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Interviews

Yuri Kochiyama

(1922–2014) Political and civil rights activist.
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Visit to assembly centers by E. Stanley Jones

The thing I remember the most in assembly center was a guy—he was a very famous minister, E. Stanley Jones. He was America’s top evangelist, And he said something that stayed with me the rest of my life, I think. And, in fact, I would tell my Sunday school kids this.

He said, “It’s not so important what happens to you as what you do after it happens.” And when he came there this week, he knew that all of us had just lost our homes, our jobs. We were ousted from our home town, and that we were all really, like, feeling very bad. And so, he tried to, I guess, lift us up to say that “It isn’t so important what happens to you, but what you do after it happened.” And I really thought it made sense that we gotta, we gotta make the camp as nice as a camp for everybody. And we should all help each other out, and stuff.

imprisonment incarceration temporary detention centers World War II World War II camps

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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