An enormously successful businessman whose products have graced U.S. homes and automobiles for decades, George Aratani could have easily enjoyed the fruits of his vast fortune without sharing a nickel of it.
But instead, Aratani—who survived incarceration in the remote, rudimentary, Japanese American internment camps of World War Two—poured millions of dollars in charitable gifts into the University of California, Los Angeles, in hopes that faculty and students would research, analyze and re-tell the narrative of one of the most shameful chapters of 20thcentury life in order to prevent its recurrence. Aratani died last week at age 95.
Perhaps the most notable of the many UCLA gifts from Aratani and his wife, Sakaye, was one that endowed the nation’s first academic chair devoted specifically to the study of the internment and the decades-long, post-war efforts by Japanese Americans for redress.
Dr. Lane Hirabayashi, a UCLA professor who holds the endowed chair named for the Aratanis, calls his position “a dream come true.”
Dr. David Yoo, a UCLA professor and director of its Asian American Studies Center, adds that “faculty, staff and students have benefited tremendously from the generosity and vision of the Aratanis.”
In 2004, George Aratani was awarded the UCLA Medal, the university’s highest honor, in recognition of the magnitude of his philanthropy across multiple areas of the institution.
Still, Aratani’s deep, wartime losses made his transformative gifts to UCLA all the more profound, school officials say. After the war, the notion of Aratani ever accumulating enough wealth to afford such donations may have seemed inconceivable.
