UCLA International Institute, February 6, 2015 — The UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies launched an Oral History Project at its annual Shinnenkai (Japanese New Year) celebration on January 30, 2015. Simultaneously, the center awarded its first McCallum Prize in honor of Distinguished Professor of Japanese Art History Donald McCallum (1939–2013), a founding member of the Terasaki Center and longtime faculty member at UCLA.
Held in the Experimental Digital Arts Room of the Broad Art Center, the annual event drew close to 150 attendees. Among them were UCLA Japanese Studies faculty and students; Terasaki Center staff, board members and donors; representatives of the Japanese Consulate-General in Los Angeles and The Japan Foundation; center founders Dr. Paul and Mrs. Hisako Terasaki; Ralph Shapiro and many other friends.
Initiated in May 2014, the Oral History Project is sponsored by the Shapiro Family Charitable Foundation. Its mission is to preserve the personal histories of the original Nikkei Bruin Committee, a group of Japanese-American alumni of UCLA created in 1991.
Children of the first wave of Japanese immigrants to the United States, their support and promotion of the study of Japan and Japanese Americans eventually led to the establishment of a Japanese Studies program and center at UCLA. In fact, the Nikkei Bruins have played a key role in fundraising efforts for the Terasaki Center since its creation.
A generation commits to preserving its history
The first professional video prepared for the Oral History Project features Terasaki Center Advisory Board Member Herb Kawahara; it was screened throughout the afternoon reception and will soon be posted on the center’s website.
Kawahara is a philanthropist, retired president of the Pacific Stock Exchange, chair emeritus of the UCLA Foundation and one of the original Nikkei Bruins. He is also a longtime champion and supporter of Japanese Studies at UCLA. In 1997, his gift to the Terasaki Center established The Herbert and Helen Kawahara Fellowship to support UCLA graduate students wishing to develop Japan expertise while pursuing professional training in any academic discipline.
The endowment was strengthened in 2006 with funding from the Shapiro Family, donated in honor of the Kawahara Family — a testament to Herb’s magnificent leadership. To date, Kawahara Fellowships have provided over $125,000 for 22 graduate students, many of whom have gone on to earn PhDs and have become experts in their fields.
In his remarks, Kawahara noted that the Japanese-American community of California has not attracted the interest of anthropologists, so it was up to the community itself to preserve its heritage. “Tell your stories to your children and your grandchildren,” Kawahara urged his contemporaries, “so they can know what it was like for us.”
The multicultural UCLA campus and curriculum of today, he continued, often leaves their generation’s grandchildren unaware of the life they experienced in America. (One that included the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, together with everyday prejudices against Japanese immigrants.)
Kawahara recalled that international studies at UCLA were highly Eurocentric for many years. He recounted that when he served as advisor to the chancellor in the 1970s, there was initially great resistance to the idea of creating Asian studies programs at the university.
Soon after the East Asian Studies Center was created in 1976, a Center for Japanese Studies was formed under its aegis. Renamed the Paul and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies in 1991 in honor of their generous donation, the center has since become well-known for championing the study of Japan in all aspects.
Both Dr. and Mrs. Terasaki — contemporaries of Mr. Kawahara — were in attendance at the Shinnenkai celebration. Also a UCLA alumnus, Dr. Paul Terasaki went on to become Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the Geffen School of Medicine. A world-famous scientist, he is celebrated for developing a test that ensured tissue matching for organ donors, greatly enhancing the success of organ transplants. His 2010 gift to the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences in 2010 funded the newly built Terasaki Life Science Building on campus.
Center friends, donors and students celebrate Japanese Studies
The evening highlighted a number of Terasaki Center friends, donors and students. Newly appointed Consul-General of Japan in Los Angeles, Harry H. Horinouchi, introduced himself as the newest member of the center’s Advisory Board. The humorous Mr. Horinouchi is a graduate of Tokyo University’s Faculty of Law. He arrives in Los Angeles from Beijing, where he served at the Japanese embassy for three years as Envoy Extraordinary and Ministry Plenipotentiary.
Hideo Miyake, president of the Japanese Business Association (JBA) of Southern California (which unites over 700 Japanese companies located in the region), spoke briefly about the Japanese-language scholarships supported by the association at UCLA. JBA, he remarked, is proud to support UCLA graduate students as they study to reach proficiency in Japanese.
The JBA Language Scholars for 2014–15, John Branstetter and Jack Wilson, will both study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Languages Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Branstetter is currently researching a dissertation on the translation of British liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill into Japanese. Wilson’s research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of Japan from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Left: Hideo Miyake, JBA president. Right: Coryell Bogan and Mrs. Toshiko McCallum.
Rounding out the afternoon, Mrs. Toshiko McCallum awarded the first McCallum Prize for academic excellence to UCLA undergraduate Coryell Bogan.
In heartfelt words, Mrs. McCallum said that she and her children had agreed that the best way to honor Donald McCallum, who taught at UCLA for over 40 years and made the university a center for the study of Japanese art, was to establish a prize in his name. Her warm and gracious presentation left no doubt that she was delighted to present the first prize. The $1,000 scholarship will be awarded every other year in alternation with another new undergraduate scholarship, the Miriam Silverberg Prize.
In introducing Ms. Bogan, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature Torquil Duthie noted that she had written an excellent analysis of Chikamatsu’s play “Sonezaki shinjū” for his class, “Fiction and Plays of the Floating World” (Winter 2013). Duthie explained that her paper was an astute analysis of the “make-believe” (uso) and the “real” (jitsu). “It is very rare for an undergraduate student to even attempt this kind of nuanced analysis,” he said as he congratulated his former student.
Sadly, the last official order of business was to say farewell to Cindy Suzuki, who joined the Terasaki Center staff in 2011 and soon became event organizer extraordinaire, instituting forms and procedures that produced flawless events. Center Director Hitoshi Abe, Associate Director Seiji Lippit and Assistant Director Noël Shimizu wished her much success in her new position in the business world.
The afternoon drew to a close with conversations and reminiscences over delicious Japanese food and drink.
All photos by Reed Hutchinson.