence his ancestors faced, and how that coincided with the violence he was facing in the present-day.
“One of his [Trump’s] policy points was: there are only two genders, male and female. And I just remembered feeling this fear,” Omoto said. “It was the first really political, national scale of fear that I had felt personally, and I realized that my grandparents and great-grandparents had felt the same way during the Second World War. Going through incarceration, they were labeled in a similar way. They were labeled as an enemy, as an alien, as an ‘other,’ and segregated out. As I see everything playing out politically and our country repeating a lot of those past mistakes, being able to process this huge burden and fear with other people who understand that is so important. It is way too much for any one person to be going through alone.”
Mita, who also lives in Oregon, resonated with this reckoning. Recently, he visited the Japanese American Museum in Portland, where he learned more about the Minidoka concentration camp, where over 13,000 Japanese Americans were forced into. “My grandma was actually part of that site. Knowing the similarities of political statements were very identical — that was terrifying and really hard to process. Let alone like…yeah, that’s my grandparents,” Mita said.
As Mita questioned how queer and trans Nikkei can stay afloat today, Omoto answered with the core that lies within Okaeri. “I think one of the foundational pieces of resistance is community,” he said. “When we’re in these very specific affinity groups, Okaeri, we’re able to share these stories, these hidden histories. That makes me think of now, and how we can persist and try to thrive in these times today.”
To learn more about Okaeri and find up-to-date info about events and programs, refer to their website and social page.
Kristie Song is a California Local News Fellow placed with the Los Angeles Blade. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
The National LGBT Media Association represents 13 legacy publications in major markets across the country with a collective readership of more than 400K in print and more than 1 million + online. Learn more here: NationalLGBTMediaAssociation.com.
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