Multidisciplinary Gosei artist Kai Naima Williams has just published a children’s picture book about her famous great-grandmother, Yuri Kochiyama. The book is called The Bridges Yuri Built: How Yuri Kochiyama Marched Across Movements, illustrated by Anastasia Magliore Williams and released by Kaepernick Publishing. Emphasizing themes of compassion and activism, community and resistance, the book is a beautiful and well-focused tribute to her great-grandmother’s life.
In the midst of book tour events and speaking engagements, Williams took time to answer some questions for Discover Nikkei about the writing of the book.
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Discover Nikkei (DN): Your great-grandmother Yuri means a great deal to many people—a figure of crossracial solidarity, an outspoken activist, a Japanese American camp survivor. What has she meant to you, or who was she for you, in your life?
Kai Naima Williams (KW): Yuri is my personal hero and the values that many consider her to be emblematic of—cross-racial solidarity, resistance, radical anti-racism—she symbolizes for me as well. But growing up, I had very little understanding of the scope of her activism or her influence as a public figure. To me, she was just a beloved member of my family, my sweet great-grandma who I looked forward to spending time with once or twice a year when my family would visit Oakland in the summers.
It wasn’t until after she passed away that I began to learn more about her extraordinary personality and life’s work and to appreciate the examples that she set for how to be a person of conscience, in community and in service to others. Writing this book made me feel closer to her in spirit, as I wish we could have been while she was still alive.
She certainly made an indelible impact on the people she knew, even those that she only met once, and the way that others speak about her and how she made them feel cared for, invited, remembered and valued strikes me as a deeply meaningful legacy. I very much wish to emulate those qualities that allowed her to connect with so many people. In that way, she’s a guide for me.
DN: You have published two poetry chapbooks. Like poetry, children’s picture books require a lot to be said in very few words. Did that make it easier to write the picture book? How did you decide to narrow down on which moments to choose from in Yuri’s life?
KW: The parameters of writing for children, particularly the word & page limits proved the biggest challenge as I approached this completely new (to me) form of writing. I wish I could say that being a poet helped in this respect, but the truth is that I struggle with concision across every medium—even my poems are pretty long!
I do believe my poet brain allowed me to apply some skills to the process, however. The musicality of poetry; the emphasis on sound, meter, rhythm, rhyme—all of that is helpful in writing for kids because the words need to appeal in a visceral way and capture their attention. With picture books, you have to imagine that many kids will have this book read aloud to them instead of taking it in themselves, so what they hear is as important as what they see.
When narrowing down which moments from Yuri’s life to highlight in the book, I was very cognizant of the limited space. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to focus not only on her accomplishments or even who she was an activist, but more so on how she became that person—both the unique circumstances that led her to spaces where she was radicalized, and also the inherent qualities she possessed even from childhood that made her predisposed to act in service to others and that nurtured her passion for justice long before any type of education or experience in the movements.
I wanted each key turning point in the book to be a moment when she realized that community, unity, togetherness are the antidotes to injustice and division, for example: when she starts mobilizing children in the prison camps to write letters to the Nisei soldiers, or when she opens her home to people in need of shelter, or when she connects with Malcolm X – so even though I had to omit some really dope anecdotes, I thought it was crucial to center the story around her entry into movements and the journey of becoming, instead of writing a more traditional biography that extended across her entire life.
DN: In your poem “Radical ImagiNation,” you write about your ancestors as beings that talk to you. You write that they say, “we suffered different beneath the same rule/but our resistance rubbed shoulders/and the shared muscle is you—.” Did you feel that conversation as you were working on this book? How so?
KW: Thanks for this question, yes I did! That line in particular references the different experiences of racist imprisonment that members of my family faced on both sides—my Black ancestors enslaved in the South, my Japanese American relatives incarcerated in the WWII prison camps, even my Jewish family members who immigrated to the U.S. in order to escape the threat of concentration camps in Nazi occupied Poland.
Part of what allowed Yuri to work across and navigate so fluidly between movements was her understanding that, despite differences, people of all racial backgrounds and identities were harmed by the same forces of racism, imperialism and white supremacy. That didn’t mean that every community shared the same experiences or were discriminated against in equal measure and equal ways, but rather that had a common set of oppressors that everyone needed to resist in order to secure anyone’s liberation—we “suffer different beneath the same rule.”
And I suppose I think of myself as the “shared muscle” developed through my ancestors’ resistance because I am quite literally a product of their fight for justice, I exist as I am because of those movements. My paternal grandparents met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, my maternal grandparents were acquainted with the Kochiyamas through Asian American art and activist movements in New York, which is how my parents met as kids. I come from a long lineage of freedom fighters across different backgrounds and cultures and I believe that has deeply informed who I am and what I do.
DN: Where did the metaphor of the bridge come from? (Was it something you thought of, or something you found in your research about your great-grandmother, or family stories?)
KW: The bridge metaphor came from a quote of Yuri’s that reads “The legacy I would like to leave is that people try to build bridges, not walls.” I just thought that was the best symbol, and clearest image, to deliver the foremost themes of the book (and to some extent, Yuri’s life), which are connection and togetherness. By definition, bridges are supportive structures that connect one point to another. I thought that was the perfect illustration of Yuri’s whole praxis and her way of being, she constantly linked people and causes together.
I also liked the ways that literal bridges had ties to the story, like how some of the most iconic protest actions from the Civil Rights Movements saw protestors march across bridges. And I knew my illustrator Anastasia Magliore Williams would beautifully represent this on the page. It took a while to decide on titling the book after the metaphor, but when it came down to that point, I really felt like it was an exact distillation of the message in Yuri’s story I was hoping to highlight.
DN: How and why do you think this book about her is needed right now, and by whom? Who are your especially-hoped-for readers?
KW: We’re living through a period when Black studies, the education on the histories of non-white Americans in general and especially the histories of protest movements and resistance toward the U.S. government are under attack. This is a campaign designed to erase the knowledge of how people resisted in the past in order to disempower dissent in the present. Without that knowledge, without blueprints, maps, guidelines and stories from those who struggled and won before us, how can we develop strategies for resistance today?
I highly recommend that everyone read Our History Has Always Been Contraband, a brilliant book from Kaepernick Publishing that expounds on the war on black Studies and Critical Race Theory, as well as the long fight to implement this history across decades, even centuries, of American history.
I think it’s absolutely imperative to tell children the truth, to nurture their social consciousness, to help them develop their own values and beliefs, to honor their capacities to handle information about the world they will inherit. And I think Yuri’s story is a fantastic example of how anyone, at any age, can transform their knowledge and participate in social change. So I would say my hope is that this book finds its way to young readers who might take away new inspiration or ideas for how to live as Yuri did, and get involved in the causes and communities they care about.
© 2025 Tamiko Nimura
