The Rafu Shimpo - L.A. Japanese Daily News

Lane Hirabayashi Named UCLA’s First Professor of JA Internment, Redress
Saturday, Oct. 14, 2006

UCLA faculty members and community leaders celebrated the appointment on Saturday of scholar Lane Ryo Hirabayashi as the first George and Sakaye Aratani Professor of the Japanese American Internment, Redress, and Community.

NAO GUNJI/Rafu Shimpo
From left, George and Sakaye Aratani, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Don Nakanishi Saturday at the UCLA Faculty Center.

Hirabayashi was named to the endowed chair after a year-long international search conducted by professors, staff and students of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Department. He will teach an upper division undergrad seminar course on Japanese Americans and the mass incarceration during the winter quarter of 2007 and a seminar for the Asian American Studies graduate students in the spring. The professor will also organize public educational programs to share the history of the Japanese American community.

“Being appointed as the inaugural recipient of the Aratani Chair is like a dream come true for me. Not only will I join a stellar set of colleagues in Asian American Studies at UCLA, but I can contribute to the long tradition of Japanese American Studies and collaboration with community groups that have been undertaken by so many distinguished UCLA faculty, staff and students over the years,” he stated.

For Hirabayashi, to take part in the experience and history of the internment is a family business. His uncle, Gordon Hirabayashi was the principal defendant in the U.S. Supreme Court case that challenged the U.S. government’s decision to forcedly relocate the Japanese Americans. His father, Dr. James Hirabayashi was the first Dean of the School of the Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and an original member of the Japanese American Planning Group at the university, which designed the first curriculum in Japanese American Studies.

“I wanted to come to L.A.—the heart of the Japanese American community in the United States mainland,” Hirabayashi said at the event, regarding his arrival to Los Angeles from San Francisco in 1981. “I wanted to understand the Japanese American community by living and working here in Los Angeles.”

While working on his postdoctoral fellowship at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, he asked his colleagues what he should have done to understand the Japanese American community.

“They told me something I’ve never forgotten which was, ‘Don’t be academic about this. Go out there and get involved. Join as many community-based organizations as you can,’” he recalled.

And, young Hirabayashi took that advice sincerely. Since then, he has worked with numerous community-based organizations including the Asian American Drug Abuse Program, the Asian American Theater Company, East West Players, Gardena Pioneer Project, the Japanese American Graduation Committee of Denver, Colo., the Japanese American National Museum, the Japanese Community Youth Council, and the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization.

Hirabayashi, who initially was against the reparation, said that the experience of working with former internees and community activists regarding the 1988 redress for Japanese Americans has transformed him and remains his inspiration for his work.

He received a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley, and has taught at San Francisco State University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and UC Riverside. Currently working on two books about the Japanese American resettlement in Colorado, Hirabayashi has authored “Cultural Capital: Mountain Zapotec Migrant Associations in Mexico City (1993),” “Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona (1995)” and “The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp (1999).”

Professor Cindy Fan, chair of the Department of Asian American Studies, said on the occasion, “The faculty, students, and staff of the Department of Asian American Studies are very excited that Professor Hirabayashi—a superstar in Asian American Studies—is joining UCLA. His scholarship is ground-breaking, interdisciplinary, and transnational. His professional vision will not only fulfill the goals of the endowed chair, but also enhance the undergraduate and graduate curriculum and forge important links between Asian American Studies and other departments as well as the larger community of which UCLA is part.”

—Reporting by Nao Gunji

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