A California Love Story--Professional and Personal

Lee W. Formwalt

More recently, I learned about how collaborative their efforts have been on behalf of history. They have coauthored articles and books on Japanese American history and served on numerous civic and professional advisory boards. When Nadine codirected a special seminar in summer 2003 to upgrade the research skills of community college faculty (funded by the Ford Foundation) at the Library of Congress, Don, her “closest professional colleague,” was right there at her side.

In addition to this shared passion for history, Nadine and Don share a heritage and a curiosity about their families’ past that resulted in their meeting for the first time a half a world away in Japan in 1965. Don explains, “We are both fourth generation Americans of Japanese ancestry&emdash;she from Hawaii and me from the barrios in East Los Angeles . We met as graduate students in Japan in 1965, searching for our roots, on Ford Foundation Overseas Fellowships. During the course of the year, I learned that she had a tumor in her breast, and that caused me to propose to her on our way home, on a Soviet freighter from Yokohama to Nakhodka&emdash;a port in Siberia&emdash;and then across the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian Railroad.” The following year after their return to the U.S. , they married in Los Angeles .

Nadine Iku Ishitani was born in Honolulu , Hawaii, in March 1941, nine months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. “I am the first of four daughters to graduate from college (University of Hawaii, 1963) from a hard-working family whose father worked in a small dry goods store and a mother who was a seamstress; neither of them finished high school because they had to work to support families. My parents both believed in the value of education and were convinced that it was one way for minority women to become self-sufficient. I spent my summers on the night shift of a pineapple factory assembly line&emdash;hand trimming&emdash;to pay for my education. That grubby and exhausting job did more than simply pay for books and tuition. It served as a reality check that alerted me to the omissions and distortions that made American history as it was then taught irrelevant to me in Hawaii.”

“With few exceptions,” Nadine observed, “at all levels of instruction, history courses and textbooks perpetuated blatantly chauvinistic, sexist, and racist assumptions about every facet of public and private life in America. U.S. history focused primarily on areas east of the Mississippi River, and world history covered mostly northwestern Europe. There was no mention of trans-Pacific immigrants to America, nor were Asian civilizations included. Indeed, when I was growing up, histories were written and taught to exclude rather than include those groups. I realized that the founding fathers/mothers did not look like me. And so, like Alex Haley, I was forced to search for my own roots as an American of Japanese ancestry. Upon completion of a master’s degree in Japanese studies from the University of Michigan, I received a scholarship to study in Japan.” There she met Don.

Donald Teruo Hata was born in East Los Angeles two years before Nadine. At the age of three, this California native and U.S. citizen was rounded up as a political prisoner and hauled off to “the U.S. War Relocation Authority concentration camp for persons of Japanese ancestry (WRA File #312014) at Gila River, Arizona.” From 1942 to 1945, he was officially prisoner #40451C, denied due process and “guilty by reason of race.” His work as a migrant child laborer with other Nikkei (Japanese American) inmates and reservation Indians in rural Arizona, Colorado and Utah, made an indelible imprint on him and changed him for the rest of his life. After the war, he returned to southern California where he was a “full-time student with a variety of full and part-time jobs (K-12 through graduate school)” including working as a “gardener’s assistant (low hedge and lawn edge trimmer), grocery store stock clerk and cashier, and door-to-door cooking ware salesperson.” He went to the University of Southern California, where he majored in history, graduating with a B.A. in 1962 and an M.A. in Asian Studies in 1964.

After returning from Japan with his new fiancée, Don went back to USC where, in 1970, he earned his Ph.D. in modern Japanese history. That year he landed a position in the history department at then ten-year-old California State University, Dominguez Hills, where Nadine had taught the previous year. When Don came to Dominguez Hills, Nadine moved to El Camino College in nearby Torrance. Nadine taught her community college classes at El Camino and entered the Ph.D. program in history at USC where she received her doctorate in 1983. The following year Nadine began her administrative climb with an appointment as Dean of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences. After eight years as dean and a year as acting Vice President for Instruction, Nadine was appointed Vice President of Academic Affairs, the position she held until her retirement last year. Don, too, did his stint in administration in the 1980s as executive assistant to the president at CSU Sacramento and then returned to full-time teaching at CSUDH until his retirement several years ago.

Nadine and Don never limited their activities in promoting “the search for truth based on fact rather than passion or prejudice” to the classroom or the campus. Don’s involvement in politics included service as a city councilman in Gardena, California. Both of them served on the state advisory committee for History Day in California. They have been active in both the AHA and OAH championing the importance of history taught in community colleges and the significant contributions made by community college historians.

As Nadine points out, “More than half of this country’s undergraduate students are enrolled in a community college. This may be the last opportunity for them to take a course which provides historical perspectives which should stand them in good stead for whatever job they undertake. These men and women are the bedrock of our communities; their contributions and successes epitomize what is so special about good teaching at the community college and lower division levels. How many plumbers, construction workers, and health care professionals have you met who love history and read history because of their history teacher?”

I asked Nadine when she looked back over her career what her proudest accomplishment was. “Playing a role,” she replied, “in improving the quality of teaching and learning both at my home institution and through larger organizations by demanding that community college faculty be treated as equal partners by faculty and administrators and professional organizations and by insisting that community college faculty remain current with the research, become involved in professional activities, and conduct scholarly research themselves so that there is no excuse for their being treated like second class citizens.” Aside from her community college advocacy, she served on the California State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the 1970s: “I was particularly proud of our public hearings and published reports on civil rights issues confronting Asian and Pacific Americans. At the same time I was appointed by the governor to the State Historic Resources Commission, where I supported official historic site designations for World War II incarceration camps for Japanese Americans, and pushed for more sites reflecting the multicultural history of California&emdash;including a published survey of minority sites.”

Nadine and Don Hata have a strong affection for OAH and, in fact, have included the organization in their estate plans. As she reflected on her appreciation of the organization, she noted that OAH is “inclusionary”&emdash;“they treated me as an equal; they put me on the Executive Director selection committee. I chaired the community college task force and was given no agenda other than to find out what OAH could do for community college faculty.” She received support from both the executive board and executive office and “the executive leadership turned the temporary task force into a permanent standing committee.” OAH published the pioneering work she edited on the status of community college historians in 1999.

I asked Nadine and Don why they decided to include OAH in their estate planning. Nadine replied that she and Don were both committed to the importance of undergraduate teaching (in 1990, Don won the California State University Trustees’ systemwide Outstanding Professor award) and appreciated OAH’s efforts to promote the highest quality of teaching at all levels. Furthermore, “we both believe in OAH’s commitment to globalizing/internationalizing teaching and research in U.S. history. OAH’s executive directors and elected leadership have been innovative in thinking outside the box, and shown courage and commitment to their convictions: Arnita Jones and Larry Levine established the community college task force and allowed us to determine our own destiny; Lee Formwalt stood up to be counted on the St Louis/Adams Mark controversy; David Montgomery, Linda Kerber and others have also demonstrated courage of convictions in the search of the truth and to do the right thing&emdash;including reaching out and treating two-year college historians as equal partners in improving the quality of the research and teaching of undergraduate history.”

Nadine has experienced a recurrence of her cancer and she wanted to discuss her struggle with the disease “for a number of reasons&emdash;all educational: When I had my mastectomy seven years ago, we both were shocked to learn that women across my campus&emdash;from Ph.D. faculty to secretaries and custodians&emdash;were astounded that I went public about why I was absent for several months. They were afraid of the stigma that continues to pervade the workplace&emdash;fears that cancer might have a negative influence on promotion or retention. I formed an informal support group that, over the past seven years, has cut across the rigid (albeit never publicly acknowledged) hierarchy of the campus community. That group has evolved from a superficial ‘survivor’s’ luncheon to an increasingly serious exchange of grim facts such as my case of metastasized cancer. Faculty have gained the support of off-campus groups that provide free mammograms; others provide information about free wigs and other support services. I am convinced that job-related stress is linked to reduced immunity, and thus the ominous hypothesis that women with multiple sources of stress are targets for cancer. As my hair fell out, we discovered the total disconnect between reality and vanity. Have you seen the thriving commerce in incredibly ugly cancer hats? I followed the lead of one of my courageous faculty who simply tied on a small triangular bandana to shield her sensitive bald head from the sun. Her students were startled at first, but they got a lesson in reality. When I adopted the same posture as Vice President for Academic Affairs, I was inundated by emails and phone calls from women across the campus, thanking me for setting a standard that allowed them to come out of the closet. Health related inequities,” Nadine concluded, “have now superceded gender and racial-ethnic issues in our priorities for future activism.”

Nadine and Don Hata have faced many struggles in their lives and careers. Their example of courage in the face of discrimination, hatred, and even deadly disease is a high standard for us to emulate. Through it all, their love of the past and of each other has really made the difference. 

Lee W. Formwalt is OAH Executive Director.