Yuji ichioka biography examples

American historian and civil rights activist (1936–2002)

Yuji Ichioka (Japanese: 市岡雄二, June 23, 1936 – September 1, 2002) was a Japanese-American historian and civil rights activist, widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of Japanese American history. Ichioka was a pioneer in the field of Asian American Studies and a leading figure in the Asian American movement. Alongside his partner Emma Gee, Ichioka is credited for coining the term "Asian American" and founding the Asian American Political Alliance to help unify different Asian ethnic groups (e.g. Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, etc.) under one shared identity.

Early life and education

Yuji Ichioka was born in 1936 in San Francisco, California. As a child, he and his family were interned at Utah's Topaz War Relocation Center following the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066, which ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. After release, Ichioka's family moved to Berkeley, CA in search of a new start. Ichioka finished grade school there, graduating from Berkeley High School in 1954.

After three years of U.S. military service in Europe, Ichioka enrolled in UCLA. In 1962, he graduated with a B.A. in history. The following year, Ichioka enrolled in Columbia University's graduate program studying Chinese history, where he met Gee. However, he quickly dropped out due to his dissatisfaction with academia and instead became a youth parole worker at a social service agency in New York. In 1966, he took an extended trip to Japan and became interested in the migration of Japanese Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) to the U.S. Upon return to the U.S., Ichioka enrolled in a graduate program at UC Berkeley, where he received an M.A. in East Asian Studies two years later.

Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA)

During his time at B

Ichioka’s family was incarcerated at Topaz in Utah during World War II, and they returned to California following their release to start a new life in Berkeley. Ichioka served the US Army in Europe before earning a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1962. He pursued graduate study in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he met his partner, historian Emma Gee. But he quickly became dissatisfied with academia and dropped out, choosing instead to work as a youth parole worker in New York City.

In 1966, he traveled to Japan, where he first became interested in the history of Japanese immigrants (Issei). He subsequently enrolled in the graduate program in East Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There, Ichioka was instrumental in organizing the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968; he and Emma coined the term “Asian American” to unify Asian ethnicities together based on their shared experience under Orientalist US racism.

Recognized as a foremost expert before the field even existed, Ichioka taught the first Asian American studies course at UCLA in 1969 and became the associate director of the Asian American Studies Center. Until his death, Ichioka served as the center’s research associate and an adjunct associate professor of history at UCLA.

Ichioka’s rise as one of the most important historians of Asian America embodied the field’s complex emergence in Eurocentric US academia. Though he was initially shunned by mainstream US immigration historians, Ichioka helped develop archives and new venues for research and publications. The Japanese American Research Project, the nation’s best collection of Issei primary sources, could not have existed with

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 Japanes

UCLA historian Yuji Ichioka has never played pro basketball, but his fans like to call him an Asian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Watch him on the basketball court any Wednesday or Friday morning, and you’ll see the lean, bespectacled scholar stripped to his gray sweat shorts, running and jumping to score baskets and block shots with the vigor of the 20-year-olds with whom he plays.

Ichioka may be the oldest player at John Wooden Center--he’s 59--but his left-handed rendition of Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook is a sight to behold. His admirers say the man’s athletic prowess is as remarkable as his intellectual power.

“He’s our role model,” said David Willingham, a recent graduate who plays basketball with Ichioka. “We want to be like him when we’re his age.”

Whether on the basketball court or in the classroom, the influence of Ichioka, considered by many to be the nation’s foremost authority on Japanese American history, has been immense.

He coined the term “Asian American,” founded the first inter-ethnic political organization for Asians and advanced the rationale for bringing together diverse Asian peoples.

Before he formed the Asian American Political Alliance 27 years ago, Asians--at the time a million nationwide compared to 8 million today--belonged only to their own ethnic organizations.

The idea of Chinese Americans, for example, joining Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans for a shared political purpose was revolutionary; the proposition that Asians needed to forge an alliance with blacks, Latinos and Native Americans to work on a common agenda was unheard of.

Ichioka’s role in creating the relatively new discipline called Asian American studies was a natural outgrowth of his commitment to teach histories that weren’t part of the mainstream curriculum.

The phenomenal growth of the Asian American Studies