Heritage Hero : Scholarship: By documenting the lives of Japanese settlers in the U.S., historian Yuji Ichioka chips away at stereotypes attached to Asian Americans.

UCLA historian Yuji Ichioka has never played pro basketball, but his fans like to call him an Asian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Watch him on the basketball court any Wednesday or Friday morning, and you’ll see the lean, bespectacled scholar stripped to his gray sweat shorts, running and jumping to score baskets and block shots with the vigor of the 20-year-olds with whom he plays.

Ichioka may be the oldest player at John Wooden Center--he’s 59--but his left-handed rendition of Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook is a sight to behold. His admirers say the man’s athletic prowess is as remarkable as his intellectual power.

“He’s our role model,” said David Willingham, a recent graduate who plays basketball with Ichioka. “We want to be like him when we’re his age.”

Whether on the basketball court or in the classroom, the influence of Ichioka, considered by many to be the nation’s foremost authority on Japanese American history, has been immense.

He coined the term “Asian American,” founded the first inter-ethnic political organization for Asians and advanced the rationale for bringing together diverse Asian peoples.

Before he formed the Asian American Political Alliance 27 years ago, Asians--at the time a million nationwide compared to 8 million today--belonged only to their own ethnic organizations.

The idea of Chinese Americans, for example, joining Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans for a shared political purpose was revolutionary; the proposition that Asians needed to forge an alliance with blacks, Latinos and Native Americans to work on a common agenda was unheard of.

Ichioka’s role in creating the relatively new discipline called Asian American studies was a natural outgrowth of his commitment to teach histories that weren’t part of the mainstream curriculum.

The phenomenal growth of the Asian American Studies program at his alma mater UCLA, where Ichioka taught the first class, and at schools across the country attests to the thirst for knowledge of Asian heritage.

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Ichioka’s office in Campbell Hall is so full of books and heaps of research material that there is barely enough room for a visitor.

This cramped space is where Ichioka pursues his lifelong work of recovering the “buried past” of the early Japanese settlers by going to the original sources, such as letters they wrote, diaries they kept and newspapers they read.

Through his lectures and writing, he makes these unknown men and women come alive. In the process, he chips away at the stereotypes of Asians as docile people who only worked hard and kept to themselves.

On the contrary, he notes, Asians fought the injustice of exploitative employers with strikes and demonstrations, and the cruelty of discriminatory laws through the legal system and the courts. Most of the time, they lost--but not without a struggle.

His pioneering work, “The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924,” is seminal.

Five generations after the first Japanese came to U.S. shores in the 1880s, Ichioka stands out as the scholar who documented and analyzed the Japanese American experience from the perspective of the immigrants. Many who came after him have relied on his work because they lacked the proficiency in Japanese to tackle the original sources.

The San Francisco-born Ichioka mastered the language through years of diligent study.

“Our ignorance of the history of Japanese immigrants and their descendants is due not to a lack of historical sources,” Ichioka says, “but to the failure of past and present researchers to study existing Japanese-language sources.”

His annotated bibliography is an impressive collection of Japanese American reference material, which he gathered over many years by talking families into turning over from their attics, garages and closets, dusty boxes and trunks left by their ancestors.

With the patience of a paleontologist, he continues to assemble and record bits and pieces of Japanese American lives from all over America. He is the main reason UCLA’s Japanese American Research Project Collection is the finest of its kind, attracting scholars from throughout the world.

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Many, including his students, find Yuji Ichioka intimidating. His exacting standards, no nonsense exterior and a stern gaze reminiscent of old-fashioned teachers in Asia, all make him hard to approach.

One student from Okinawa was so afraid of Ichioka just from his reputation that he debated whether he should take his class.

But once he was over that hurdle, he told a friend that he was won over by the professor’s dedication, an unpretentious demeanor, and willingness to give and share his knowledge.

When it came time for the student to return home, Ichioka took him out to dinner, then gave him an envelope containing $100, as if the young man were his own son.

That’s typical of him, say his friends.

“Yuji will never win a politeness award,” said Alan Nishio, a top administrator at Cal State Long Beach who was involved in the ‘60s movement with Ichioka. But as a thinker, scholar and teacher, few can match him, he said.

Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, who took a course from him in 1969, says Ichioka taught him not only Asian American history but how to write.

“His critiques were very helpful,” Kwoh recalled. “He taught me how to get to the point right away.”

And, Kwoh says it was “inspiring to watch” Ichioka challenge and educate the UCLA administration on the need for ethnic studies generally and Asian American studies in particular.

“He has educated and trained thousands of students,” said his boss, Don T. Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

Not having a Ph.D. has hurt his academic career--he’s not tenured--but that doesn’t bother Ichioka.

“Since all I wanted to do was research and I already knew how to do that, I didn’t want to go through all the rigmarole,” he said.

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Twenty-seven years ago this month, when Black Panther leader Huey Newton was on trial in Oakland for killing a police officer, Ichioka marched with the members of his newly-founded Asian American Political Alliance.

The then 33-year-old scholar-activist had gone through the Peace and Freedom Party roster to locate Asian American names, called them, then organized the first pan-Asian American political group in the Berkeley apartment he shared with his wife, Emma Gee, a Chinese American activist.

He ordered buttons declaring “Yellow Peril”--a play on the World War II hysteria. And, he coined the locution “Asian American” to frame a new self-defining political lexicon. Before that, people from across the Pacific were called “Oriental” or “Asiatic.”

Ichioka’s contingent was a startling show of unity of previously disparate Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans.

Their presence among the hundreds of Black Panthers also caught the attention of the national and international news media on hand to cover Newton’s trial.

For Asian Americans, 1968 was the year of political awakening. And, Yuji Ichioka was its midwife.

Taking a public stance was consistent with his beliefs. He did not agree with the Black Panther Party’s “suicidal politics,” but he felt that Newton, like all citizens, deserved to be treated fairly by his government.

The alliance, he felt, would not only let the mainstream know that Asian Americans were in the movement, but encourage others to come forward.

Today, in the aftermath of the migration of millions of Asians in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the term Asian American has been broadened to Asian Pacific Americans to embrace 28 different ethnicities, whose numbers are projected to grow to 12 million nationally by the year 2,000. Asians are California’s second largest minority group behind Latinos.

Ichioka, who experienced poverty and discrimination at an early age, has seen Japanese Americans and other Americans of Asian descent make great strides.

They still face discrimination, he says, but the fact that young Asians represent disproportionately high numbers at the nation’s top universities--20% at Harvard and other private schools and more than 40% at UCLA and UC Berkeley--gives hope.

“There is something going on that has never happened as far as the Asians are concerned,” he said. “These young Asians today are in a similar position as young Jews were in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

Once the quota system that kept Jewish enrollment low in the Ivy League schools came down after World War II, Jewish students poured into those institutions, he said. “They went into every field of study in human endeavor--music, arts, sciences, literature--and achieved incredible success in all of these areas.”

The best and the brightest among Asians have that chance now, he said, and he wants to see them rise to the challenge. He hopes they will be motivated by a social conscience to help change this society “for the better.”

One immediate task would be to oppose the current campaign to eliminate affirmative action. To Ichioka, last week’s UC Regents decision to kill affirmative action was morally wrong because he believes racism and inequality of opportunities still remain, especially for disadvantaged African Americans and Latinos. In the UC system, affirmative action in admissions does not apply to Asians, except Filipinos, because of their high enrollment numbers.

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Ichioka, who has no children, tells his UCLA “kids” that they should “think big.”

Asians still face a “glass ceiling” and prejudice, but 1995 is vastly different from the World War II years, when frenzy against Japanese Americans led authorities to round them up and dispatch them to hastily-built internment camps. Ichioka was 6 when his family was forced to leave San Francisco for a Utah internment camp.

Before 1970, Asians avoided speaking their parents’ language on campus because they were afraid of enforcing the white perception of being foreigners, he said.

“There was this kind of enforced Americanization that was held up as an ideal. You were supposed to get rid of your parents’ language, dump your old culture and traits, and make yourself in the image of Anglo-Saxon New England Americans.

“Today on the UCLA campus, you hear Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog [among other Asian languages]. The kind of pressure that existed in the ‘30s and ‘40s is not there anymore.”

For Ichioka, it was first-hand experience with racism that influenced his outlook on social justice: The internment, living among blacks in Berkeley, and picking fruit alongside Mexicans in the Central Valley all contributed. His stint in the Army in the 1950s also opened his eyes.

When his family returned from the relocation camp, his father had to start all over again as a laborer at age 62.

His parents bore their suffering with stoicism, but young Yuji felt keenly their unspoken pain and that of his sister, Shizuko, who had to work as a live-in maid to put herself through UC Berkeley.

His sister told him that she was going to become a “Super Jap”--so superior that “nobody, least of all a white person,” could say that she was “inferior.”

She earned her biochemistry degree in three years. “Straight A’s . . . Phi Beta Kappa,” Ichioka said. “She was superior.”

One summer in his early teens, while helping plant 800 acres of celery in Lodi, he saw how Mexican migrant farmers lived.

“I used to feel real sorry for them,” he said. “They were housed in shacks and just fed beans.”

Then, as an 18-year-old Army private in Germany, he saw white enlisted men refusing to take orders from a black second lieutenant. “The discrimination in the military really opened my eyes and made me do a lot of thinking.”

Looking back over six decades, Asians have many successes to celebrate, he says. At the same time, they must not forget important lessons from history.

It wasn’t that long ago in California, when they could not testify in court, could not buy land, could not marry freely, could not live where they wished, and could not even get a haircut outside Chinatowns and Japantowns.

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“Our job as historians and teachers of history is to pass on our knowledge,” he said.