Pod Insights Throughline Yuri Kochiyamas’s lifetime of activism About this episode Civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama lived a life dedicated to social justice for people of all backgrounds. Not only a pillar of the Asian-American movement, she also fought for Black liberation and the rights of political prisoners. Today on the show, how Yuri Kochiyama’s 50 years of activism was informed and practiced.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:26 Rund Abdelfatah? This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.
0:49 Speaker 02 The date was February 21st. It was a Sunday.
0:55 Rund Abdelfatah? This is the voice of Yuri Kochiyama in an archive recording about the fateful day in 1965 when civil rights activist Malcolm X was assassinated.
1:05 Speaker 03 What's up, Malcolm? How do you feel? Who do we want to hear? Are we gonna bring him on?
1:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Yuri was there when there was a distraction in the audience.
1:17 Speaker 04 And just then, the gunfire went off, and his hand was up. I remember this. I turned around quickly, and the next thing I saw was Malcolm falling back in a dead state.
1:26 Rund Abdelfatah? Yuri ran up to Malcolm X.
1:28 Speaker 02 And picked up his head and just put it on my lap.
1:32 Rund Abdelfatah? At that moment, someone snapped a photo. Yuri is dressed in all black, kneeling on the ground, her back hunched over Malcolm, her hands holding up his head, and her eyes pointed down at his face. And he's in her arms, eyes closed, wounds exposed, white shirt stained with blood.
1:56 Rund Abdelfatah? This photo is an enduring image of Yuri Kuchiyama. But why was she there? And how did she become an active member of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and beyond? Today on the show, the story of Yuri Kuchiyama and how her experience of Japanese internment during World War II catapulted her into a lifelong fight for social justice and a more just vision of America. That's coming up after a quick break.
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3:45 Speaker 04 December 7th, 1941.
3:49 Speaker 02 December 7th is a date.
3:52 Speaker 04 A date which will live.
3:53 Speaker 02 We won't forget.
3:54 Speaker 04 In infamy.
3:58 Rund Abdelfatah? On December 7, 1941, at 7:55 a.m., Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
4:05 Speaker 07 And within hours, Yuri's family, the Nakaharas, got a knock on their door.
4:11 Speaker 02 Three guys walked in. I didn't know what they were till later, but it was FBI. They asked if Mr. Nakahara lived there. I said, "Oh, yeah, but he just came home in the hospital, and he's sleeping in the back."
4:28 Speaker 06 He had had ulcer surgery.
4:31 Speaker 02 They didn't say anything. They just went in the house, went to the back, woke up my father and said, "Put on your bathtub and slippers, I guess." And they took him away, just like that.
4:47 Speaker 06 Yuri's father is detained.
4:51 Speaker 06 And this happened to 2,000 or 3,000 Japanese-American immigrant men in particular, who were picked up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
5:02 Speaker 02 We were calling each other up, saying, "Did anyone come to your house yet?" Some of the people said, "Yes," some said, "No," but they all had heard over the radios that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. So we said, "Oh, my God, we're all going to be in trouble."
5:24 Speaker 07 Five weeks went by before Yuri was allowed to visit her father. A week later, he was released. But just one day after returning home, he died, perhaps from being moved so soon after his surgery.
5:40 Speaker 03 When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our west coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestors. Military authorities therefore determined that all of them would have to move.
5:56 Speaker 07 Before long, Yuri, who was 20 years old at this point, along with her family and many other Japanese people, were forced to leave their homes, their fates unknown.
6:07 Speaker 02 There were some people on the street who had signs saying...
6:14 Speaker 02 We're sorry to see you go. You know, you Japanese go. But there were also people who had signs to say, "Get out, Japs." The hysteria of war was really high.
6:30 Speaker 04 The relocation centers are supervised by the War Relocation Authority in unsettled parts of California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
6:42 Speaker 06 It helped her to recognize herself as a Japanese-American. This is what Yuri says. And to see the strength of the Japanese-American community and to survive as not just individuals, but to come together as community. You know, people grew gardens, right? They figured out how to put up partitions in the bathrooms to have a little privacy and dignity. There was great protests inside the concentration camps.
7:10 Speaker 06 She talked to a lot of people inside the camps. She listened to discussions of more politicized Japanese-Americans inside the camps. And I would say she started to grow a social consciousness, a sense that problems in the United States had social and structural origins.
7:32 Speaker 02 We always called the camps relocation centers while we were there. Now, it feels apropos to call them concentration camps.
7:43 Speaker 06 And when people say, "Well, doesn't that diminish what happened in Nazi Germany?" Their response has been that those were death camps. But these that Yuri and Japanese-Americans were placed in were concentration camps. There was barbed wire, there were sentries. They were forced to be placed into them. Their freedoms were limited.
8:06 Rund Abdelfatah? 120,000 Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II. Yuri spent two years living in a camp. And that experience forever changed the way she viewed the US and its history.
8:21 Speaker 02 Even if you took history in school, I don't think we learned very much of anything. Historically, Americans have always been putting people behind walls. First, there were the American Indians who were put on reservations, Africans in slavery on plantations, Chicanos doing migratory work, and even to the Chinese when they worked. On the railroad camps. You're taught what a good country America is, and it does so much good to the world and all that crap. I believed it wholeheartedly. And suddenly, for the first time, I felt something different.
9:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Yuri's family was imprisoned in internment camps until the end of the war in 1945. But the experience and what she had learned there stayed with her. Five years later, when the US entered war with Korea, Yuri was married to Bill Kociama, a World War II vet who she'd met at one of the internment camps. Now she and Bill were living in New York and in search of community.
9:31 Speaker 06 In New York, there was not a large Japanese-American community. And so there wasn't a ready Japanese-American or Asian-American activist community to plug into.
9:48 Speaker 06 And in some ways, Yuri and her husband Bill were doing that work. They're supporting Asian-Americans en route to the Korean War, right?
9:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Hosting gatherings at their home, giving soldiers a sense of camaraderie.
10:02 Speaker 06 This is, people would call it, community activism.
10:08 Speaker 02 The first place I worked in New York was Chalk Full of Nuts, a very famous restaurant. And I got a job as a waitress. I loved that job. And it was the first time I'm working with just black people. Two of the guys were from the South. And so I mentioned to them that I lived a year and a half in Mississippi and that USO, which is service to everybody.
10:40 Speaker 07 USO stands for the United Service Organizations, a nonprofit that provides live entertainment to soldiers and their families.
10:47 Speaker 02 But no black soldiers came in. And so they said, "What was the address?" I gave the address. I couldn't forget, 222 Pine. They said, "That's the main drag." No black soldiers, even wearing a uniform, can go in anywhere on the main drag.
11:10 Speaker 02 I was shocked. Then I got really interested and wanted to find out everything I could about what black people have gone through. And it made me ashamed when I could think of Asians who were just as racist as whites towards blacks anyway.
11:34 Speaker 07 It was experiences like that, talking to coworkers and neighbors who were black and Puerto Rican, that began to educate Yuri about the deep roots of segregation and racism in America. The sickness and ugliness of racism was exposed to the entire nation and to
11:51 Speaker 02 the rest of the world as well. We will leave your physical force with soul force.
11:57 Speaker 06 She started to invite civil rights activists. She was quite unusual. She would just see people announcing in the newspaper that there were speakers coming through town and she would call up Columbia University and invite them to her home. And she was always also so extraordinarily modest. And she just did this to try to get exposed and get the people around her exposed, right?
12:22 Speaker 07 She also began getting involved in the labor movement.
12:26 Speaker 02 Racism is something that it seemed like all people of color, if not people of color, it would be poor people, have gone through, that this country is not only race-conscious, but class-conscious.
12:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Meanwhile, Yuri's family was growing.
12:49 Speaker 06 You know, she became an activist and an organizer in her 40s as the mother of six children. Wow. Right, right?
12:57 Speaker 02 By the time I had six kids, we had to move to a larger apartment. And, you know, we were living in a housing project, low-income housing. And they were building a new low-income housing in Harlem.
13:13 Speaker 06 So, her family moves to Harlem in 1960. She tells a hilarious story of how they carried their whole life, their whole apartment full of stuff, on the subway, back and forth, multiple Multiple times from midtown Manhattan to New York, I mean to Harlem.
13:31 Speaker 02 Gee, Harlem, I mean, activism, I mean Harlem was the place to go.
13:38 Speaker 06 She was really primed when she moved to Harlem to get involved after the growth in her political consciousness during the 50s, right? And the activism around her in Harlem is mostly in the black movement.
13:53 Speaker 06 She got involved in supporting better quality schools for the children of Harlem, right? Now, now including her own children. And then she got involved in a labor struggle at a medical site where they were gonna build a new medical building and were doing their typical, right? Discrimination in hiring.
14:18 Speaker 02 During the summer of 63, it was a fight for jobs for black and Puerto Ricans.
14:27 Speaker 06 CORE had organized this, the Congress on Racial Equality, to demand jobs for black and Puerto Rican construction workers. And, you know, some of what they were doing was putting their bodies on the line to block the entry of construction trucks onto the site and to slow down the work. And Yuri did that. And she got arrested. She was one of more than 600 arrested.
15:06 Speaker 02 The hearings started after the summer.
15:11 Speaker 02 And one day Malcolm walked through the door.
15:16 Speaker 06 Malcolm X.
15:20 Speaker 06 You know, he was this monumental figure. Especially in Harlem, right? Where he was based. And in the black community, you know, people greatly admired him. Not everyone agreed with him, but he was a force to be reckoned with.
15:37 Speaker 02 All the black activists all ran over to Malcolm and circled him. They were shaking hands with him. I thought, gee, I want to shake his hands too, you know? But I thought, gee, maybe it's not right for me because I'm not black and somebody's not going to like that. You know, wondering why Asians wants to do that. And I said, doggone it, I'm gonna somehow, I'm gonna shake his hand.
16:09 Speaker 06 And she did shake his hand.
16:11 Speaker 02 And then I said something very stupid. I mean, I said, I admire what you're doing, but I don't agree with you about everything. And he said, well, what don't you agree with me about?
16:30 Speaker 02 And I said, your harsh stand on integration. And he said, well, I don't have time to talk to you. But he said, if you're really interested, he said, you could call my secretary and make an appointment.
16:52 Speaker 07 After her chance meeting with Malcolm X, Yuri decided to write him a letter to clarify what she meant when she'd said, "Your harsh stand on integration."
17:02 Speaker 06 She says, "If people could show their true dedication to black liberation or to racial justice, could you then accept the togetherness of all people?" So even though she always had a vision for the togetherness of all people, she was even then recognizing that the blame didn't reside within black people who wanted autonomous spaces, but in folks who exhibited anti-black racism and that they were the ones who needed to change before all people. People could come together.
17:40 Speaker 07 In other words, Yuri thought integration could be the key to bringing people together through nonviolence. And in order for it to happen, non-black Americans first had to recognize that they were the problem. Malcolm X seemed receptive to her feedback.
17:58 Speaker 06 He invites her to attend his Organization of Afro-American Unity, newly formed after he left the Nation of Islam, the OAAU's Liberation School. And Yuri joins and studies, and it transforms her life.
18:17 Speaker 02 I feel that Malcolm did more than anyone else to let me see what's really happening in the world and why.
18:27 Rund Abdelfatah? They talked about Black liberation in the US, but also connected the dots between freedom struggles all around the world.
18:33 Speaker 06 He absolutely was for Black liberation. That was front and foremost for him. And he was also an internationalist and a third-worldist. When he talked to the Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors in the Kotsuyama's home in 1964, he said to them, right, you have been bombed and you bear the scars of the bombs, and we too, as Black Americans in the United States, also bear the scars of bombs. So he was constantly making these connections in large scale.
19:07 Speaker 02 Well, I think the Black Liberation Movement had an influence on every movement because they were really more advanced. And I think all the other movements sort of followed suit, knowing what racism has done to this country and the ceiling of white superiority that has spread all over the world.
19:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Yuri kept organizing well after Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, up until 2014, when she died at the age of 93. She was involved in Asian Americans for Action, fighting for reparations for Japanese-American incarceration. And she found connections between the Asian-American struggle and the struggles of other groups. She protested and organized alongside the Young Lords, a group fighting for self-determination for Puerto Ricans and colonized people. She lobbied for the release of political prisoners. And in the aftermath of 9/11, she spoke out against the racial profiling of Muslim Americans.
20:21 Speaker 06 Yuri Kochiyama always said and operated by the ethos that my people's liberation is intricately linked to your people's liberation, right? I cannot be free if you're not free.
20:38 Speaker 06 We need to think about how things impact the most vulnerable among us, right? And work out of those best interests.
21:02 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full story about the life of Yuri Kochiyama, check out the episode, "Our Own People." And join us next week as we turn to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
21:18 Speaker 04 It was unimaginable to see 200,000 people anywhere at that time. Looking out at that crowd from the small town in Mississippi, I have this kind of feeling that comes up in me, a sense of awe and pride and so on. It feels a certain way, and I still get it. I remember thinking, "Barracuda, but they support us. They support us."
21:43 Rund Abdelfatah? The March on Washington and the man behind it all. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moradam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.
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