Abstract
Yuri Kochiyama is a civil right activist who was born in 1921 in San Pedro, in California. He lived and stayed in San Pedro where she was involved with several activities such as sport and article writing. Her father was arrested and put in prison as a war prisoner. The father died a day after leaving prison due to sickness. She was married by Bill Kochiyama who was a Nisei Soldier, and they had six children. Yuri was engaged in many civil right movements some fighting for the rights of Japanese as well as the rights for the black people in the United States. Yuri was mainly focused on the liberation of political prisoners. This paper seeks to describe in details the life of Yuri Kochiyama as an activist.
Yuri Kochiyama was born in 1921 in San Pedro, in California. Yuri grew in a neighborhood predominated by the white with a lifestyle that involved Sunday school and sports. Her father and mother were both Japanese immigrants who had moved to the United States looking for better economic opportunities. Yuri went to the San Pedro High School where she was involved with many activities like writing articles for a local newspaper. She was much involved with activities being done in her community and volunteered to be a member of the Girl Scouts (Seevak, 2004).
Her life took a different turn when the Japanese Empire decided to bomb the Pearl Harbor. It was soon after the bombing that her father, Seiichi Nakahara, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a suspect who was a threat to the national security. Few days later, despite his failing body conditions, he was taken to the Terminal Island Federal Prison. In the federal prison, her father was denied medical care. The family pleaded for him and was taken to the San Pedro Hospital where he was kept in a room for merchant marines and his bed was marked prisoner of war. Much pleading saw him taken to his own room. He was later released on January 20th, 1942 when he was very sick. Her father could not speak and he died the next days after being released.
One month after the death of her father, President Roosevelt gave an Executive Order 9066 that enabled the military to deny any citizen relocation from any area in the west coast. The areas affected stretched from Washington to Arizona. The military was also empowered to do anything that they felt was best for the goodness of the area. Although there had been no citizen of Japanese descent had been found to be guilty of disloyalty by April that year, all 2nd Generation Japanese Americans were considered aliens and were moved from the area and taken into assembly centers. The exercise saw more than 120, 000 Japanese being relocated. The operation was smoothly conducted due to the cooperation that was offered by the Japanese.
The operation caused Yuri, her brother and their mother to leave their home and be taken into a horse stable that is in Southern California. They stayed here for several months before they were taken to Jerome, Arkansas, which is a Japanese internment camp where they stayed for another three years. It is here that she met Bill Kochiyama who was a Nisei Soldier, and he became her future husband. When Kochiyama was away at war, Yuri used to write him many letters to the point where he was embarrassed that he received so many letters while his colleagues received none. Kochiyama requested Yuri to write letters to the other soldiers as well, and this request enabled Yuri to come up with the Crusaders. This was a group of young people who used to write letters of support for those Nisei soldiers who were fighting World War II in the U.S. army. This involvement in community work enabled Yuri to have jumpstart to her later political involvement.
Yuri is a human right activist and has been involved in various issues ranging from nuclear disarmament, rights for international political prisoner, as well as the redress for World War II impoundment by the Japanese (Goodman & González, 2006). In 1940s, Yuri noted several similarities between the way Japanese were being treated in the camps and the way minor groups such as the blacks were being treated in the US by then. She decided to fight for the rights of these groups by being an enthusiastic activist, as well as supporting a number of civil right activists.
In 1945, Yuri Kochiyama left Jerome, Arkansas and moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi where she made collaboration with the United Services Organization (USO). USO was an exclusively established organization for the Japanese American soldiers. In 1948, she moved to New York for a reunion with Bill after which they got married in February of the same year. The two stayed in the Amsterdam Housing Projects that stretched from 62nd to 65th street. They stayed here for another 12 years and had 6 children and in 1960, they left for the Manhattanville Housing Projects located in Harlem.
The first thing that Bill and Yuri did in order to dig into a bustle of activity they involved themselves with was to become members of the Harlem Parents Committee. By then, most street intersections did not have traffic signals and this caused many accidents where children were hit by cars. This caused the committee leader to take action and organize for a sit-in along the streets. The parents also joined in, and they had the children stand on the affected streets demanding for more streetlights to be installed in the streets. Soon after, the city responded to their demand and more streetlights were added. The committee continued to fight for improvement on other issues such as sanitation and standards of living within the city. Through collaboration with other groups, the committee shut down all public schools in the city as they fought for reforms to improve education for children who were black (Fujino, 2005).
As Yuri engaged in the black movement, she found it was necessary to first get a better understanding of the history and culture of the African American. To enable her achieve this, together with her husband and their three eldest children the Harlem Freedom School. The school taught Black children on how to have pride in their heritage in spite of the oppression that they faced. This involvement marked the first step for Yuri to work across the borders outside her local community and ethnic group. She, however, never neglected nor forgot her own ethnicity. Since her ethnic group also faced the same issues, Yuri worked hard in order to bring together a common mission to fight for human rights.
The main activity that Yuri Kochiyama has been involved is the liberation of political prisoners. Yuri took a greater part of 1970s to help groups like the Young Lords, and the Black Panthers whose members were arrested and others attacked almost daily. During this time, there were very few organized funds that were set for legal defense or lawyers. This led to the formation of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners where Yuri worked for a number of years. She went ahead and worked in all means possible in order to raise awareness on these issues as well as in freeing the prisoners who were taken to prison unjustly.
Some of the cases, where Yuri campaigned include the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal who was a former member of Black Panther and journalist based in Philadelphia. Mumia was well known for his role in exposing the brutality by the police to minority through radio journalism. In 1982, Mumia was accused and unfairly tried for the murder of Daniel Faulkner who was a police officer. The other case was is that of prisoner David Wong who is convicted of second degree murder. Although he had a strong evidence for his innocence, he was repeatedly denied a new trial (Seevak, 2004).
While, in Harlem, in the 1960’s, Yuri found it hard to be involved with the activities of the Civil Rights Movement since she was several links and connections between the struggles those people went through and her own struggles. The Civil Rights Movement had two trends following each other in popularity and influence. Initially, groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the NAACP spearheaded the starting of the Civil Rights Movement, where they were fighting against aggregation issues in America through courtrooms, protests and marches. Some of the notable successes by the movement include during the time include a case between brown and Board of education and involved segregation of in public schools, which was unconstitutional. Despite the victories, the process was very slow and most people lost their faith in pushing for equality within the system.
The nationalism movement arose in mid 1960s with Malcolm X being one of the leaders who were most influential. The movement was based on the idea that one of solutions for racism experienced in America was the formation of nations and government by blacks, and completely separate themselves from the whites. As he matured politically, Malcolm dropped the separatist belief after realizing that the belief alienated people belonging to other colors who were fighting for the same dream. Although Malcolm still had a dream of having the blacks form their own governments, his main focus was on improving the conditions of the blacks who were in America (Seevak, 2004).
Yuri was involved with the two trends, which became the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. The Civil Right Movement was led by King while the Power Movement was led by Malcolm X. The philosophy of Malcolm changed the perspective of Yuri on the struggle for civil rights causing her to become a fervent champion for Black Nationalism. Yuri incredibly contributed to the two movements in protest events. She also showed support for the organizations formed by the blacks including the Black Panthers. She also assisted in the creation of a link to other cultures that faced the same challenges as the blacks. Some of these movements include the Puerto Rican Movement and she hoped to unite all the minorities who faced the same or similar struggle (Seevak, 2004).
The idea by most people has been that the movements for civil rights that were formed between mid and late 1900s were solely a struggle by the blacks. However, there were several civil rights movements during this period that were not solely a struggle by the blacks. Several civil rights movements where set up to represent other cultures and this caused Yuri to be involved in the struggle for Ethnic Studies. Yuri was caught by the boiling wheels of Movement, and this made her one of the earliest grassroots activists since she was engaged in various movements through her participation in different multicultural organizations (Seevak, 2004).
Yuri was later an active supporter and a member of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), which was formed in 1968. She was also a member of the OAAU or Organization of Afro-American Unity which was led by Malcolm X and was formed in 1964 in order to enhance awareness of black culture, independence, as well as unity among the blacks. The movement also aimed to reduce injustice and racism in the United States (Swirski, 2007).
In 1965, soon after the formation of this movement, Malcolm X was assassinated causing the movement to fail afterwards. At the same period of time, another movement called Puerto Rican Movement was started with an intention to liberate the Puerto Ricans from the colonization by the United States. Since there was a heated atmosphere of the movements for the blacks, very few people noted the desire independence by the Puerto Rican (Wang, 2013).
Yuri was, however, much aware of the movement, and she noted how many countries worldwide tried to resist imperialism. This caused her to join their course by joining the Young Lords Party. The party was a gang formed by the Puerto Rican gang in Chicago and was turned to a political action, as well as community work. The Japanese Redress and Reparations groups aimed at getting the government address the wrongs that were done to the Japanese citizens through internment. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians organized for a public hearing in 1981 in Washington to address the problem where one of the speakers was Yuri husband. More than 750 interned Japanese explained to the committee the things that they went through during the war. The congress later passed the act on Civil Liberty of 1988 that granted any still living internees $20,000 together with a note of apology that was signed by the president (Seevak, 2004). In 2005, she was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee through the project called “1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005”.
Reference List
Fujino, D. C. (2005). Heartbeat of struggle: The revolutionary life of Yuri Kochiyama. Menneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goodman, A., & González, J. (2006). Civil Rights Activist Yuri Kochiyama Remembers the Day of Malcolm X’s Assassination to Her Internment in a WWII Japanese-American Detention Camp. Retrieved November 30, 2013, from http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/21/civil_rights_activist_yuri_kochiyama_remembers
Seevak, S. (2004). Yuri Kochiyama. Retrieved November 30, 2013, from http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2004/sites/kochiyama/japaneserep.html
Swirski, P. (2007). All Roads Lead to the American City. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Wang, H. L. (2013). Not Just A 'Black Thing': An Asian-American's Bond With Malcolm X. Retrieved November 30, 2013, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/08/19/209258986/the-japanese-american-internee-who-met-malcolm-x
