James A. Hirabayashi

James Akira Hirabayashi was born on October 30, 1926, in Thomas, Washington, a small farming community between Seattle and Tacoma, the third of five children of Shungo and Mitsuko Hirabayashi. Shungo had first migrated to the U.S. from Nagano prefecture in around 1907, with Mitsu coming over as a picture bride seven years later. The couple were followers of the Mukyokai movement, a small Japanese Christian sect that eschewed priests and hierarchy, with families gathering in groups to conduct services on their own. Through his childhood, Hirabayashi's parents and other Mukyokai members didn't work on Sundays, using that day to attend Sunday school at community churches during the day and meeting at the homes of Mukyokai members at night. ^[2]

Prior to James's birth, the Hirabayashis had banded together with four other Mukyokai families and bought fifty acres of land in Thomas, calling it White River Gardens. But after the family had cleared the land and built a home on their portion of the land, the state confiscated the land under the tenets of the alien land law . The Hirabayashis were subsequently forced to lease back the land and home from the state. They ran a small truck farm on the land. ^[3]

Jim grew up among many Japanese Americans, with the local public schools he attended being up to three-quarters Nisei. Like most Nisei, he and his siblings also attended Japanese language school after public school. He went on to Auburn Junior High School. When he was in the 6th or 7th grade, the family bought a nearby grocery store that his mother and the kids mostly ran, while his father continued to farm.

Jim was fifteen and a first-year student at Auburn High School when World War II began. Along with all other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, the Hirabayashis were forcibly removed and incarcerated, being taken by train nearly 1,000 miles to the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno, California, in May 1942. After about two months there, they were sent to the Tule Lake , California, War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camp, where he attended school, played baseball, and hung out with friends. His oldest brother, Gordon , famously refused to obey curfew and exclusion orders, hoping to mount a legal challenge to them. When their parents were called to Seattle to attend Gordon's trial, Jim quit high school and left Tule Lake to do agricultural work in Idaho. He got permission to remain in Weiser, Idaho, officially leaving Tule Lake in March 1943. His mother and two younger siblings joined him three months later. He spent his junior year of high school in Weiser, before the family moved to Spokane, Washington, where Jim graduated from John Rogers High School in 1945.

Hirabayashi attended the University of Washington. Initially intending to be a pre-med major, he ended up graduating with a degree in anthropology in 1949 and continued on to an M.A. program. He also married Joanne Vandenburg in 1949 and had a son, Lane, in 1952. Having minored in Far Eastern Studies and studied Japanese, he decided to focus his research on Japan. Funded by a Fulbright Scholarship in 1954, he did fieldwork in Nagano prefecture, where his parents were from, studying social changes brought about by World War II and the occupation in a village. Even before finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, he was hired at San Francisco State University in 1959. He was the second Japanese American faculty member there, after the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa . In the meantime, the Hirabayashis had another child, a daughter, Jan, in 1957. Encountering discrimination while trying to buy a home in an area with good schools in San Francisco, the Hirabayashis bought a home in largely white Mill Valley, where Hayakawa and his family lived. ^[4]

Among the projects Hirabayashi took on while teaching at San Francisco State in the 1960s were a NIMH funded study of the urbanization of Native Americans in the Bay Area, a study of family structure and health practices in Nigeria that was interrupted by the Biafran Civil War, and project that looked at the rebuilding process after a typhoon in Guam.

After his return to the university from Nigeria in 1967, he was asked to be the faculty advisor for the Asian American Political Alliance, one of the earliest pan-Asian American student organizations. Later in the fall of 1968, he became involved in a student strike for ethnic studies at the university. The strike would become a turning point in his life and career. "For me, it became a personal dilemma. Do I ignore all this and keep on working?" he said in a 1998 interview. "I had worked my whole life to get into this position...." But in the end—and inspired in part by Gordon's stance—he decided to get involved and was soon marching in picket lines with the students and in opposition to Hayakawa, who had been named university president due in part to his opposition to ethnic studies. In the end, the university did establish an ethnic studies program, and Hirabayashi became the first chair of an Asian American Studies program in the fall of 1969 that offered eighteen classes, including "The Japanese Americans in the United States" taught by Edison Uno . A year later, Hirabayashi became the first dean of ethnic studies, a position he held for six years. ^[5]

Hirabayashi remained at San Francisco State for his entire academic career, retiring after thirty years and after spending his last three years (1985–88) as dean of undergraduate studies. He traveled widely in these years, returning to Nigeria to teach for two years at Ahmadu Bello University and spending sabbaticals backpacking through Africa and traveling through Asia and the Pacific Islands and Mexico, sometimes to visit, his brother Ed, whose work for the State Department took him all over the world, and sometimes with his son Lane, who had himself become an anthropologist. In 2009, he was awarded the San Francisco State University President's Medal. ^[6]

He and Joanne divorced in 1982. He later married Christine Kitchel, and the couple adopted a daughter, Tai-Lan, in 1994. ^[7]

Beyond his academic career, Hirabayashi contributed to public knowledge about the Japanese American experience in other ways. Acknowledging the limitations he faced in a university setting, he became one of the founders of the Center for Japanese American Studies, where "we did what we thought needed to be done to understand Japanese American life. And we didn't have to pass it through any bureaucracy." One program put on by the center—a 1975 production of playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi 's The Plums Can Wait —led to a series of acting roles mostly for the the Asian American Theater Company, including roles in plays by Philip Kan Gotanda , Wakako Yamauchi , and Garrett Hongo among others. He memorably played his own father in R. A. Shiomi's Point of Order: Hirabayashi v. U.S. (1983), which was based on his brother Gordon's story. He also appeared in narrative films by Steven Okazaki ( Living on Tokyo Time , 1987) and Gotanda ( The Kiss , 1993) as well as in the landmark documentary Rabbit in the Moon (1999) by Emiko Omori. ^[8]

After his retirement from San Francisco State, Hirabayashi was named the chief curator at the newly formed Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in 1989. Working part-time at JANM while maintaining his home in Mill Valley, he helped craft the museum's approach to collections and exhibitions in its first decade. Later, he served as the chief advisor on the JANM-based International Nikkei Research Project and co-edited two books based on his work at JANM and the INRP. He also collaborated with his son Lane on a number of projects, most notably on a volume based on the papers of Gordon titled A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). ^[9]

He remained in Mill Valley with his second family until Chris's death in 2006. He died of bone cancer at Kokoro Assisted Living in San Francisco on May 23, 2012 at age 85. ^[10]

Oral histories with Jim Hirabayashi, 1983, 1992, and 2008 . Densho Digital Repository.

Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo, Brian Niiya, and Penny Nakatsu. "James Akira Hirabayashi, 1926–2012." Amerasia Journal 39.1 (2013): 130–34.

"Nisei: The Quiet American? A Re-evaluation." Amerasia Journal 3.1 (Summer 1975): 114-29.

"'Concentration Camp' or 'Relocation Center'—What's in a Name?" Japanese American National Museum Quarterly (Fall 1994). Discover Nikkei , Apr. 24, 2008.

"Four Hirabayashi Cousins: A Question of Identity." In Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans & Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century . Ed. Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 146–70. Discover Nikkei , May 17, 2008.

"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.

"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.

A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

With Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Akemi Kikumura. 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 Akemi Kikumura and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations . Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005.