Tazuko Schmitz died peacefully at home on the morning of August 17, 2016 after a seven-year long, but nearly symptom-free, battle with breast cancer. She was 71 years old.

Tazuko was born on February 18,1945 in Oita prefecture in Japan, midland of Kyushu Island. At the time of her birth, Japan was in the last months of the War of the Pacific (World War II). Her family was originally from the industrial city of Kokura, where her father Yoshiomi Omori owned and operated a large lumber business. The port, other military facilities and steel factories made the city a prime strategic target and was, in fact, the original objective of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki. Kokura was saved by an overcast sky that obscured the target. For family safety Tazuko’s parents had moved to the lumber supply village of Yabakei in Oita prefecture in the early 1940s. Her name is unusual, even in Japan. According to custom, her father held the responsibility to name his daughter on the seventh day after her birth. He was on business travel when she was born, however, and received the telegram with news of her birth on the seventh day. As he looked out of a train window, a rare red-crested Japanese crane alit in a nearby rice paddy. And so he named her Tazuko, “child of the crane in the rice field”. As an infant Tazuko fell deathly ill from an infection incurable by readily available medicines in post-war Japan. A neighbor rode his bicycle through the night to an American military facility where he acquired the miracle drug, penicillin, that saved her life.

The family returned to Kokura in the early 1950s and it was there, still during American occupation, that Tazuko first encountered Americans GIs trying to make friends with local children by offering candy, but Tazuko avoided the GIs and was scandalized by their red-nailpolished girl friends. Tazuko grew into a charismatic and curious young woman, who pursued life’s possibilities, including learning English, with grace and confidence. She studied at the elite University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo. At first she was self-conscious of her thick, rural accent (Kokura-ben), but she overcame her shyness and developed friendships at Sacred Heart that would last a lifetime. She lived in an apartment in Tokyo with her younger brothers, Masatoshi and Seijiro, and while studying and later working, she would prepare meals for them and entertain their friends. Between her last two years of University, she independently arranged, without the help or involvement of her parents, to live and study at the Sacred Heart School of Montreál (Canada). She came back with a renewed interest in foreign languages and things international. She trained as a simultaneous interpreter of English and Japanese and worked for a short time with Japan P.E.N. club.

At the age of 23, Tazuko lost her father to cancer. She lived in his hospital room and cared for him there for three months. Afterwards, she returned home to Kokura to care for her ailing mother and accompany her on trips around Japan.

One of the most formative experiences of her young adulthood, and her entree into global culture, was the world exposition, Expo 70, held in Osaka in the summer of 1970. Tazuko's language skills and international orientation helped her secure a position as an Expo hostess. In that capacity she encountered and welcomed many dignitaries, such as Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, West African princes, and Hong Kong millionaires. While at Expo 70, she was recruited by the American Embassy to work as assistant protocol officer in Tokyo. It was there that she met her future husband, Charles Schmitz, who was then working on Okinawa Reversion negotiations and political/military affairs.

Tazuko told her daughters that she knew Charles was the one, when his first gift to her was a leather manicure set, identical to the one she had received from her father upon her graduation from University. Charles and Tazuko married on August 5, 1975 in Tokyo and honeymooned on a working trip through Micronesia, where Charles was involved in negotiating the termination of the U.S. Trusteeship of Micronesia. The couple then moved to Washington, D.C.

During her early years in Washington, Tazuko studied interior design and worked as a tour guide for Japanese visitors and as a bank assistant. The Schmitzes moved to Panama in October 1978 where Charles was charged with implementing the Carter-Torrijos Panama Canal treaties. Showing her entrepreneurial spirit, Tazuko participated in several small business ventures in Panama City, including office design for several new bank offices, and even ran a summer café at the US Embassy in Panama with the help of her three step-daughters. Her daughter Laura Schmitz was born on April 6, 1979 in Panama “between poker games”. Tazuko later recalled her reluctance to leave the game for the hospital because she was “on a roll”. Efficient in child-delivery, as she was in many things, she caused Charles to nearly miss the event by hastening into final labor when he had stepped out for a pizza to sustain energy “for the long haul”. Within 48 hours of delivering, Tazuko was back to the poker game, winning pocket change from friends, Embassy officers and visiting grad students.

In 1981, Tazuko, Charles and Laura moved to Germany for Charles' next assignment as Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Air Forces, Europe. In Germany, Tazuko continued her studies in art and interior design and traveled extensively, especially through Germany and France. She loved market shopping, especially in rural France, where she visited individual farms and participated in festivals like the middle-of-the-night White Asparagus harvest. She made friends everywhere.

The family moved back to Washington in August 1985. While Charles commuted to New York for his work the Council on Foreign Relations, Tazuko worked with an architecture firm on interior design for the new Japanese Chancery in Washington. Soon thereafter, she became a real estate agent with Long & Foster. She subsequently opened her own brokerage, Global Estates, Ltd., and soon began remodeling and building residential properties in Washington and Maryland. Over 30 years, through creativity, initiative and business acumen, she became one of the most respected names in Washington real estate, especially among the Japanese community. She became a U.S. citizen in 1988.

While never fully retired from working in real estate, Tazuko eased her work schedule through tennis, skiing, golf, extensive foreign travel, hiking, and increasing engagement in her Japanese cultural interests: kaiseki cuisine, kimono, tea ceremony, Sacred Heart alumni gatherings, mahjong, gardening, and ikebana. She fostered a Japanese environment at home in Washington through Japanese-inspired redesign and extensions of her own house, her passion for authentic Japanese cooking, ever aided by the Hinata fish and grocery store of Bethesda, and sets of close friends that allowed her to fashion a Japan-infused life in Washington. For much of her life she had wished that she could move back to Japan and live as an adult there for at least a year; but in later years she decided that she could have most of what she wanted in Japanese experience right here, with her good Japanese friends, in her Japanese-inspired house, in Bethesda.

She is survived by her husband of 41 years, Charles Arthur Schmitz, daughter Laura Mariko Schmitz, brother Masatoshi and sister-in-law Hisae, brother Seijiro and sister-in-law Ikuko, six nieces and nephews in Japan, and step-daughters Elisabeth Schmitz Lucas, Susannah Amiteye, Catherine Bise and step-grandchildren Hannah and Miles Lucas, Bronwyn and Imogen Bise, and Ellis and June Amiteye.