Remembering Yuzuru Takeshita

Yuzuru Takeshita (1926-2016) was an educator, researcher, and activist. Born in Alameda, California, he was raised by his maternal grandfather in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan from the age of 10 to 15, and returned to the U.S. in 1940 to avoid military conscription in Japan. Following the outbreak of war, Takeshita and his family were incarcerated in concentration camps in Utah (Topaz) and California (Tule Lake). After the war, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Park University in Missouri in 1951, and his Ph.D in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1962. Thereafter, Takeshita taught for over three decades at the U-M School of Public Health, all the while spearheading population planning studies in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China, and Malaysia. He was also an active faculty member of the U-M Center for Japanese Studies, and served on the Board of Governors of the Japanese American National Museum.

Takeshita twinned his academic work with a fervent devotion to commemorating the U.S. government’s incarceration of people of Japanese descent during World War II. From the 1980s onward he began speaking and writing widely about his incarceration experience, including at U-M’s inaugural Martin Luther King, Jr. Symposium in 1988. Having experienced the lead-up to war in Japan in the 1930s, Takeshita also engaged in peace activism around the Nanjing Massacre and the killing of six people in a Japanese balloon bombing in Bly, Oregon. “If a wrong was committed by an earlier generation,” Takeshita wrote in one of his many pieces for the Ann Arbor News, “it is still our responsibility to recognize that wrong and make amends so that new wrongs are not committed.”