Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi was born on October 17, 1952, in Seattle, Washington, where both of his parents, James A. Hirabayashi and Joanne Vanderburg Hirabayashi, were graduate students at the University of Washington. The family lived for a time in a care home that his Hirabayashi grandparents ran for Issei in Seattle. He also accompanied the family to Japan as a toddler, while Jim did fieldwork towards his Ph.D. in anthropology, something that may have influenced Lane's later worldwide travels. When his father was hired to a faculty position at San Francisco State University in 1959, the family moved to the Bay Area, eventually settling in Mill Valley, California, where Lane grew up in a largely white community. By the time he was in high school, he had become a talented guitarist and became a member of the Muskadine Blues Band, which gained some local notoriety. According to his father, Lane was an indifferent student whose focus was on music, but made a dramatic turn as a senior, raising his grades and getting into nearby Sonoma State University.

He graduated from Sonoma State in 1974 with a degree in liberal studies, having written a senior thesis on the Japanese American incarceration. He also traveled widely in the summers, visiting his uncle, Ed Hirabayashi, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development, in São Paulo, Machu Picchu, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico City. Initially interested in pursuing graduate study in sociology, he ultimately decided to study anthropology instead, completing M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1981) degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. He did fieldwork in Oaxaca and Mexico City on the Mountain Zapotec and his dissertation focused on the urbanization of this population in Mexico City. But at the same time, he had a growing interest in Japanese American studies, and upon completing his dissertation in 1981, he got a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA and moved south. ^[1]

Upon moving to Los Angeles, he sought to get involved in the local community. On the advice of Roy Nakano and Susie Ling he headed to Gardena, a suburb about fifteen miles south of downtown Los Angeles that had a large Japanese American residential community, where he got involved with the Gardena Pioneer Project and Gardena Coalition for Redress/Reparations, which led to involvement with the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR), along with other organizations. Once opposed to monetary reparations, he changed his mind through his involvement with these organizations as support for redress grew in the community. While in Southern California, he also lectured at UC Santa Barbara.

After two years in Los Angeles, he moved back to the Bay Area in the summer of 1983, assuming a faculty position at San Francisco State University and being promoted to full professor in 1988. In 1991, he moved to the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After twelve years in Colorado, he moved the the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Finally, he moved to UCLA, where he was named the inaugural George & Sakaye Aratani Professor of the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community in 2006 and was also chair of the Asian American Studies Department from 2007 to 2010. He retired to emeritus status in 2017. As the Aratani chair, Hirabayashi also served as the general editor of The George and Sakaye Aratani "Nikkei in the Americas Series" at the University of Colorado Press that produced eight volumes under his leadership, many of which he wrote introductions for.

Though Hirabayashi continued to publish on Latin America and other topics, the vast majority of his publications had to do with Japanese American history and in particular on the World War II forced removal and incarceration. His work in this area has several different and related branches.

His earliest and latest works stemmed from his immersion into the Los Angeles area Japanese American community in the early 1980s. His work with the Gardena Pioneer Project led to an article co-authored with George Tanaka on the early history of Japanese Americans in Gardena, with a longer version published by the Pioneer Project itself. His early involvement with NCRR led eventually to the book NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2018), which he edited and to which he contributed several essays.

His largest body of work focused on the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) and on the War Relocation Authority (WRA), with a focus on the question of how researchers might best use the enormous amount of data on the wartime incarceration generated by those two entities, the latter being the agency tasked with implementing that incarceration. He produced monographs on two JERS fieldworkers, Richard S. Nishimoto and Tamie Tsuchiyama . The first ( Inside An American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona ) is mostly a compilation of Nishimoto's writings about Poston, augmented by a biographical essay and contextual information by Hirabayashi, while the second ( The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp ) is a biography of the pioneering Nisei woman social scientist; both revived the memories of important figures in Japanese American history who had largely been forgotten. Later in collaboration with Kenichiro Shimada, he wrote a book ( Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA's Photographic Section, 1943–1945 ) that focused on the question of what to make of the thousands of photographs generated by the WRA's Photographic Section , particularly those taken by Nisei photographer Hikaru Iwasaki , whom Hirabayashi had befriended during his Colorado years.

Hirabayashi also wrote several pieces aimed at those doing research on or teaching about the Japanese American incarceration including articles on using specific works— Wakako Yamauchi 's short story " The Sensei " and Michael Toshiyuki Uno's short film Emi —in the classroom. He also played a key role in the restoration and rediscovery of another film he used in his teaching, Toshi Washizu's Issei: The First Generation .

He also co-edited with Akemi Kikumura and his father, James A. Hirabayashi, two volumes having to do with projects at the Japanese American National Museum . One of them ( New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan ), a study of Nikkei in the U.S. and abroad, allowed him to draw on his knowledge of Latin America.

Finally, with his father, he collaborated on works that examined the family legacy, most notably a volume on his uncle, Gordon Hirabayashi ( A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States ), that draws on previously unseen writings from the family collection.

Hirabayashi married literary scholar/artist Marilyn C. Alquizola in the summer of 1988, and they remained married until his passing. The couple collaborated on articles about Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan, and contributed the introduction to a new printing of Bulosan's landmark book America Is in the Heart in 2014.

Hirabayashi remained active in Japanese American communities throughout his life, ranging from efforts to preserve San Francisco's Japantown in the 1970s and 1980s to the [[ Redress movement|Redress Movement]] in the 1980s. He spoke frequently at community events such as Days of Remembrance . As the Aratani Chair at UCLA, he also started the George and Sakaye Aratani Community Advancement Research Endowment (CARE) awards that provided small grants to community organizations engaged in activities to benefit Japanese American communities.

He passed away on August 8, 2020, at the age of sixty-seven, after a battle with cancer.

[with James A. Hirabayashi]. "A Reconsideration of the United States Military Role in the Violation of Japanese-American Citizenship Rights." In Ethnicity and War . Ed. Winston A. Horne and Thomas Tonnesen. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 87-100.

[and George Tanaka]. The Early Gardena Valley and the Issei . Gardena, Calif.: Gardena Pioneer Project, 1987.

[and George Tanaka]. "The Issei Community in Moneta and the Gardena Valley, 1900-1920." Southern California Quarterly 70.2 (Summer 1988): 127-58.

[with James A. Hirabayashi]. "The 'Credible' Witness: The Central Role of Richard S. Nishimoto in JERS." In Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Ed. Yuji Ichioka. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 65-94.

"The Impact of Incarceration on the Education of Nisei Schoolchildren." In Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress . Ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. Revised edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. 44-51.

"Community Lost? The Significance of a Contemporary Japanese American Community in Southern California." In Asians in America: A Reader . Ed. Malcolm Collier. Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt Publishing Company, 1993. 169–83.

"Re-Reading the Archives: Intersections of Ethnography, Biography, and Autobiography in Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement." Peace and Change 23.2 (Apr. 1998): 167-82. Republished as "Re-Reading the Archives: The Intersection of Ethnography, Biography & Autobiography in the Historiography of Japanese Americans During World War II." In Remembering Heart Mountain: Essays on Japanese American Internment in Wyoming . Ed. and contribution by Mike Mackey. Powell, Wyoming: Western History Publications, 1998. 195-208.

The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp . Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

"Community Destroyed? Assessing the Impact of the Loss of Community on Japanese Americans during World War II." In Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History . Edited by Josephine Lee, Imogen L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa. Philadelpha: Temple University Press, 2002. 94–107.

[with Kenichiro Shimada]. Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA's Photographic Section, 1943–1945 . Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009.

"Wakako Yamauchi's 'The Sensei': Exploring the Ethos of Japanese American Resettlement." Journal of American Ethnic History 29.2 (Winter 2010): 55–61.

"Accused of the Crime, Doing the Time: Notes on Gordon Hirabayashi, 1943-1945." Seattle Journal of Social Justice 11.1 (Summer, 2012) :27-40.

[with Gordon Hirabayashi and James A. Hirabayashi]. A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

" Asian American Small Business Formations: From Accommodation to Innovation. " In Finding A Path Forward: Asian American Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study Ed. Franklin Odo. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2017.

"Changing My Mind About Redress," "Conclusion," and "For Further Thought and Reading," in Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress. NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations . Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2018. 190–92, 348–61.

Nishimoto, Richard. Inside An American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona . Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.

[with Akemi Kikumura and James A. Hirabayashi]. New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

[with Jun Xing]. Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Film . Boulder, Col.: The University of Colorado Press, 2003.

[with Akemi Kikumura and James A. Hirabayashi]. Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations . Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005.