A founder of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center in 1969, Ichioka was considered by many to be the nation's foremost authority on Japanese American history.

A man of many dimensions, the San Francisco-born scholar was known not only for his pursuit of social justice and research to recover the "buried past" of the early Japanese settlers, but also for his zest for life: playing basketball, eating, drinking and traveling.

Ichioka mastered Japanese to tackle the original sources of immigrant life, such as diaries, letters and old newspapers. His seminal work, "Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924," won the 1989 U.S. History Book Award of the National Assn. for Asian American Studies.

Ichioka's contributions in compiling the Japanese American Research Project Collection at UCLA has made it the nation's largest and most significant historical archives on Japanese Americans.

His many articles and two of his books, "A Buried Past" and "A Buried Past II," provided the foundation for Japanese American studies.

In the 1960s, when people of Asian ancestry totaled fewer than 1 million, compared to nearly 11.9 million in the 2000 census, the idea of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans joining together for a shared political purpose was unheard of. And the proposition that Asians needed to forge an alliance with blacks, Latinos and Native Americans to work on a common agenda was even stranger.

Ichioka created the first inter-ethnic pan-Asian American political group and coined the term "Asian American" to frame a new self-defining political lexicon. Before that, people of Asian ancestry were generally called Oriental or Asiatic.

His role in creating the academic discipline was a logical outgrowth of his commitment to teach histories that weren't part of the mainstream curriculum.

More than 120 years after the first Japanese immigrants came, Ichioka stands out as the researcher who documented and analyzed the Japanese American experience from the immigrants' perspective. He gathered his materials over many years by talking families into turning over from their garages and attics dusty trunks and boxes left by their ancestors.

Ichioka's firsthand experience with racism influenced his outlook on social justice. His family was interned during World War II. He also lived among blacks in Berkeley, and picked fruit alongside Mexicans in the Central Valley.

After undergraduate studies at UCLA, he earned a master's degree at UC Berkeley and did graduate work at Columbia, but decided not to pursue a doctorate because he thought it was a "waste of time."

For 33 years, Ichioka was senior researcher at the Asian American Studies Center and an adjunct professor in the history department.

In a modern-day "Alien Land Law" dispute in which the San Francisco YWCA claimed sole title to a historic building erected in the 1920s in the city's Japantown, Ichioka uncovered a crucial 80-year-old diary proving that the property was actually held in trust by the YWCA for the benefit of the Japanese American community.

His research showed that the San Francisco YWCA merely held "paper title" to circumvent laws barring Asian immigrants from owning real estate, Tamaki said.