Sakura Kokumai, Olympic karate athlete, says she was target of anti-Asian rant at California park
American karate star Sakura Kokumai says she was the target of anti-Asian slurs and threats while training at a park in California.
Kokumai, who has already qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, posted a series of videos on Instagram last week showing part of her encounter with a man at a basketball court in Orange County.
The verbal attacks appear to start randomly. In one of the first clips, a man with orange shorts walks toward her and says "get away from me." She replied, "What have I done?"
In another video, he called her a "stupid b****" and threatened to "f***" her up." In the final video, he got into his car and drove away, yelling racist insults at her.
In her video caption, she lamented how no one stepped in to help her, despite people being around.
"Yes what happened was horrible, but I don't know which was worse, a stranger yelling and threatening to hurt me for no reason or people around me who witnessed everything and not doing a thing," she said, later adding that one woman went to check up on her near the end.
"This could have happened to anyone, if it wasn't me, someone could've gotten hurt," she added.
Kokumai, whose parents are from Japan, told KTLA on Wednesday that she didn't understand why she was being targeted at first, but then he launched into an anti-Asian rant. She told the TV station that she was still processing the attack and hadn't reported it yet to police.
"I was aware about the anti-Asian hate that was going on," she said. "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. "
Her incident comes amid a rise in attacks targeting the Asian American community in the U.S. during the pandemic. This week, she called further attention to the attacks during a U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee media summit.
"What happened to me was nothing compared to what we see on social media now — people getting hit, people getting slashed, people getting killed," she said.
Kokumai is a decorated karateka. She's ranked sixth in the world in the World Karate Federation's female kata category. She has won a gold medal in the 2019 Pan American Games and earned bronze in the 2012 World Karate Championships and 2013 World Combat Games. She's also a seven-time USA national champion.
Karate — along with baseball, softball, skateboarding, sports climbing and surfing — will make their debut in the delayed Tokyo Olympics.