Chris Iijima

Chris Kwando Iijima (1948–2005) was a lawyer, educator, legal scholar and musician. In the 1970s, Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto , and "Charlie" Chin, were the members of the group Yellow Pearl; their 1973 album, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, (originally recorded on Paredon Records, now Smithsonian Folkways) was an important part of the development of Asian American identity in the early 1970s.

Iijima was born in New York City on December 19, 1948 to activist parents: father Takeru, who served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team , Company L; and mother Kazuko. He also had an older sister, Lynne. Kazuko Ikeda was born in California in 1918. She was one of the few Nisei who held a civil service job in prewar Oakland, at the social welfare department. When her fiancé, Tak Iijima, was drafted to fight for the United States Army, Kazu joined him in Salt Lake City, where he had been sent to get a pre-induction physical exam, and they were married there. She stayed a short time at the Topaz concentration camp in central Utah until she was able to join Tak in Mississippi.

Following the war, Iijima's parents were both active in the Asian-American movement in New York City, and helped form the first community-based East Coast APA organization, known as Asian Americans for Action (Triple-A) in 1969, focusing on cultural and identity issues as well as political action such as ending the war in Vietnam. Iijima's parents were also instrumental in the formation of the United Asian Communities Center, which opened in New York in December 1972, with the support of Bill and Yuri Kochiyama and other community activists. The United Asian Communities Center became the incubator for a major political movement.

Iijima himself got involved in Asian American activism beginning in the late sixties and early seventies and was also one of the founders of the civil rights organization, Asian Americans for Action. He earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1969. While a student there, he was involved in the Columbia University protests of 1968 against the Vietnam War.

Iijima met Nobuko Miyamoto at a 1970 conference and sang together for the first time. The next day, they threw together a song for the Japanese American Citizens League, and quickly decided to make radical, political music. In 1972, New York's Asian American arts space, Basement Workshop published a book entitled Yellow Pearl. The project initially was designed to illustrate and publish the music of Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin but grew into a larger portfolio of writing, art, and music by over thirty creators. In 1973 Yellow Pearl band released their album, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, which articulated their perspectives as Asian Americans and spoke of their lineage traced back to immigrant workers and solidarity with freedom fighters.

AsianWeek columnist Phil Tajitsu Nash stated that upon hearing Yellow Pearl perform live, "From Boston to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu, Asian-derived people who had been classified in the Census as 'Other' suddenly realized that they had an identity, a history, and a place at the table." Iijima sang a song from the album on the Mike Douglas Show, co-hosted with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on February 15, 1972. ^[1] The group stopped performing together after 1973, but occasionally reunited to perform.

In 1988, he received a J.D. from New York Law School. He served on the faculties of New York University School of Law, and Western New England College School of Law and was invited to join the faculty of the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa in 1998 and became a tenured associate professor in 2001. Throughout his career as a law professor and legal scholar, Iijima wrote and published critical articles on discrimination against Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and members of other racial groups. Iijima also served on the board of directors of Na Loio and of the Society of American Law Teachers, and on the Commission on Equal Access to Justice, appointed by the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, and the Special Advisory Committee on Diversity of the Hawaiʻi Civil Rights Commission.

He married Jane Dickson in New York City in 1992, and had two sons, Alan and Christopher.

Iijima died on December 31, 2005 at age 57 in Honolulu, Hawai'i, of amyloidosisa, rare blood disease.