Background
Born in Los Angeles, Nishi was the daughter of Hatsu and Tahei Matsunaga who had emigrated to the United States from Kumamoto, Japan. Her father was a hotel owner in the Little Tokyo district of Los Los Angeles
Born in Los Angeles, Nishi was the daughter of Hatsu and Tahei Matsunaga who had emigrated to the United States from Kumamoto, Japan. Her father was a hotel owner in the Little Tokyo district of Los Los Angeles
She attended Theodore Roosevelt High School before enrolling as a music student at the University of Southern California. Nishi then studied sociology at Washington University in Saint Louis where she earned a master"s degree in 1944. She completed her education at the sociology department of the University of Chicago where she ultimately received a doctorate in 1963.
Despite writing a telegram to President Roosevelt complaining about "internment as undemocratic", she had to interrupt her studies and her music career in spring 1942 when, as Japanese Americans, she and her family were incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In Chicago, Nishi married the painter Ken Nishi in 1944 and they subsequently started a family with the birth of a son, Geoffrey. Prattis introduced her to fellow American sociologist Horace R. Cayton who helped her found the Chicago Resettlers Committee, later known as the Japanese American Service Committee.
In that connection, in 1946 she published the widely distributed pamphlet Facts About Japanese Americans.
In the late 1940s, she headed the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination which coordinated civil rights and labour groups. In the early 1950s, the Nishis moved to Tappan, New York, where they had four more children.
Nishi worked as a researcher for the National Council of Churches. With Horace Cayton, she wrote The Changing Scene (1955), a study of churches and social service.
In 1965, Nishi became professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, also teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New New York
At Brooklyn, she delivered the first courses on Asian American studies, creating a new generation of scholars. In the 1970s, she joined the New York State Advisory Committee, which reported to the United States. Commission on Civil Rights. She served on the committee for three decades, ultimately becoming its chairman
During her teaching career, she had increasingly combined her academic assignments with community involvement.
She retired in 1999.
Nishi devoted her final years to work on the large-scale Japanese American Life Course Survey which reviewed the effects of the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. Nishi died in Cape Breton, Canada, on November 18, 2012.
