Donald Toshiaki Nakanishi
From the UCLA Daily Bruin:
Don T. Nakanishi, director emeritus of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, died of cardiorespiratory arrest March 21 in Los Angeles. He was 66.
Nakanishi was a professor at UCLA for 35 years and was the director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center from 1990 to 2010.
Nakanishi was a nationwide pioneering Asian-American scholar, said David Yoo, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Nakanishi devoted his entire career to study Asian-Americans’ and Pacific Islanders’ education and political participation, Yoo said. …
—See the full article at http://dailybruin.com/2016/03/25/professor-emeritus-remembered-for-legacy-of-asian-american-scholarship/
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Alice Young writes:
Don Nakanishi was the gentlest yet most persistent and organized revolutionary I have ever met. When I first met him at Yale in 1969, he was known as “Don the Chicano”, whose East LA public school life was as foreign to my Hawaii and DC upbringing as that of the East Coast boarding school preppies there.
Don had been involved in the Mexican American student organization at Yale, and in the midst of the anti-Vietnam war protests, the rise of Black Power and student activism on campus, thought it was important for Asian Americans also to have a voice. He asked several of our only 9 Asian American “band of brothers” in the ’71 class (there were only 4 of us APA women in that first Yale coed class, out of 1250 students) whether we were interested, and together with graduate students Glen Omatsu, Rocky Chin and Bill Yuen, we went through the entire Yale student directory to identify Asian surnames and called each person to ask if they were interested in the idea. Don then invited everyone to gather for dinner at Saybrook, his college. When 30+ APAs showed up, the entire Saybrook dining hall was abuzz, since they had never seen such a large gathering of Asians at Yale before! At Don’s instigation, we decided that there was enough interest to found the Asian American Student Association (AASA), which was the very first Asian American student organization in the Ivy League and still exists to this day.
Through AASA, Don spearheaded anti-discrimination campaigns , events on campus and AASA Conferences. When we discovered that the small number of APAs at Yale, especially from public schools, was in part caused by the lack of outreach, Don took the lead in organizing a small group of us to request the Admissions Committee as part of its diversity efforts to send Yale APA students to recruit APAs. Don went home to California and I to Hawaii to recruit from the public schools, with great success. By the time we graduated from Yale in 1971, one year later, the Asian American undergraduate student population had grown from 50 to 90. Because we knew from our own experience that it was not as easy for the public school students we had recruited to assimilate in the Yale environment, Don suggested a Third World Floating Counselor program ( how arcane that sounds now), which was to advise and lend support to the ethnic minorities at Yale College- African American, Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American students, and in our senior year we served as Yale’s first Third World Counselors.
Don also came up with the idea of creating a pilot Asian American Studies course at Yale, and in the spring of 1970 persuaded Professor Chitoshi Yanagida to teach that pioneering class. He also with our classmate Lowell Chun-Hoon founded the Amerasia Journal (featuring the artwork of classmate Billie Tsien), which is the longest continuously published Asian American periodical.
After graduation from Yale, Don went on to many more pioneering achievements at UCLA and the mentoring of thousands of students in California and at Yale. Our paths criss-crossed at the many diversity and Asian American events and awards ceremonies and reunions we attended. He was always the same Don- focused but self-deprecating and soft-spoken. He somehow managed to lead an extraordinarily busy life of leadership and service in the community and in academia, yet also share a wonderful family life with his dynamic wife Marsha Hirano-Nakanishi and his son Tom, who followed in his footsteps to Yale.
As a fellow APA and as a career woman, I know how hard it is to achieve that balance of devotion to career, community and family. He was so proud of the accomplishments of Marsha and so happy to have time in retirement to cheer on their sports teams and travel together. He was also so proud of having raised such a talented, dynamic and thoughtful son. What an extraordinary legacy he has left for us all. His commitment was so deep and passionate yet so gentle, never strident. He has made a gentle but firm dent in our universe.
With respect and great fondness,
Alice Young