Paul T. Takagi Honored

ON APRIL 19, 2008, THE ASSOCIATION FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES HONORED Professor (Emeritus) Paul Takagi with a Lifetime Achievement Award during its Chicago conference on Where Is the Heart of AsianAmerica? American Identity and Exceptionalism in an Age of Globalization and Imperialism. Paul rose to address the 250 to 300 people who had assembled for the ceremony. last time I spoke before a group this large, he said, when I taught a radical criminology class in Berkeley. The guys in back lit up joints. Laughter erupted. He did not segue, as he often did, to the stresses induced by the Vietnam War draft, and the troubling options these young men faced of resisting and going to jail, or leaving friends and family behind for a new life in Canada, a country that did not want them. Instead, Paul discussed an innovative approach to senior care for Asians, such as the community-based Kokoro Assisted Living Center in San Francisco, and Kimochi, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the well-being of seniors in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is one of the more lasting and unheralded legacies of Asian American activism, with both referring to the heart and spirit. In July 2007, on the University of California Berkeley campus, Paul also had been honored as the inaugural recipient of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency's Gerhard Mueller Award. Dr. Barry Krisberg, the NCCD's president since 1983, explained that the award recognizes outstanding contributions to criminology that bring a global perspective to U.S. justice policy and advance human rights. Gerhard Mueller (1926-2006) was a pioneering force in international criminal law, with a distinguished career as a law professor at New York University and Rutgers University; at the United Nations, he was responsible for U.N. programs dealing with crime and justice worldwide. Mueller fought against the death penalty, and wrote both the U.N. standards to prohibit torture and the minimal standards on prisons for the European Union. Krisberg noted that the acclaim and recognition Takagi richly deserves have been elusive because he challenged boundaries and pushed people out of their comfort zones. Speaking to the value of Professor Takagi's work to national policymakers, city leaders, and organizations such as the Commission on Civil Rights and the Urban League was Rose M. Ochi, NCCD Board Chair, whose own public service has included appointments in the Justice Department as an assistant attorney general during the Clinton administration and as associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House; she has also led the effort to establish Manzanar National Historic Site as part of the National Park System. Manzanar, in California's Owens Valley, was the first of 10 permanent War Relocation Centers at which up to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were forcefully confined beginning in 1942. native Californian born in 1923, Takagi was interned by the U.S. army at Manzanar, provoking in him an intense, lifelong interest in issues related to imprisonment, human rights, and the political, economic, and ideological forces that led to the tragic and unprecedented dispossession and confinement of people of Japanese heritage on the West Coast. In Manzanar, he honed his journalistic skills while working on the staff of the Manzanar Free Press. Rose Ochi noted Takagi's seminal 1974 study on police killings of civilians (and particularly the overuse of force against African Americans), A Garrison State in a 'Democratic' Society, which appeared in the first issue of Social Justice (then entitled Crime and Social Justice). She also called attention to his determined effort to reveal the rights violations and the acceptance of such abuse in police culture in the January 1979 killing of Eulia Love, an African-American widowed mother of three children in Los Angeles. Having returned to California in 1947 after a troubling experience at the University of Illinois and a stint as a factory worker in Chicago, Takagi graduated from U. …

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