In honor of Women’s History Month 2011, I’ve selected one woman to profile every day from March 1st – March 31st, 2011.

Yuri Kochiyama: Human rights activist

As in all her speeches, Yuri offered historical facts and statistics, but little about herself or the four years she spent in an internment camp. For all her public appearances, Yuri has never found it easy to talk about herself.

She was struck, she said in her talk, by the similarities between today and sixty years ago, when Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and suddenly treated like national enemies. Men were arrested, their families given no explanation. Asian Americans were publicly harassed, spat upon, beaten, even killed. The same thing is happening now, she said. One third of the latest violent incidents were logged in the Bay Area. She urged the crowd not just to express sympathy, but to act swiftly.

“An injury or injustice to one is an injury and injustice to all,” she said to applause.

When she finished, Yuri scooted back into the crowd. Reporters and photographers approached her continuously, asking her to spell her name. She answered patiently, as if she had been doing this her whole life.

Of course, she hadn’t. As teenagers, Yuri and her two brothers lived a red-white-and-blue, oh-so-apple-pie existence. Yuri taught Sunday school, volunteered for the YWCA and Girl Scouts, attended every football game in a town where high-school sports mattered above all else, and even joined the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps of America, which preceded the Women’s Army Corps.

Religious and baseball-obsessed, Yuri grew up as Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, a port town just south of Los Angeles. Her father had come to America by himself, later returning to Japan to find a wife. He found her teaching at the school where his father was principal. In San Pedro, Seichi Nakahara owned a fish market. He often did business with Japanese steamships and sometimes brought ship officers home for dinner.

Most of the residents of Terminal Island, located just across the bay, were Japanese immigrants, but in the town where the Nakaharas lived the population was mostly white, working-class Italian and Yugoslavian immigrants. “We Japanese kids never felt embarrassed that our parents couldn’t speak perfect English, because no one’s parents spoke perfect English,” Yuri said.

But all that changed on December 7, 1941. Yuri had just returned home from Sunday school when a knock came at the door. Three FBI agents wanted to see her father. He was sleeping, having returned just the day before from the hospital where he underwent an ulcer operation. Within minutes, though, the agents rushed him into his bathrobe and slippers and whisked him away. The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.

The next day, agents returned and rifled through everything in the house. For days the family didn’t know where their father was. Finally, a lawyer located him in a federal prison across the bay on Terminal Island. Yuri’s mother pleaded with authorities to take him to the hospital and send him back to jail when he was better. Meanwhile, Yuri’s twin brother Peter, then a student at UC Berkeley, hitchhiked home, since no one would sell him a train ticket. By December 10, both her brothers tried to sign up for military service. Peter was accepted even though his father was accused of spying. — Yuri Kochiyama: The Last Revolutionary

Links: Wikipedia page
Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice
Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama – A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation
ASU film: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama

Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama Talk About Activism Over Decades
Yuri Kochiyama to receive honorary doctorate June 12–California State University East Bay
Civil Rights Activist Yuri Kochiyama on her Internment in a WWII Japanese American Detention Camp & Malcolm X’s Assassination (interview, includes audio and video links)
Yuri Kochiyama: With Justice In Her Heart
Yuri Kochiyama: The Last Revolutionary

Books:
Passing it On (memoir)
Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (Kochiyama contributed the foreward)
Fishmerchant’s daughter: An oral history
Discover your mission: Selected speeches & writings of Yuri Kochiyama

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