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.

Rounding up Issei and Nikkei

The first 48 hours, I think about 3,000 Isseis were picked up. And the first ones were, were I don’t know, uh, Japanese businessmen, Japanese schoolteachers, martial arts teacher—they didn’t pick up all the fishermen then. The next group, every fisherman, 16 or over, were picked up.

And, of course, we see the papers blaring headlines, “Get the Japs Out!” and all that. So, we knew that we were, you know, all the Japanese were gonna go. And, I worked in San Pedro at the Woolworth, Five and Dime. There were hardly any Asians, Blacks or Chicanos that had jobs in San Pedro, and I didn’t know how long they were gonna keep me before they let me go. But, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold on to that Five and Dime job.

And, well, I think, Japanese in other cities, they were all losing jobs—Long Beach, Los Angeles, all the places—and, of course, all of us called up each other, you know, friends saying, “What do you think’s gonna happen to us?” And, it was in the paper already, you know, that California’s wanted every Jap out and so…So, we knew that sooner or later we’re all gonna be sent out of California.

discrimination interpersonal relations 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)