T. Scott Miyakawa

Pioneering Nisei sociologist and first director of the Japanese American Research Project (JARP). Miyakawa was born in Los Angeles on November 23, 1906 and graduated from Los Angeles High School. He went on to Cornell University, graduating with a degree in industrial engineering. But like other highly educated Nisei of that time period, he was unable to land a job with an American company due to rampant racial discrimination and ended up working for the South Manchurian Railway's New York office as the assistant to the Japanese manager from 1931 to 1940 and in Manchuria in 1934–35. When the railway closed its New York office in 1940, he worked in marketing and public relations for small company.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was not interned despite his position. With journalist Larry Tajiri and others, he formed a "Temporary Committee on Japanese-Americans" to advocate for the rights of Nisei. In 1944, he moved to Michigan as a lecturer at the University of Michigan and took an academic position at Boston University in 1946. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia in 1951. He was also one of the founders of the New England Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). ^[1]

Interested in the history of Japanese Americans and in U.S.–Japan trade, he began collecting material on these topics in the 1950s. When the JACL began the JARP project in the early 1960s, Miyakawa became the first director of the project in 1962 serving in that position until 1965. He also co-edited the pioneering anthology East Across the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation with Hilary Conroy that was published in 1972. In addition to his published writings on Japanese Americans, he was also working on a manuscript on Issei on the East Coast and Japan/US trade in the late 19th century.

Miyakawa remained at Boston University until 1972. He subsequently taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, chairing the sociology department there. He passed away on August 2, 1981. His papers are held at the UCLA. There is a T. Scott Miyakawa Memorial Prize in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, that is presented to a graduating undergraduate sociology major.