When the Association for Asian American Studies pays posthumous tribute to Dr. Don Nakanishi at its annual meeting this week in Miami, conference-goers will honor an academician who was more than just a trailblazing scholar, popular professor and mentor.
Without Nakanishi, whose watershed lawsuit in the 1980s to gain tenure was closely watched by colleagues nationally, the field of Asian American studies might not exist today.
Or the discipline would have grown much slower if Nakanishi had not battled back when he was initially denied tenure at the University of California, Los Angeles, based on his pioneering research about Asian Americans in politics and education.
Nakanishi, 66, died on March 21. Since then, tributes and remembrances have poured in from colleagues and former students from around the globe, and the Association for Asian American Studies is the latest to do so.
A third-generation Japanese American, Nakanishi grew up in East Los Angeles among Chicanos and Jews and was high school student body president. As a Yale undergraduate, his pre-med intentions faded after a disturbing incident.
In December 1966, he was in his dorm room when a group of his non-Asian peers burst through the door, pelted him with water balloons and chanted, “Bomb Pearl Harbor, bomb Pearl Harbor.” One student stood before a drenched Nakanishi and recited former President Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration of war speech.
“I didn’t know what to make of it — whether to laugh or cry,” he recounted to a UCLA interviewer many years later. He couldn’t grasp why his peers felt so strongly about world events from 25 years earlier, before any of them were born.
