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

(1922–2014) Political and civil rights activist.

Mr. Finch, godfather of the 442nd

Mr. Finch? He was called the ‘Godfather of the 442.’ Well, he said, “Look, would you go to Minnesota and see if the Japanese there need anything.” This Mr. Finch was certainly a godfather.

He got so attached to the Japanese American soldiers, he did everything. Anything the boys wanted that they couldn’t get, he would go to, I don’t know where, some other state, like Japanese from Hawaii like abalone. And, I don’t know where you get abalone, but he would get abalone for them. He would get Japanese food and bring it back to Mississippi. And every time a Japanese soldier, whether, you know, in training or what, was injured, he would go visit them at whatever hospital they were sent to. He would…anything the Japanese soldiers needed or even if the parents needed… “Is there anything your mother or father need? How old are they?” and stuff like that. Mr. Finch was an unusual person, and it seems like, in this whole world…always someone like that will show up.

100th Infantry Battalion 442nd Regimental Combat Team Earl M. Finch 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)