Karl Schoenberger

1954 - 2025

Karl Schoenberger
02/06/1954 - 04/08/2025
Karl Lee Schoenberger passed away peacefully on April 8, 2025 in El Cerrito, California of complications from a stroke. He was 71. He will be remembered not only as an award-winning journalist, but also as a loving father, brother, and friend.
Karl grew up in Hinsdale, Illinois, graduated from Hinsdale Central High School and moved to California to attend the University of the Pacific. He later transferred to Stanford University, graduating with a degree in Japanese Language and Literature. Karl then continued his literary studies in Kyoto, marking the start of a deep and lifelong connection to the city.
After stints working as a taxi driver, social worker, and Japanese-language tour guide in San Francisco, Karl began his journalism career in the early 1980s as a reporter at the Associated Press in Tokyo. He then worked for the AP in Philadelphia and the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. He returned to Japan to serve as the Asian Wall Street Journal's Tokyo Bureau Chief and later was Tokyo Correspondent for the LA Times.
Karl was known as a hard-driving reporter who relished both breaking news stories and in-depth feature reporting. He covered stories throughout Asia including the democracy movement in South Korea and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Fluent in spoken and written Japanese, Karl spent a significant part of his career in Tokyo covering the global rise of the Japanese economy in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was active in the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, serving as its 1st Vice President.
Following treatment for a cancerous brain tumor in 1991, he continued covering Asia as a roving Pacific Rim reporter for the Los Angeles Times, based in California. Karl spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and then became Hong Kong Bureau Chief for Fortune magazine.
Karl returned to the Bay Area to teach journalism at UC Berkeley for a year and continued as a visiting scholar at the University's Human Rights Center. While at Berkeley, he researched and wrote Levi's Children: Coming to Terms with Human Rights in the Global Marketplace (Grove Atlantic Press, 2000), an exploration of the Levi Strauss company's imperfect efforts to maintain an ethical supply chain.
Karl later worked at the San Jose Mercury News, where his investigative reporting on the environmental hazards created by the export of U.S. electronic waste to China was awarded with the 2002 Overseas Press Club Whitman Bassow Award for Environmental Reporting.
Karl loved challenging stereotypes and was drawn to resisters and marginalized people. His offbeat articles included pieces on the ubiquity of poetry in South Korea, the inescapability of Japan's loudspeakers (even in Zen gardens), and profiles of outcasts and iconoclasts. An archive with highlights from Karl's work can be found at https://karlschoenberger.com/archive.html.
After his retirement from journalism in 2006, Karl turned to fiction writing. He was a regular at the SF Writers' Workshop and volunteered as a writing coach in the Albany, California public schools. In 2013, he published My Life as a Cadaver: A Survivor's Tale, a semi-fictional memoir disguised as a mystery novel.
Karl was married to Susan Kuramoto Moffat from 1991 to 2006 and was a devoted father to their daughters Sonya and Hannah. His playfulness and humor shaped their childhoods. He met his eldest daughter Chelsea for the first time when she was in her early twenties, and their belated connection was an enormous and ongoing joy. His older brothers Jim and John were dear to him, and he took good care of his aging parents, Sally and Jim. He was a loyal and kind friend and nurtured long-standing relationships that date in some cases back to elementary school. He found community locally as a member of the Berkeley Zen Center and the "breakfast club" at Jodie's Restaurant in Albany.
Karl faced multiple serious health challenges throughout his adult life with determination, grit, and courage. Even after a stroke robbed him of his verbal agility in 2019, he still managed to express his signature sense of humor with just a wry word or two, efficiently deployed.
He is survived by his daughters, Chelsea Elisabeth Rose, Sonya Alexandra Schoenberger and Hannah Marumoto Schoenberger; his former wife Susan Kuramoto Moffat; and his older brother, John Schoenberger. He is preceded in death by his parents, Sally and James Schoenberger, and his older brother, Jim.
Donations in Karl's memory may be made to the Committee to Protect Journalists. A Celebration of Life will be held at 2 pm on Saturday May 17 at Ocean View Brew Works in Albany.