Yuji Ichioka

Yuji Ichioka, (June 23, 1936 – September 1, 2002) was an American historian best known for his work in ethnic studies, particularly Asian American Studies. Adjunct Professor Yuji Ichioka (History and Asian American Studies). He coined the term "Asian American" to help unify different Asian ethnic groups (e.g. Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, etc.), and was considered the preeminent scholar of Japanese American history.

Biography

Yuji Ichioka was born in 1936 in San Francisco, California. As a child, he was interned with his family at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. Ichioka received an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from UC Berkeley in 1968, and later served as a senior researcher at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from approximately 1969 to his death at the age of 66.

Ichioka 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. His seminal work, "Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924," won the 1989 U.S. History Book Award of the National Assn. for Asian American Studies.

Selected publications

• Yuji Ichioka. (1988). The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrant, 1885-1924. Free Press. ISBN 978-0029324356. 
• Ichioka, Y. (1990). "Japanese Immigrant Nationalism: The Issei and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941". California History 69 (3): pp. 260–275, 310–311. doi:10.2307/25591553. 
• "Beyond National Boundaries: The Complexity of Japanese-American History". Amerasia Journal 23 (2). 1997. 
• Compiled by Yuji Ichioka, Eiichiro Azuma. (1989). A Buried Past II: A Sequel to the Annotated Bibliography of the Japanese American Research Project Collection. Univ of California La Asian Amer. ISBN 978-0934052290. 

See also

• Yuji Ichioka. Ed. by Gordon H. Chang ... (2006). Before Internment Essays in Prewar Japanese American History. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804751476.