Background

Yuji Ichioka was born on June 23, 1936, in San Francisco, California, United States. Ichioka and his family were incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center and Topaz when he was a child. The family returned to San Francisco after the war.

Education

Yuji Ichioka graduated from Berkeley High School in 1954. After a three year stint in the army, he went to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating as a history major in 1962. He entered graduate school at Columbia University in Chinese history, but dropped out after less than a year in 1963, subsequently working with juvenile delinquent youth for a New York social service agency. He also studied the Japanese language in preparation for an extended 1966 trip to Japan. In 1967, he entered a Master of Arts program in East Asian Studies at the University of California- Berkeley and graduated in 1968. Ichioka decided not to pursue a doctorate because he thought it was a "waste of time."

Career

Joining the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Yuji Ichioka was a history professor for his entire career. In 1969, Ichioka co-founded the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and taught its first course. Over the next three decades there, he continued to expand the realm of Asian American historical research while focusing on the experience of Japanese American immigrants. He was also an important contributor to the Japanese-American Research Project Collection at UCLA and became known as a social activist who fought not only for the rights of Asian American but for those of all minorities. Toward this end, Ichioka founded the Asian-American Political Alliance in 1968. An expert on the history of the Japanese the United States, his research shattered stereotypes of these immigrants by showing that they were not simply passive, hard-working laborers; instead, they often fought against social injustices by holding demonstrations and labor strikes.

Inspired to pursue the study of Asian American history by his teaching experience, he was also drawn to the Japanese American Research Project (JARP) collection at UCLA. Together with his UCLA classmate Yasuo Sakata, he organized that collection, while sharpening his ability to read prewar Japanese; in 1974, they published A Buried Past, the first bibliography of the JARP collection. Ichioka also drew on the material in that collection to author a series of influential journal articles over the next decade focusing on previously unknown aspects of the Japanese American experience, including essays on Issei leftists, prostitutes, the Japanese Associations, Issei reaction to alien land laws and exclusion, and many other topics. His award-winning 1988 book The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924, drew from these articles. He later pursued the study of the interwar period, looking at the coming of age of the Nisei generation and such previously taboo topics as Japanese nationalism among Japanese Americans and Japanese Americans in the Japanese empire. He guest-edited two volumes of Amerasia Journal in 1986 and 1997 that focused on these topics. These essays were published posthumously in 2006 in Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History, edited by Gordon Chang and Eiichiro Azuma. Though the bulk of his work focused on the prewar period, he did organize a 1987 academic conference that re-examined the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, its proceedings published in 1989 as Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study.

Yuji Ichioka was a visiting professor at Tokyo University in 1999. Throughout his career, he remained a "research associate" at UCLA's Asian American Studies Center and an adjunct associate professor of history. In addition to his academic work, he gave frequent public lectures and taught community classes and remained active in the Asian American community.

Achievements

• Yuji Ichioka's contributions in compiling the Japanese American Research Project Collection at UCLA have made it the nation's largest and most significant historical archive on Japanese Americans. His many articles and two of his books, A Buried Past and A Buried Past II, provided the foundation for Japanese American studies. Ichioka created the first inter-ethnic pan-Asian American political group. And he coined the term "Asian American" to frame a new self-defining political lexicon. Before that, people of Asian ancestry were generally called Oriental or Asiatic.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History

    (This is a collection of the last essays by Yuji Ichioka, ...)

    2006
  • The Issei: The world of the first generation Japanese immigrants, 1885-1924

    (A portrait of the first Japanese immigrants, known as the...)

    1988
  • Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study 1989

Politics

The Asian American Movement began in Berkeley on an iconic evening in May 1968, in Yuji Ichioka's and Emma Gee's living room on Hearst Ave. There they, together with Floyd Huen, Richard Aoki, Victor Ichioka, and Vicci Wong, founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA sparked the emergence of a political movement that united Americans previously divided by ethnicity such as Filipino, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, who were stereotyped as "Oriental" or as part of a "silent minority." AAPA originated and popularized the more comprehensive term, "Asian American." Conceived as a national grassroots organization, they published the AAPA Newsletter and quickly sprouted many chapters encouraging other Asian American individual and collective progressive activism.

In opposition to the possibility of future incarcerations of entire populations, such as what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II, AAPA members fought to repeal the McCarran Internal Security Act authorizing emergency detention and deportation of alleged "subversives." They strengthened the international Third World Liberation Movement through their active support of the Black Panther Party, the Occupation of Alcatraz by Native Americans and other "anti-imperialist" struggles worldwide.

AAPA joined forces with African American, Chicano, and Native American groups in the 1969 Third World Strike at the University of California-Berkeley for a Third World College, which helped spur the creation of ethnic studies and social justice programs nationwide. Many in AAPA moved into San Francisco's I-Hotel to join tenants’ struggles areawide and battle to save Manilatown. At Berkeley, they established the first Asian Film Festival series, and at the University of California-Davis, their efforts led to the History Department's launching of an Asian American Studies program. In San Francisco their members were involved in the formation of the Asian Community Center (ACC), the Chinatown Co-op (a garment workers collective), Everybody's Bookstore, Wei Min Bao bilingual newspaper, Community Educational Services (CES), the activist "May 4th Singers," the first Chinatown Workers Festival, and Japantown's Rodan newspaper. In New York, they establish a branch of the non-profit organization AAFE, Asian Americans for Equality. Group members have joined progressive multinational organizations, contributed to community services, and run for political office.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Yuji Ichioka was a complex man who had just a wonderful thirst for life. On one hand, Yuji spent a lot of his time in quiet contemplation of going through records (in Japanese) that nobody went through, and on the other hand, he loved to interact with people." - Don T. Nakanishi, director of UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Interests

• travelling

• Sport & Clubs

  basketball

Connections

Yuji Ichioka was married to Emma Gee.

Mother:

Sei Ichioka

Wife:

Emma Gee

In 1968, the University of California-Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka needed a name for their student organization, which was aimed at increasing the visibility of activists of Asian descent. As the Black Power Movement, the American Indian Movement, and anti-war movements expanded, Gee and Ichioka saw an opportunity. They wanted to come up with a term that would bring together all the different groups of people of Asian descent under one, larger umbrella. So they named their group the Asian American Political Alliance - what is believed to be the first public use of the phrase "Asian American." Gee and Ichioka themselves were an example of the integration of various Asian American subgroups happening at the time: Gee, who was Chinese American, and Ichioka, who was Japanese American, were a pan-Asian American couple.

Brother:

Eddie Ichioka

Brother:

Victor Ichioka

Sister:

Pat S. Traylor

Sister:

Yowko Richardson