Interviews

1. Didn't have rights that whites had

2. Californians didn't know about evacuation

3. Terminal Island / San Pedro

4. The day Pearl Harbor was bombed

5. Father as prisoner of war in hospital

6. Patriotism versus loyalty

7. Conditions of assembly centers

8. Idealism before war, being red, white and blue

9. Visit to assembly centers by E. Stanley Jones

10. Postcards to Nisei soldiers

11. Hiding what happened in camp

12. Issei are hard-working

13. Arrest of father

14. Camp as a positive thing

15. Mr. Finch, godfather of the 442nd

16. Meeting Malcolm X

17. Joining the movement

18. Rounding up Issei and Nikkei

Kochiyama,Yuri

(1922–2014) Political and civil rights activist.

Idealism before war, being red, white and blue

I was so ‘Red, White and Blue,’ so small-town gal, you know, and just really a thorough American, I mean, I’ve changed almost all the way around. But, then, I mean here, you know, teaching Sunday school and this whole thing about being a proud American, and I guess I was. Now, I’m certainly not, I mean. But, then, I mean, I just thought America was such a wonderful country that there could not be any country where people could be so free and no racism... I didn’t realize how bad racism was because in the school world, it’s so different from the working world, you know. And everybody was so nice, I mean, I loved, you know, living there with all the Italians and Slavonians and there were Scots and French and German...everybody. And so, it seemed like a perfect place to grow up.

Date: June 16, 2003

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Karen Ishizuka, Akira Boch

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Yuri Kochiyama (nee Mary Nakahara) was born in the southern California community of San Pedro in 1922. She was “provincial, religious, and apolitical” until Japan’s December 7, 1941, bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawai`i led to the government’s mass incarceration of virtually all Japanese Americans. Her wartime detainment in two concentration camps in the segregated American South prompted her to see the parallels between the treatment of the Nikkei and African Americans.

After the war she married Bill Kochiyama, a veteran of a segregated Japanese American battalion, and lived in New York City. In 1960, the Kochiyamas moved their family into low-cost housing in the African American district of Harlem. Her political involvement there changed her life, especially after her 1963 meeting with Black Nationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, who was assassinated two years later. She has since had a long history of activism: for black liberation and Japanese American redress and against the Vietnam War, imperialism everywhere, and the imprisonment of people for combating injustice.

She passed away on June 1, 2014, at age 93. 　(June 2014)