Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, (October 17, 1952 – August 8, 2020) was an American historian who focused on the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. He recommended to use the term incarceration instead of internment. "He was at the forefront of scholars calling for the use of more precise terminology regarding the forced uprooting and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and for avoiding government euphemisms such as “evacuation” and “relocation.” He also argued that “comparative research relating this history to the internment of Middle Eastern and Muslim detainees, and the incarceration of militant activists of color and prisoners of conscience, is imperative.”[1][2] Hirabayashi was an early member of The National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR),[3] an organization that sought to right historical wrongs by returning money and land taken through incarceration during the war.[4]

Hirabayashi grew up in California and attended Sonoma State University for college and then got a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. He became a professor at San Francisco State University.[5] He was influenced by his father James A. Hirabayashi, who was a sociocultural anthropologist and was involved in the Third World Strike at San Francisco State University. His methodology was influenced by his father, particularly the idea of "cultures of resistance,” an "approach to social research that focused “on working with or for a community-based group seeking to empower an ethnic minority population that had been excluded from the mainstream in terms of resources and services …”[6]

From 2006-2017 Hirabayashi was a professor at University of California, Los Angeles. He held the George and Sakaye Aratani Professorship, the first endowed chair to focus on the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans.[7]

Hirabayashi published multiple books in his lifetime. In his 2013 book, A Principled Stand: Gordon Hirabayashi v. the United States, Hirabayashi discussed his uncle Gordon Hirabayashi's major legal case, Hirabayashi v. United States. Gordon Hirabayashi had resisted the internment (incarceration) and his case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.[5]