Fall Seven Times, Rise Eight

“As the Japanese saying goes, you get knocked down seven times but you get up eight times,” Al Muratsuchi told the Rafu Shimpo in early 2016. Two years earlier, he had lost his seat in the California State Assembly by 706 votes. Now he was running to win it back.

I never interviewed Muratsuchi. Most people we write about aren’t public figures, but he has spent twelve years in the State Assembly, and he has talked about his life many times in community newspapers, candidate profiles, and Japanese-language interviews. This piece draws on those. Since he was usually talking to people he hoped would vote for him, I’ve tried to point out where his account and the record don’t quite match.

At a gathering of an Okinawan community association, Muratsuchi once said his hometown was Okinawa and his alma mater was Kubasaki High School, on the Marines’ Camp Foster. He also said his roots were in Gifu, in central Japan.

The Gifu side goes back to his grandfather, Genjiro, who emigrated to America in 1907, went back and forth across the Pacific for years, and settled for good in 1937 in Gujo Hachiman, a town in Gifu Prefecture. His father, Jiro, was born in the United States but raised and schooled in Japan, which made him what Japanese Americans call a Kibei Nisei. Jiro later took a job with the US Department of Defense, which sent him to Okinawa.

M uratsuchi was born there in 1964 and grew up in Kitanakagusuku, a village in the middle of the island, until he left for college at eighteen. The US ran Okinawa from the end of the war until 1972, when it went back to Japan. He has said that as a boy he felt like he was growing up in two countries at once, and that after the handover, stepping off the base meant you were in Japan.

He watched both American and Japanese TV growing up. He had posters of the idol singer Momoe Yamaguchi in his room and was a Yomiuri Giants fan, and he still calls himself a “Showa person,” someone shaped by Japan’s postwar decades.

His parents were from mainland Japan, and his father worked for the American military, whose bases many Okinawans have protested for decades. Even so, he has told Okinawan community leaders that he considers himself Uchinanchu, an Okinawan. He doesn’t seem to think he has to pick one place.

In 1982, he moved to California for UC Berkeley. There he took classes on Asian American history and learned about the Asian American civil rights movement, which he has called the first and biggest turning point of his life. One of his instructors was a lawyer with the Asian Law Caucus, a group that gives legal help to Asian immigrants, and Muratsuchi went on to intern there. Some of the lawyers he met had worked on redress for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. He decided he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer too.

That history wasn’t something he grew up with. Genjiro had taken the family back to Japan in 1937, five years before the incarceration began, and Muratsuchi was raised on the other side of the Pacific. He came to the Japanese American story as a college student, and then built a career around it.

After law school at UCLA, he worked as a civil rights attorney, as a regional director for the Japanese American Citizens League, and later as a deputy attorney general for California. Around 2005, he says, Senator Daniel Inouye and Irene Hirano, then head of the Japanese American National Museum and later Inouye’s wife, encouraged him to run for office. Their argument was that more Japanese Americans in politics would be good for the country and for the community. He ran for the Torrance school board and won.

In 2012, he ran for the State Assembly in the 66th District, which covers Torrance, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and other parts of LA’s South Bay. The race against Republican Craig Huey got ugly, with both campaigns attacking each other through mailers. Late in the race, Muratsuchi told the Rafu Shimpo that people had been phoning his headquarters and calling him a “Jap.” He won by nearly ten points and walked into his victory party to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.”

Two years later, in the 2014 Republican wave, businessman David Hadley beat him by 706 votes out of more than 108,000 cast. Muratsuchi was openly bitter. He told the Rafu Shimpo that Charles Munger Jr., a wealthy donor, had paid for a smear campaign to buy the seat for Hadley.

Out of office, he went back to work as a deputy attorney general, and the criticism kept coming. When Keiro, a Japanese American senior-care organization, was sold, a former supporter blamed him for not getting Attorney General Kamala Harris to hold a hearing on the deal. Muratsuchi said he was one of 800 attorneys in the office, worked on consumer law, and wasn’t allowed to comment.

That was the stretch when he gave the Rafu Shimpo the proverb. He ran against Hadley again in 2016, won by more than eight points, and never lost another Assembly race.

In Sacramento, he became chair of the Assembly Education Committee and of the budget subcommittee that oversees school funding. The bill he’s best known for is AB 247, which after two years of negotiations became Proposition 2, a $10 billion bond to repair and build schools and community colleges. Voters approved it in November 2024.

In 2020, he pushed AB 345, which would have kept oil wells at least 2,500 feet from places where children gather. He has said the strongest opposition came from oil and gas unions, which usually back Democrats. The bill died in a Senate committee.

When he talks about why education matters to him, he brings up his daughter, who was three when he was first elected. During pandemic distance learning, he watched her do jumping jacks in front of a computer screen, and he has called it one of the most heartbreaking moments of his life.

He has described himself as a product of both Japan and America, and in office he made ties between California and Japan one of his priorities.

Term limits ended his Assembly career this year. In 2026, he ran for state superintendent of public instruction, California’s top elected education official. He pitched himself to EdSource as “a true believer in public education — the son of immigrants, a first-generation college graduate, the product of public schools.”

Like most campaign lines, it smooths some edges. His father was born in the United States; it was his mother who was born in Japan. And the public schools he attended were Department of Defense schools in Okinawa. None of it is false, exactly. But it’s a reminder that the story in this piece is partly one he has shaped himself, for voters.

In the June primary, he finished sixth, with under 8% of the vote.

Muratsuchi has now lost two elections in public: one by 706 votes, and one by more than a million. The first time, he reached for a proverb and got back up. Whether there’s an eighth rise this time is a question only he can answer, and one I’d like to ask him.