Paul Takao Takagi

“For all of Paul’s apparent dignity and reserve, he was one… of two faculty members of the School of Criminology who were so threatening that it brought about the elimination of that school by then Gov. Ronald Reagan. …First, they tried to fire Professor Takagi; when that failed, they closed the school. Now, you know that he had to have done something really impressive to warrant that reaction.”

Congressman Ron Dellums, Congressional Record, March 14, 1989, p. 4126-7.

Paul Takao Takagi was born May 3, 1923, in a rural area near Sacramento, the third of four children.

The influential sociologist C. Wright Mills once observed “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” He defined the “sociological imagination” as the ability to grasp the relationship between personal troubles and social forces and societal transformations.  Paul Takao Takagi’s social imagination informed his teaching, research, and social justice activism, inspiring those around him to better understand the human costs of racial inequality.

Takagi knew discrimination and hardship from an early age. His Japanese-born parents were legally unable to gain U.S. citizenship and could not own their farm (registering it instead in their children’s names); his older brother drowned at three years old and his younger sister lost her hearing and ability to develop spoken language at the age of two. In March 1942, the Takagi family were relocated to Manzanar, an incarceration camp for Japanese and Japanese American citizens during World War II (WW II). Takagi soon became an orderly in the camp hospital, but resigned in December 1942, after a protestor died of gunshot wounds while attended to only by Takagi, then still a novice and lacking appropriate medical supplies and equipment.

Takagi came to the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate after the war, completing his degree in 1949. In 1952, he was hired as a deputy probation officer in Alameda County, and advanced through a number of roles in the criminal justice system, ultimately becoming a researcher for the State of California. While employed by the State, Takagi became particularly interested in the contradictory demands on parole officers and institutional status hierarchies. Influenced by cutting edge organizational behavior theories, he conducted in-depth interviews with parole officers, collected survey data, engaged in document analysis, and reflected on his own participation in these settings to understand how officers resolved tensions and incompatibilities in their work. This innovative approach remained a key feature of his scholarship: his theoretically and methodologically rigorous research was applied to questions of contemporary relevance to criminology and social justice. This work became the basis for his Ph.D. dissertation in sociology, which he obtained from the Sociology Department at Stanford University in 1967.

Returning to UC Berkeley as a professor in the School of Criminology in 1965, Takagi was tenured in 1968. He also served as an associate dean. During the 1970s, faculty and students at the school became increasingly committed to criminal justice reform, and forged significant alliances with researchers at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, housed in the School of Law. As one of the school’s most progressive faculty members, Takagi increasingly focused his scholarship on police violence experienced by marginalized communities, whether Asian, African American or Chicano. He and his colleagues were among the first in the field of criminology to highlight structural racism; his work reflected empathy for the disenfranchised and featured sophisticated theory and rigorous argument to make its point. He was also a popular teacher whose perspective held substantial allure for the growing number of students majoring in criminology. In fall 1972, Takagi co-taught an introductory course in criminology that attracted over 600 students the first time it was offered—a number that far exceeded the size of most classes offered by the school.

Takagi also co-taught the first course in Asian American studies offered at UC Berkeley: Asian Studies 100X, “The Evolution of the Asian American.” Offered in January 1969, during the one of the longest strikes by faculty and students at a U.S. academic institution (the Third World Liberation Front Strike), a sympathetic Takagi arranged for the class to meet off campus. The strike resulted in the establishment at UC Berkeley of the nation’s first ethnic studies department.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Takagi mentored many leading civil rights activists, including Congressman Ron Dellums and Black Panther Richard Aoki. He was also concerned with the long-term repercussions of incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WW II. In 1976, Takagi and his family monitored the trial of Wendy Yoshimura, a Japanese American artist accused of participation in a revolutionary army operating in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1970s. Takagi developed public opinion surveys that not only aided Yoshimura’s case, but also laid the groundwork for a formal apology and reparations to all Japanese and Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated by the U.S. government during WWII.  In 2008, Takagi received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies that acknowledged him as “a stalwart scholar and courageous advocate for Asian American communities.”

In 1976, the School of Criminology was closed and Takagi was transferred to the Graduate School of Education. He continued to edit and publish in Social Justice (an academic journal which he co-founded), and devoted substantial energy and attention to training and advocacy, traveling throughout the country to address violence within the police force. Takagi also participated in teacher education programs, focusing particularly on work with students from marginalized racial and ethnic groups.

In 2007, Takagi was the inaugural recipient of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s Gerhard Mueller Award. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1989.

Throughout his academic career, Takagi published thoughtful, important work. In 1967, he coauthored two studies on “Operation Fair Chance” and teacher education with the dean of the School of Criminology, Joseph Lohman. Other publications, also frequently coauthored, included “On Conservative Attitudes,” “The Myth of ‘Assimilation in American Life’,” “Teaching Radical Criminology,” “Code 984: Death by Police Intervention” (revised as “A Garrison State in a Democratic Society”), “Behind the Gilded Ghetto: An Analysis of Race, Class and Crime in Chinatown,” “Death by Police Intervention.” Most were published in the journal Crime and Social Justice (now Social Justice). He also coedited Punishment and Penal Discipline: Essays on the Prison and the Prisoners' Movement (1980), which remained a central text in the field for many years.

Many of the issues Takagi addressed are again the center of heated political discourse today, and contemporary scholarship builds on his pioneering scholarship and activism. Throughout his career, Takagi emphasized the importance of not only studying the problems that beset marginalized communities but also of discerning policy alternatives to address and ameliorate persistent forms of discrimination and inequality.  His teaching and research illustrate his productive sociological imagination and his deep commitment to social justice.

He died of natural causes on September 13, 2015, in Oakland, Calif., at the age of 92. Takagi’s wife Mary Anna passed away in 1986. He is survived by his two children Tani Hideyo Takagi (1953) and Dana Yasu Takagi (1954), and two grandchildren Robin and Miye D’Oench; Dana Takagi followed in her father’s academic footsteps to become a professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

Dana Buntrock
Susan Holloway
Michael Omi
2019