US karate champ Sakura Kokumai told to ‘go home’ in anti-Asian rant as she trains for Tokyo 2020 Olympics
- Japanese-American, who will represent Team USA at Tokyo 2020, racially abused as she trained in California park
- ‘I thought, what if this was my grandma or my mom? That scares me,’ seven-time national champion says
US Olympian Sakura Kokumai has revealed more details around the incident where she was racially abused by a stranger while training in a California park last week.
“You’re a loser! Loser! Go home, stupid b****!” a stranger shouted at her in Grijalva Park in Orange, southern California, in a video that the 28-year-old recorded of the incident and shared to Instagram.
Speaking to Los Angeles television station KTLA, the Tokyo 2020 karate qualifier said she was unaware why she was being targeted until she heard racial slurs as the man got in his car to leave. “You’re Chinese! You can’t see me!” the man shouted as he left the park.
“I was aware about the anti-Asian hate that was going on,” the Japanese-American told KTLA. “You see it almost every day on the news. But I didn’t think it would happen to me at a park I usually go to to train.”
More worrying, she said, was that others in the park stood by during the incident, as she had pointed out on Instagram.
“One lady did come up towards the end, asking if I was OK,” Kokumai told KTLA. “But until then, as he was walking up, yelling, there were people, but they kind of kept to themselves the entire time,” she said. “I thought, what if this was my grandma or my mom? That scares me.”
