Ronald Takaki was a historian, social activist, prolific writer, beloved teacher, and a key figure in the field of ethnic studies, which he helped establish and develop as a distinct discipline at the University of California, Berkeley.

Born in Hawaii in 1939 to a Japanese immigrant father and a Japanese American mother, Takaki grew up in a multicultural environment with many other ethnic minorities, learning different languages and lifestyles. When Takaki was five, his father died and his mother remarried a Chinese immigrant. While Takaki’s parents did not have much formal education, they valued leaning and enrolled Takaki at a private school. During his senior year of high school, one of Takaki’s teachers greatly influenced him, shaping the trajectory of his professional career. The teacher pushed Takaki to consider epistemological questions like, “How do you know what you know?” (442). Takaki later applied these questions to his scholarly endeavors, as evidenced in A Different Mirror, where he interrogates “how we know what we know” about American history.

At the urging of his high school teacher, Takaki attended the College of Wooster in Ohio. There he experienced culture shock, as most students assumed that he was not American because of his Japanese heritage, a misperception that he frequently experienced during his lifetime.