Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (October 17, 1952 – August 8, 2020) was an American anthropologist and historian who focused on the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. He advocated for more precise terminology in describing the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, recommending the usage of the term "incarceration" rather than government euphemisms such as "evacuation" or "relocation".

Early life and education Hirabayashi was born on October 17, 1952, in Mill Valley, California, where he grew up with his parents and younger sister. His father, James A. Hirabayashi, a sociocultural anthropologist at San Francisco State University, and his uncle, Gordon Hirabayashi, who challenged the wartime curfew and exclusion orders in the 1943 Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States, had particularly strong influences on his academic interests. After a short stint as the guitarist of the Muskadine Blues Band, a local rock group in the Bay Area, he went on to earn his bachelor's degree at Sonoma State University (1974) before pursuing graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he completed his master's degree (1976) and PhD (1981) in anthropology.

In 1983, he became a professor in the Ethnic Studies department at San Francisco State University,

In 1991, Hirabayashi moved to the University of Colorado Boulder, holding faculty positions in the Ethnic Studies and Anthropology departments. The book raised questions about race, gender, and power imbalances in academic research and was reviewed in journals including the Journal of Asian American Studies and Isis.

A Principled Stand In 2013, Hirabayashi co-edited A Principled Stand: Gordon Hirabayashi v. the United States, drawing on his uncle Gordon's prison diaries and correspondence. New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan (2002), and Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens (2009). Hirabayashi also initiated the "Nikkei in the Americas" book series with the University Press of Colorado in 2012.