Leo Akira Yoshimura and Nobuko Miyamoto during the Fireside Chat held July 19 at the JACL National Convention in New Mexico. (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
A revelatory Fireside Chat precedes his
acceptance of the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
By P.C. Staff
To paraphrase original “Saturday Night Live” cast member Garrett Morris’ iconic character Chico Escuela, one might say that 2025 so far has been “berry, berry good” for the hoary sketch comedy and music show.
In February, “SNL” celebrated 50 years since airing live, from New York, on a Saturday night — Oct. 11, 1975 — on NBC.
Thus, it was only fitting that someone associated with the venerable show received a President’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the JACL National Convention in Albuquerque, N.M. — and that someone was Leo Akira Yoshimura, the Emmy-award winning “SNL” production designer whose name has been in the show’s ending credits since 1975.
Among the many anecdotes Yoshimura shared during a July 18 Fireside Chat hosted by Nobuko Miyamoto a few hours before he received his award at the Sayonara Gala was how he got his first name. He told the singer/dancer/activist that “Leo,” the name by which most of the people in his life address him, can be credited to a priest who served Japanese American Catholics at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where Yoshimura’s parents were incarcerated during World War II.
The Chicago-born Yoshimura also attributed to Catholicism — “You can’t use birth control, right?” — the fact that he is one of among 11 Yoshimura siblings. Not an unfunny observation from someone who claims to have “no sense of humor.” Maybe something rubbed off after 50 years with a comedy show.
Like ramen, “SNL” became an instant classic. Over all those decades, one constant was Yoshimura.
It has also meant 50 seasons of stress, sleepless nights and long days. “That’s what I do. I’ve done it for 50 years, and I do it because I love it,” said Yoshimura.
For the convention’s Japanese American audience, elements of Yoshimura’s backstory resonated: parents meeting in an arranged marriage, coming from a family that experienced incarceration, having a Nisei father who was, in his words, a “no no person” and who was deported to Japan, the family choosing to move to Chicago after the camps closed to avoid the racism of Los Angeles, being told by his mother that “I always had to be better than the other guy” and how she “always used Manzanar as the reason why one had to be better. If you’re not better, then they’ll be able to take you to Manzanar again.”
Yoshimura got his start building scenery for a theater troupe while attending Loyola University Chicago. From there, he said he chanced upon another theater group, which was run by Second City co-founder Paul Sills, himself a giant of sketch comedy.
Said Yoshimura: “I did most of the technical work. One winter, Paul came up to me and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ because the company was closing. I said, ‘I really don’t know what I’m going to do, Paul.’ And he said, “Why don’t you go to Yale?’”
As fate would have it, Sills was friends with Robert Brustein, who was at that time the dean of Yale School of Drama. “And he said, ‘I’ll get you in.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ Two weeks later, I get this letter, and it’s kind of this formal letter, and I open it up, and it said, ‘You have been accepted at Yale.’ Very lucky and very coincidental.”
Lucky break of a lifetime, right? For Yoshimura, it was more of a “yes, but” than a “yes and” scenario. And, it wasn’t the last lucky break that would get him to “SNL.”
“I get to Yale, and I’m terribly unmatched because a lot of the undergraduates who had come to the graduate program were from very strong theater programs, and I was just a guy who built scenery for a minor University in Chicago,” he said.
Yoshimura wasn’t sure whether he’d make it through his second year. Fortunately, Yale had hired Ming Cho Lee, a well-regarded Broadway and opera designer. “I found that so lucky because he mentored me. He invited me down to his studio during the semester … breaks to work for him, and then to work in the Public Theater in in Central Park.”
With his Yale degree and the mentorship of Lee, when Lorne Michaels was preparing to launch “SNL,” Yoshimura was a ready for primetime player. Referring to the show’s creator, visionary and executive producer, Yoshimura said, “Lorne Michaels did not hire me because I was Japanese American. He hired me because I was a good designer first.”
But there’s no speculation for how much longer he will stay. “They asked me, and I said I would do one more year.” Like Chico Escuela and baseball, for Leo Yoshimura, “Saturday Night Live” has indeed been “berry, berry good.”
