Ai Constance Handa Moore

Ai Constance Handa Moore

Ai Constance Handa Moore died in her home at sunrise on 13 June 2015. Born and raised in Seattle, she lived most of her life in and near Princeton, New Jersey. She was 90.

Ai was a student at Garfield High School when she and her family were "evacuated" an internment camp for Japanese Americans in desolate Minadoka, Idaho, where she completed her secondary school studies and received her high school diploma. Thanks to the American Friends Service Committee, Ai was permitted to leave internment to pursue a college education on the East Coast at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Pennsylvania.

At the war's end, when she and her family were allowed to return to Seattle, she transferred to the University of Washington and earned her bachelor of arts in the department of sociology, a degree that was formally conferred only in 2015. At the university she was a co-founder of Valeda, a Japanese-American sorority, at a time when established on-campus sororities did not welcome non-white co-eds.

During summers while at the University of Washington, Ai did volunteer social work in Harlem, New York, and then became a resident volunteer with inmates at the New Jersey State Reformatory for Women at Clinton. Ai served as a volunteer aide on an Indian reservation in Washington before becoming a junior case worker for the King County welfare department, Seattle. She was a member of the Japanese Presbyterian Church in Seattle and served on the boards of the Seattle Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Seattle Urban League.

In 1952 Ai moved to Princeton, New Jersey. She married James W. Moore and launched Handa Food Management in Princeton, providing food catering services to individual and corporate clients. Ai was a contributor to a Time-Life volume on international cuisines and taught cooking at the Princeton Y adult school. She ran the dining facility of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for many years and retired in 1987.

Ai was preceded in death by her parents, Yuki and Takeyoshi Handa, originally of Fukushima and Niigata, Japan, respectively; a sister, Shizuko Nakashima Handa of Koriyama, and brother Michihiko Handa of Los Angeles; and her former husband James Moore.

She is survived by a daughter, Yuki Moore Laurenti, and her husband Jeffrey, of Trenton; a grandson, Mario Laurenti; a brother, Yoshihiko Robert Handa of Bellevue, Washington; nephews Dan Handa and David Handa, respectively of Gig Harbor and Seattle, Washington, and Doug Handa of Poway, California; and cousins in Seattle and in Koriyama and Tokyo, Japan.

A funeral and memorial to Ai's life will be celebrated at Nassau Presbyterian Church, Princeton, on Saturday, 18 July.

Ai requested that, in lieu of flowers, friends might make donations to the Mario Laurenti '03 Financial Aid Endowment at the Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, 1128 Great Road, Princeton 08540.