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  • Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life by Diane C. Fujino
  • Ryan H. Fukumori (bio)
Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life, by Diane C. Fujino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. xxxi + 441 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-81667-787-5.

With her gripping study and oral history of the Japanese American radical Richard Aoki, Diane Fujino has further cemented herself as a premier scholar of the Vietnam War–era Asian American movement for community empowerment and social justice. Following her biographical and anthological treatises on movement luminaries Yuri Kochiyama and Fred Ho, respectively, Samurai among Panthers intersperses Aoki’s own words with Fujino’s analytical commentary and supplementary research. The result is a polyphonic and complex portraiture of a revolutionary icon who, in his own words, “[b]y accident of history … was in the right place at the right time” (163).

Aoki approached Fujino to write his memoirs in 2002, and the testimonials that populate the book are the result of multiple, extensive interview sessions. Fujino edited and rearranged his transcriptions into a chronological account, starting with his childhood internment at the Topaz War Relocation Center during World War II, subsequent upbringing in the Black neighborhoods of West Oakland, and an eight-year stint in the U.S. military. The majority of the narrative spans the 1960s and 1970s upon Aoki’s discharge. Returning to Oakland, he encounters the mostly-white Socialist Workers Party and initiates a circuitous route throughout the Bay Area Left that brings him to his two most prominent positions: a founding [End Page 230] member of the seminal Black Panther Party and a leader of UC Berkeley’s Asian American Political Alliance and Third World Liberation Front, the students of color coalition that orchestrated the 1969 campus strike for ethnic studies. The book ends with Aoki’s shift to a decades-long career as a college administrator, his elder years as an activist icon, and his death by suicide in 2009.

Fujino divides the memoirs across a dozen chapters, and at the end of each she provides her own contextual frameworks for Aoki’s recollections. Many of these mini-essays focus on detailing the organizations, radical theories, and geopolitical phenomena to which Aoki alludes or supplement his thoughts with the author’s research on his family history and interviews with his colleagues. The book’s impressive footnotes reveal the rigor of Fujino’s research beyond the interviews and her intricate knowledge of twentieth-century U.S. radicalism. Moreover, the author interrogates the contradictions and idiosyncrasies that emerge from Aoki’s recollections, such as the Cold War doctrines that “shap[e] his ideas about nation, work, masculinity, and family” (92) and inform his lamentations over his parents’ failed marriage.

However, perhaps the most revelatory contradiction about Aoki emerged after the release of Samurai among Panthers. Four months after the book’s publication, the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed documents alleging that Aoki was an FBI informant from 1961 to 1977. The celebrated revolutionary was purportedly providing information about his peers in the socialist, antiwar, Black Power, and Asian American activist circles. Fujino and Aoki’s acquaintances have denied the allegations and countered their evidentiary claims as an ongoing attempt to defame the Black Panthers: as is well known, the FBI’s counterintelligence initiatives used surveillance and sabotage to severely enervate the Panthers in the 1970s.

It is beyond the scope of this review to reiterate said debate. This reviewer is more concerned that these recent claims might lead readers to invalidate Fujino’s work because of these accusations and, thus, dismiss a provocative and multidimensional study. The book is certainly sympathetic but far from uncritical: Fujino questions Aoki’s potential embellishments and pushes him to talk about subjects—especially his family—about which he was initially hesitant. She details Aoki’s calculated preparation for interviews, his attempts to “control the narrative of his life” (xxiv), his militarist proclivities, his periodic lack of self-reflexivity, and his self-admittedly “compartmentalized” life. He kept his political activity a priority and a secret from his romantic partners, and yet he betrays a latent longing for...

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