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

Yuri Kochiyama

(1922–2014) Political and civil rights activist.

Didn't have rights that whites had

We didn’t have all the rights that caucasians had, and it was because of racism. And, of course, when December 7th happened, it was also hysteria, and Americans also looked at December 7th from a very economic point of view. I mean, Japan had been working the land. I mean, she was given only the worst kind of desert land and she made it fertile. And so, other farmers—caucasians—it would be to their advantage if the Japanese were thrown out, and they could work the land. Uh so, I think on what are the civil rights we lost: I think, well, we never had all the civil rights. Uh, and I think, that’s how come, too, that there came to be a group called the “No No Boys.” Because, they felt it was more important to fight for civil rights, than to fight the enemy. I think a lot of Japanese felt they weren’t treated like a real American.

civil rights discrimination imprisonment incarceration interpersonal relations no-no boys racism 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)