Yuji Ichioka

Yuji Ichioka

About

Yuji Ichioka an internationally renowned historian and a UCLA Asian American studies and history professor, died Sept. 1 2002. He was 66. He was married to Emma Gee.

"Our Asian American Studies Center and the fields of U.S. history, Asian American studies, andimmigrant studies will forever benefit from professor Ichioka's path-breaking intellectual contributions, his courageous leadership, and his fiery social commitment," said Don Nakanishi, the center's director and professor. "He was a giant presence."

Ichioka was born on June 23, 1936 in San Francisco. During part of his childhood, Ichioka and his family were interned at the Topaz Relocation Center during World War II.

Ichioka, who dedicated much of his life to social justice and scholarly research in the United States, Japan and Latin America, created the term "Asian American" in the late 1960s,according to Nakanishi. While at the University of California, Berkeley, where he organized the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968, he was an activist for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Ichioka was a key founder of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, where he taught its first Asian American studies class in 1969. For nearly 33 years, Ichioka was a senior researcher at the center and an adjunct professor in the UCLA history department.

Colleagues described Ichioka as a dedicated instructor who mentored both undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom went on to become leading researchers and university professors.

Nakanishi described Ichioka as the "preeminent scholar of Japanese American history." Ichioka authored the seminal book, "The Issei: The World of the First-Generation Japanese Immigrant, 1885-1924," which was nominated for the 1988 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and awarded the 1989 U.S. Book Award of the National Association for Asian American Studies.

Ichioka, an historian of the Japanese American internment during World War II, testified at the Congressional hearings that resulted in the official presidential apology and redress of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Ichioka emphasized the importance of using both Japanese- and English-language sources to recover what he labeled the "buried past" of Japanese American history. Over three decades, his extensive collaborative work in compiling the Japanese American Research Project Collection at UCLA, the largest and most significant historical archive on Japanese Americans in the United States. His numerous articles and books, including "A Buried Past," provided the foundation for the field of Japanese American studies.

Ichioka also served on the editorial board of UCLA's Amerasia Journal, the leading international journal in Asian American Studies. In 1971, Ichioka observed that like the history of many other racial minorities in the U.S. "much of Japanese American history remains unwritten." He saw his mission to help write that history, which involved "the debunking of old distortions and myths, the uncovering of hitherto neglected or unknown facts, and the construction of a new interpretation of that past."

Because of Ichioka's pioneering scholarship and vision, his dedication to teaching, and his commitment to make known the long legacy of working peoples' resistance to injustice, new interpretations of the past were made possible, Nakanishi said.

Ichioka was not a "scholar in the ivory tower," but throughout his life was active with social justice issues.

For his lifetime work in Asian Pacific labor history, Ichioka received the 2002 International Longshoreman and Warehouseman's Union (ILWU) Yoneda Award at the annual conference of the Southwest Labor Studies Association.

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center plans to establish The Yuji Ichioka Endowed Chair In Social Justice Studies to continue the activist scholarly work of Ichioka. Such an endowed chair would recognize and support the research, teaching, and community service activities of leading scholars who are pursuing research that provides new analysis of the significant historic and contemporary role of racial, ethnic, and gendered minorities in American life.

Profile Karl Yoneda

Yuji Ichioka profiled Karl Yoneda in the introduction to his book: Ganbatte: Sixty Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (1906):

"This autobiography documents his lifelong, tenacious struggle for political, economic, social justice and for racial equality as a Communist trade-unionist, longshoreman, anti-fascist fighter, writer, and Japanese American. Simultaneously, it documents in part, the story of his wife, Elaine, and others who engaged in the same struggle.

Born of Japanese immigrant parents in 1906, Karl was one of the first American-born Japanese on the continental United States. His parents hailed from Hiroshima Prefecture. He passed the first seven years of his life in Glendale, California where his parents eked out a living in agriculture. In 1913, he was taken to Japan and spent thirteen formative years there. After World War I, he attended high school in the city of Hiroshima.

Attracted by progressive ideas, he avidly read the writing of noted socialists and anarchists and participated in pro-labor activities. In 1926, he returned to his native in order to avoid being conscripted by the Japanese military.

A broad historical perspective is essential to understand the man. Karl's life is interwoven with the history of Japanese Americans, the American labor movement, and Japan his family history is a part of the early years of Japanese labor emigration. [...]

Besides Japanese-American history and the American labor movement, Karl's life is tied closely to Japan. Throughout the thirties, Karl engaged in numerous anti-militarist and anti-fascist activities with regard to Japan. As an underground worker, he helped to print, edit, and distribute thousands of anti-fascist leaflets and pamphlets destined for Japan. He participated in countless political rallies and demonstrations against Japan's military actions in China and joined boycotts of Japan-made goods in protest. From 1933 to 1936 Karl edited the Rodo Shimbun, official organ of the Japanese section of the American Communist Party, in which he wrote frequent editorials against Japanese militarism. The Japanese government not only banned the sale and distribution of the Rodo Shimbun in Japan, but kept surveillance of Karl's activities through its consular staff.

Even under the ordeal which befell Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, Karl never wavered in his anti fascism. The American Communist Party, ostensibly fearful of harboring fifth communists, suspended all Japanese members and their spouses. Neither this suspension nor the subsequent mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans dampened his anti-fascist ardor. He tried to enlist for military service immediately after Pearl Harbor, but was rejected. He went as an early volunteer to Manzanar, one of the ten concentration camps into which 110,000 Japanese-Americans were herded without due process. In Karl’s mind the global struggle against fascism had the highest priority. Everything else was secondary, so that he chose to cooperate with his own government, even though it stripped him of his rights. He was among the first Nisei to volunteer for Military Intelligence Service and served in the China-Burma-India Theatre. Here Karl presents his account of his activities during this period which still generates considerable controversy today.

Karl continued his struggle all through the postwar years. As a trade unionist, he was active in the ILWU until his retirement in 1972. As a member of the American Communist Party, he survived the McCarthy era and still is active in Party affairs. As a Japanese-American, he has been involved in many community issues. Currently, he is seeking along with many of his fellow Japanese-Americans, redress and reparations from the American government for the unjust wartime imprisonment. As a writer-historian, he has authored two books in Japanese and lectured widely on college campuses and elsewhere, educating people about the history of Asian labor in the United States and transmitting to Asian-American youth their heritage derived from their own forebears who helped build this nation. Reporting on American politics and society, he has been a regular contributor since 1959 to the Sunday edition of the Akahata, official newspaper of the Community Party of Japan. Ever alert to the possibility of the resurgence of prewar militarism, he still follows Japanese politics with keen interest. In sum, Karl has been, and continues to be, steadfast in his struggles."