The newly named seminar series — the Harry ’51 and Joshua ’49 Tsujimoto Perspectives in Global Development Seminar Series — will enable all invited speakers to visit campus to speak on the world’s most urgent challenges. During their time on campus, the global experts will have increased opportunities to connect and collaborate with students and faculty.
The gift honors Harry and Joshua Tsujimoto, whose parents, Roy and Miki, emigrated from Japan to California in the 1910s. In search of the American dream, the family dedicated their lives to farming. Their resilience carried them through the Great Depression until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Amid rising anti-Asian racism across the United States, the Tsujimoto family was forcibly relocated to an internment camp in Arizona. The brothers, then in their teens and early 20s, spent two and a half years in the camp.
Upon their release in 1945, immigration laws in California prohibited the family from returning to their farm. Once again, the family started over. They moved to a small farming community in Elma, New York, thanks to relocation sponsorship from a local minister. Settled in the western New York agricultural region near Buffalo, the family re-committed their lives to farming. Harry and Joshua matriculated to Cornell, where they studied at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).
“With this tribute, the Tsujimoto brothers’ descendants honor Josh and Harry and their grace and resilience in the face of racism and xenophobia,” said Lori Leonard, professor and chair of global development. “They also provide successive generations of Cornell students with exposure to a diversity of viewpoints on global development and the inspiration that comes from interacting with leaders in the field.”
After Cornell, Josh returned to the family farm in Elma. He became a successful farmer, entrepreneur and, eventually, an agricultural missionary, traveling to Bangladesh, Haiti and Ethiopia to teach farming skills through a Christian relief agency. He died in 2013. Harry had a long and distinguished career as a plant scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he and his wife Grace supported numerous initiatives. Harry died in 2012.
The seminar series will honor the legacy of Harry and Josh and the flourishing world they sought to sustain through their research and advocacy. Each semester, lectures from 12 world-leading development scholars and practitioners will share innovative approaches to social, environmental and agricultural development challenges in New York and around the globe.
The generous gift from the Tsujimoto brothers will ensure that the series can continue to attract world-renowned speakers and facilitate their extended interactions with the Cornell community, according to Ed Mabaya, research professor in the Department of Global Development and one of the seminar series organizers.
"This lunchtime seminar is a unique event that gathers faculty, staff, and students in one place to hear perspectives on the most urgent and complex challenges facing humanity and our planet,” said Mabaya. “It is my favorite way to mark the middle of the week with a reminder of that powerful marriage between academia and development practice.”
