[5] The following year, Ichioka enrolled in Columbia University's graduate program studying Chinese history, where he met Gee.

[5] However, he quickly dropped out due to his dissatisfaction with academia and instead became a youth parole worker at a social service agency in New York.

[6] He hypothesized that Asian American advocacy lacked efficacy due to the absence of a common identity or "banner" that the group could band together behind.

[6] The AAPA inspired the formation of similar pan-Asian organizations across the country, starting from the West Coast and eventually spreading to the east.

[5] Through his work, Ichioka disrupted the stereotype that Asians were politically "docile" by documenting the strikes and demonstrations organized by Asian-Americans against exploitative employers and discriminatory laws.

[8] At his death, Ichioka left behind a nearly-completed manuscript of his second book, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History, which was later edited and posthumously published by Eiichiro Azuma and Gordon Chang.

[8] To this day, many Asian Studies scholars rely on his work on these archives due to a lack of Japanese language proficiency.

[4] Ichioka later served as a senior research associate at the AASC and worked as an adjunct professor of history at UCLA up until his death.