Written by: Muskan Singh - 24003, Grade X
Posted on: 18 January, 2022
Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American activist, died of natural causes in Berkeley, California, at the age of 93. According to her family, the lifetime advocate for civil rights in the black, Latino, Native American, and Asian-American communities died quietly in her sleep Sunday morning. Akemi Kochiyama, her granddaughter, verified her death. Mrs. Kochiyama was a daughter of Japanese immigrants who had settled in Southern California, has experienced discrimination since she was a young girl. She spent two years in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Arkansas during WWII, a harrowing experience that also exposed her to the Jim Crow South's prejudice.
Kochiyama was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara in San Pedro, California, a small hamlet south of Los Angeles, where she spent her early years. She and her family were compelled to relocate to internment camps with tens of thousands of other Japanese-Americans months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas, where she spent two years, she met her late husband, Bill Kochiyama, who served with other Japanese-American troops in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. After WWII, the couple married and settled in New York City to start their family. Her interest in the civil rights struggle was sparked by her experiences living in housing projects with black and Puerto Rican neighbours. Kochiyama hosted weekly open houses for activists at her family's apartment, where she hung newspaper clippings on the walls and stacked flyers on the kitchen table. Her eldest daughter, Audee Kochiyama-Holman, said that their house felt like it was in motion 24/7. Her association with Malcolm X, whom she met for the first time in 1963 even though briefly, influenced her advocacy. Kochiyama began focusing her work on black nationalism and was present when Malcolm X died. She raced near Malcolm X and cradled his head on her lap minutes after gunmen opened fire on him at his final address in New York City in 1965. Kochiyama is shown in a black-and-white photo in Life magazine staring worriedly at Malcolm X's bullet-riddled body through horn-rimmed glasses.
Through the Civil Liberties Act, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1988, she and her husband lobbied for reparations and an official government apology for Japanese-American internees in the 1980s. Her ongoing commitment to social problems inspired new generations of activists, particularly among Asian-Americans. Kochiyama's second cousin Tim Toyama, who wrote a one-act play about her friendship with Malcolm X, said, "She was not your normal Japanese-American person, especially a nisei," or second-generation Japanese-American. "She was clearly ahead of her time, and we were able to catch up with her."
