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.

Camp as a positive thing

Everything in camp could be a positive thing. Every person you meet, you know, that you never met before or you hear what town they came from, or if they were farmers or fisherman or what, you know. I mean, to me I didn’t think of that experience as being such a negative thing. I thought, everybody goes through changes through life—after all, look at what our parents, they left their home country and came here. And here, we just went from our hometown to this camp that I didn’t think… and I had told all the Sunday school kids, “Your life hasn’t even begun yet. You don’t even know what you’re gonna go through five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now…” And so, I mean, I thought it’s good to prepare them that this isn’t the worst thing that could happen. And then, of course, afterward when I learned about slavery and the way blacks were treated, I thought to myself, “My God! I mean, how can we complain where others have been treated so much worse…”

discrimination imprisonment incarceration interpersonal relations racism World War II World War II camps

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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