Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/277/

Father as prisoner of war in hospital

My mother made calls to see if she could visit her husband, and then she started visiting him each day. And since he was getting weaker and weaker, she asked the authorities if he could be taken to a hospital, and when he feels better, put him back into prison. And so, they did. But, the hospital was the only hospital there, San Pedro Hospital—all the injured merchant marines on Wake Island were being sent there, and they were all in one big room, and they were all injured, you know. And my father was in the same room and only around his bed there was a sheet, and it said, Prisoner of War. And so, when my mother went to visit him and saw that, she felt that he would be beaten up by all the, other, the Americans who were there as injured Americans. And so then, she kept begging the hospital to give him a room of his own—that he would never make it out alive in that big room with the Americans.

And then, we kids got to see my father once, it was January 13th. My twin brother came back, he was going to Berkeley, and he immediately, it seems so strange, he immediately got into the Army. And, gee, we thought, gee, that’s strange that here my father, they don't, you know, they think he's a spy and they have him in prison, and my brother they take him into the U.S. Army. Well, he was so proud when he got his uniform, that the day we visited my father was January 13th. When my father saw my brother in a uniform, he starts shaking. He thought it was someone else coming again to interrogate him. And, my brother said, Oh, I'm your son. You know, and my father never believed it. And so, when we could see how frightened he was, we said, Look, let’s just leave, 'cause pop just looks too scared.


discrimination interpersonal relations racism United States Army World War II

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)

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