Grant ujifusa biography

2010s

Gregory Rossano, Rabb MSE’12, received his 35th granted U.S. patent, his latest contribution to the field of robotics and automation.

Masachs Boungou, Heller MA’16, MA’16, is the author of “Shared Prosperity: A Path Forward for Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Personal Crisis: Building a Leadership Story and Shaping Business Success,” both independently published in August 2024. He earned a PhD in global studies from UMass Lowell in 2022.

Gabriel Redner, GSAS PhD’16, and Amber Sommer ’03 were married at Boston’s Allandale Farm in November 2023, with many Brandeis friends attending.

Kayla Reisman, GSAS MA’18/Heller MBA’18, moved to Chicago with her husband, Andrew Brandel, and 2-year-old daughter Ruthie, then welcomed the newest addition to the family, Dov Ber (named for the late Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program founding director Bernie Reisman, Heller PhD’70). Kayla works at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation alongside Herschel Singer, GSAS MA’18/Heller MBA’18, and Dalia Krusner, GSAS MA’18/Heller MBA’18.

Iyad Qaaqah, Rabb MS’19, a clinical informaticist at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, in Houston, welcomed a baby boy in 2023.

In the 2011 PAN-JAPAN special issue NEGLECTED LEGACIES: Japanese American Women and the Redress/Reparations Movement, guest editor Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, an Asian American studies professor at UCLA (where he is also the George & Sakaye Aratani chair in Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community), acknowledges that in (resourcefully) editing the papers comprising Neglected Legacies and in writing up his published (and very perceptive) introduction to them, he benefitted from his interactions with three notable Sansei activists.

One of these third-generation Nikkei, Grant Ujifusa, was a key national player in the Japanese American redress movement that culminated in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The legislation awarded monetary damages to the survivors among the 120,000 American victims of Japanese ancestry whom the U.S. government forcibly imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II. Indeed, on January 26, 2012, the Japanese government bestowed upon Ujifusa the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, the equivalent of a knighthood, for his pivotal role, as redress strategy chair for the Japanese American Citizen League, both for developing a justification for redress that appealed to liberals and conservatives alike in the 1980s Congress and for his behind-the-scenes, 11th-hour stage management that helped persuade President Ronald Reagan to reverse his public opposition to the redress bill, which he signed into law on August 10, 1988.

In formally accepting his high honor, Ujifusa was silent about his own part in the success of redress, choosing instead to champion the consequential activities of six other Nikkei, including two comparatively unheralded second-generation women (Seattle small business woman Cherry Kinoshita and Philadelphia social worker Grayce Uyehara). Lauding them as people for who redress was total isshou kenmei, full-throttle and non-stop, Ujifusa emphasized that w

American author

Steven Brooks Ujifusa is an American historian and the author of three books on maritime history.

Ujifasa's father Grant was a founding editor of The Almanac of American Politics and prominent participant in the Japanese American redress movement of the 1980s. His mother Amy was a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School of Music.

Ujifusa majored in history as an undergraduate at Harvard University and earned a master's degree in historic preservation and real estate development from the University of Pennsylvania. His first book, A Man and His Ship, won the Literary Prize for Non-Fiction from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal. In 2019, he received the Washington Irving Literary Medal from the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York.

Books

References