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- [00:01]
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- [00:19]
Rand Abdelfattah
This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.
- [00:42]
Yuri Kochiyama
The date was February 21st. It was a Sunday.
- [00:48]
Rand Abdelfattah
This is the voice of Yuri Kochiyama in an archive recording about the fateful day in 1965 when when civil rights activist Malcolm X was assassinated. How do you feel?
- [01:03]
Archive Recording / Narrator
Who do we want to hear?
- [01:05]
Rand Abdelfattah
Are we gonna bring him? Yuri was there when there was a distraction in the audience.
- [01:10]
Narrator / Interviewee
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 faint.
- [01:19]
Rand Abdelfattah
Yuri ran up to Malcolm X and
- [01:22]
Yuri Kochiyama
picked up his head and just put it on my lap.
- [01:25]
Rand Abdelfattah
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. This photo is an enduring image of Yuri Kochiyama. 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 Kochiyama and how her experience of Japanese internment during World War II catapulted her into into a lifelong fight for social justice and a more just vision of America. That's coming up after a quick break.
- [02:29]
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- [03:19]
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- [03:51]
Narrator / Historian
We think we are standing what can be the future of energy in Denver.
- [03:56]
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On the Sunday story, Climate solutions on the local level.
- [04:01]
Rand Abdelfattah
Listen now on the up first podcast
- [04:03]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
on the NPR app.
- [04:12]
Yuri Kochiyama
December 7, 1941 December 7 is a
- [04:18]
Narrator / Interviewee
date, a date which will live, we
- [04:20]
Yuri Kochiyama
won't forget in infamy.
- [04:24]
Rand Abdelfattah
On December 7, 1941 at 7:55am Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
- [04:32]
Narrator / Historian
And within hours, Yuri's family, the Nakaharas, got a knock on their door.
- [04:37]
Yuri Kochiyama
Three guys walked in. I didn't know what they were till later, but it was the 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.
- [04:55]
Historian / Expert Commentator
He had had ulcer surgery.
- [04:58]
Yuri Kochiyama
They didn't say anything. They just went in the house, went to the back, woke up my father and said, put on your bathrobe and slippers, I gu. And they took him away just like that.
- [05:14]
Historian / Expert Commentator
Yuri's father is detained. And this happened to two or three thousand Japanese American immigrant men in particular who were picked up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
- [05:28]
Yuri Kochiyama
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 radio that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. So we said, oh my God, we're all going to be in trouble.
- [05:51]
Narrator / Historian
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.
- [06:07]
Narrator / Interviewee
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 ancestry. Military authorities therefore determined that all of
- [06:21]
Narrator / Historian
them would have to move 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.
- [06:34]
Yuri Kochiyama
There were some people on the street who had signed saying, we're sorry to see you go. You know, you Japanese go. But there were also people who had signed to say, get out, Japs. The hysteria of war was really high
- [06:57]
Narrator / Interviewee
the relocation centers are supervised by the War Relocation Authority in unsettled parts of California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
- [07:09]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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 protest inside the concentration camps. 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. We always called the camps relocation centers while we were there. Now it feels apropos to call them concentration camps. 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.
- [08:33]
Rand Abdelfattah
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.
- [08:48]
Yuri Kochiyama
Even if you took history in school, I don't think we learned very much of anything.
- [08:54]
Rand Abdelfattah
Historically. Americans have always been putting people behind walls first.
- [08:58]
Yuri Kochiyama
There were the American Indians who were put on reservations, Africans in slavery on
- [09:03]
Rand Abdelfattah
plantations, Chicanos doing migratory work, and even to the Chinese when they worked on the railroad camps.
- [09:10]
Yuri Kochiyama
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.
- [09:31]
Rand Abdelfattah
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 Kochiyama, 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.
- [09:58]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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. And in some ways, Yuri and her husband Bill were doing that work. They're supporting, you know, Asian Americans en route to the Korean War, right?
- [10:25]
Rand Abdelfattah
Hosting gatherings at their home, giving soldiers a sense of camaraderie.
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Historian / Expert Commentator
This is people Would call it community activism.
- [10:35]
Yuri Kochiyama
The first place I worked in New York was chock full of nuts, 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 at uso. Which service? Everybody.
- [11:07]
Narrator / Historian
USO stands for the United Service organizations, A non profit that provides live entertainment to soldiers and their families.
- [11:14]
Yuri Kochiyama
But no black soldiers came in. And so they said, what was the address? I gave the address I couldn't forget. 222, that's the main drag. No black soldiers, even wearing a uniform can go in anywhere on the main drag. 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.
- [12:01]
Narrator / Historian
It was experiences like that, talking to co workers and neighbors who were black and Puerto Rican, that began to educate Yuri about the deep roots of segregation and racism in America.
- [12:13]
Narrator / Interviewee
The sickness and ugliness of racism was exposed to the entire nation and to the rest of the world as well.
- [12:19]
Yuri Kochiyama
We will meet your physical force with soul.
- [12:24]
Historian / Expert Commentator
She started to invite civil rights activists. She was quite unusual. She would just see people announced 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.
- [12:49]
Narrator / Historian
She also began getting involved in the labor movement.
- [12:53]
Yuri Kochiyama
Racism is something that it seems 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.
- [13:13]
Rand Abdelfattah
Meanwhile, Yuri's family was growing.
- [13:16]
Historian / Expert Commentator
You know, she became an activist and an organizer in her 40s as the mother of six children.
- [13:23]
Yuri Kochiyama
Wow.
- [13:23]
Historian / Expert Commentator
Right, right.
- [13:24]
Yuri Kochiyama
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.
- [13:40]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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 times from midtown Manhattan to New York. I mean, to Harlem.
- [13:57]
Yuri Kochiyama
Gee, Harlem. I mean, activism. I mean, Harlem was the place to go.
- [14:05]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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. She got involved in supporting better quality schools for the children of Harlem right now, including her own children. And then she got involved in a labor struggle at a medical site where they were going to build a new medical building and were doing their typical right discrimination in hiring.
- [14:45]
Yuri Kochiyama
During the summer of 63, it was a fight for jobs for black and Puerto Ricans.
- [14:54]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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.
- [15:33]
Yuri Kochiyama
The hearings started after the summer, and one day, Malcolm walked through the door.
- [15:42]
Historian / Expert Commentator
Malcolm X. 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.
- [16:04]
Yuri Kochiyama
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. Like that, you know, wondering why Asian wants to do that. And I said, doggone it, I'm gonna. Somehow I'm gonna shake his hand.
- [16:36]
Rand Abdelfattah
And she did shake his hand.
- [16:38]
Yuri Kochiyama
And then I said something very stupid. I mean, he 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? And I said, you 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.
- [17:19]
Narrator / Historian
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.
- [17:29]
Historian / Expert Commentator
She says, if people could show their true dedication to black liberation or to racial justice, could you then accept that 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 could come together.
- [18:07]
Narrator / Historian
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.
- [18:25]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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.
- [18:44]
Yuri Kochiyama
I feel that Malcolm did more than anyone else to let me see what's really happening in the world and why.
- [18:53]
Rand Abdelfattah
They talked about black liberation in the US but also connected the dots between freedom struggles all around the world.
- [19:00]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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 Kochiyama'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 bomb. So he was constantly making these connections in large scale.
- [19:33]
Yuri Kochiyama
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 this feeling of white superiority that has spread all over the world.
- [20:04]
Rand Abdelfattah
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.
- [20:47]
Historian / Expert Commentator
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. We need to think about how things impact the most vulnerable among us, Right. And work out of those best interests.
- [21:29]
Rand Abdelfattah
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.
- [21:44]
Archive Recording / Narrator
It was unimaginable to see 200,000 people anywhere at that time. Looking out at that crowd from a small town in Mississippi, I have this kind of feeling that comes up in me, a sense of awe and pride and so on. Feels a certain way. And I still get it. I remember thinking very clearly that they support us. They support us.
- [22:10]
Rand Abdelfattah
The march on Washington and the man behind it all. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim, with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Adaplooi and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner and Lindsey McKenna. I'm Rand Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.
- [22:46]
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