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Interviews

Yuri Kochiyama

(1922–2014) Political and civil rights activist.
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Terminal Island / San Pedro

Most Japanese who lived in the Island—Terminal Island—their life was harder. First of all, all the Japanese, and just only Japanese, lived on Terminal Island, and those families actually went out fishing, you know, they didn’t…well, maybe the women worked in the cannery… but the men, actually were fisherman going out. But, our side of San Pedro, our…my uncles and all…they worked in the fish market, which is a little different. And then the fact that we lived among the caucasian people, that, I think, our life was a lot easier, because it was almost the same as white people who are living in San Pedro. And, of course, the whites were also in fishing. It was predominantly Slovonian and Italian, and they were all in fishing, too, like the Japanese.

aquatic sports California canneries fishing food processing plants San Pedro Terminal Island United States

Date: Jun 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)

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