Freedom Fighter Yuri Kochiyama Speaks

See also:

• Yuri Kochiyama Remembers Japanese Internment Camps in the U.S. and the Assassination of Malcolm X


Interviewed by Tamara Kil Ja Kim Nopper for The Objector: A Magazine of Conscience and Resistance, an official publication of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) 
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A long time freedom fighter, Yuri Kochiyama is an eighty-two year-old Japanese woman who is well known in activist circles for her commitment to anti-imperialism and participation in Puerto Rican liberation and Black liberation movements. Kochiyama is a survivor of the US federal government’s WWII incarceration of Japanese US citizens. Under Executive Order 9066, “enemy aliens” were rounded up and put in camps for extended periods of time; with the exception of some German crewmen seized from ships, Japanese in the Americas, including those residing in Peru, were the only ones targeted and locked up.

After WWII, Kochiyama and her late husband Bill, also an internment survivor, moved to NYC and then specifically to Harlem, where Bill had grown up. There, Kochiyama became politicized by the likes of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Harold Cruse, and other Black activists and intellectuals. And so began her journey into anti-imperialist work and racial politics. As this interview shows, while she no longer lives in Harlem, Kochiyama’s critique of US imperialism has not diminished over time. Here we talk about WWII internment, Yuri’s life in Harlem, the relationship between war, imperialism, white supremacy, and prisons, Osama bin Laden, and Black-Asian politics.

WWII Internment

Objector: During WWII, you and your husband were interned for being Japanese. How did this influence your views of imperialism and war?

The first question was posed wrong as I was not married yet, and so I can’t answer for my husband. But during World War II, my family of only my mother and one brother and I were sent to an inland internment camp in Arkansas. Every person of Japanese ancestry (that’s 120,000 people) was dispatched to ten camps.

My father was arrested on the morning of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 and sent to the Terminal Island Federal Prison. He had just come home from the hospital the day before on December 6, and was very weak. He died six weeks later. He was in the fishing business. All fishermen were suspect as the US government thought fishermen would best know the Pacific waters, and might side with the Japanese enemy. My twin brother left the University of Berkeley a few days after the war was declared as most universities throughout California didn’t seem to want Japanese Americans on their campus.

He volunteered into the US army as did many Japanese Americans. But I was surprised my brother was accepted, as my father was taken to prison and being interrogated daily. My twin brother was sent to an army training camp in Wyoming. My older brother also tried to volunteer but was not accepted because of health reasons.

Objector: What connections do you see between the World War II era and today?

There are many similarities, but today, there is only one super-power, the United States. To make or bring on wars, wars begin with greed for land or resources, lies and demonizing the target, and controlling one’s own homeland with harsh measures or restrictions. Today, there’s no concentration camp or internment camps like the Japanese experienced, but the Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians are the new targets. They are losing jobs, homes, and even their lives. They are being detained and deported. Many may become stateless.

Life in Harlem

Objector: When you and Bill returned to where Bill grew up in Harlem, how did that move shape your political consciousness?

My husband, Bill Kochiyama, a New Yorker, returned from World War II in January, 1946. We first lived in Amsterdam Houses, a low-income housing project in mid-town New York City. After twelve years there, we moved to Manhattanville Houses in Harlem. Luckily, we lived across the street from the Harlem Freedom School which was run by HPC (Harlem Parents Committee). We heard some of the best speakers of that time: James Baldwin, writer; Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights leader from Mississippi; Joe Patterson, grass roots activist; and Peter Bailey, a Malcolm X follower.

Our six children also enrolled in the children’s classes. Our whole family began learning about Black history. But aside from the Freedom School, I began attending Malcolm X’s meetings at Audubon Hall, and Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts School in mid-Harlem. My teacher there was Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.

Objector: What were Black people's stands on war and imperialism?

Black people in Harlem began organizing against the Vietnam War before the general anti-war movement. In 1963, two years before Malcolm died, he spoke about American military advisors already in Vietnam, and he warned that America will soon be sending troops, and when that time came, we must begin to build a strong anti-war movement. He said “the war in Vietnam will be the war of all Third World’s people--the war to suppress self- determination, liberation, and Communism. He died before the anti-war movement began to flourish. Harlem-ites used to carry banners of the Muhammad Ali quote: "No Viet Congs ever called me nigger."

War, Imperialism, White Supremacy, and Prisons

Objector: What did you think of imperialism and war?

If you meant back then when the war [WWII] began, I was a twenty year old, knew nothing, a small-town gal living comfortably, and totally apolitical. But if you mean now, today at age eighty-two, after living fifty-four years in New York, forty of them in Black Harlem, meeting awesome leaders and speakers like Malcolm X, John Henrik Clark, Mae Mallory, Robert Williams, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Elombe Brath, Kwame Ture and etc., etc., people. I became quite a different kind of person. I began learning about American history, history of unending wars, inhumanities, truths-never-told, and profound ideas about ideologies, political theories, inequalities, racism, and human shortcomings that have caused holocausts throughout the world.

As for imperialism, which is a policy of extending power and control, and usually by military force and hegemony, the government of the United States is the best example. Imperialism, terrorism and war go hand in hand. But it begins with capitalism, private ownership and profit-making.

Objector: Do you see a relationship between imperialism and racism? Between imperialism and white supremacy?

We learned about imperialism through the history of the colonization of Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, annexation of Hawaii, and the take-over of both the Caribbean Islands, and much of the Pacific. In all these instances of incursions and usurpations of other people’s territories, it was the epitome of white superiority.

Yes, there is certainly a relationship between imperialism and racism, and imperialism and white superiority. It was white superiority and racism that gave western people the impetus to rule over or control people of color as if people of color were inferior.

Objector: Currently, the US has one of the largest imprisoned populations in the world, most of the population being Black. Do you see a connection between war and imperialism and prisons?

Yes, I think there is a connection between imperialism, war and prison. Imprisoning such an alarming number of Blacks, both men and women, is part of a tactic to depopulate Black people in the US. Controlling the birth-rate of Blacks by imprisoning both Black men and women for such long periods during their most fruitful years is plain genocide. In Africa, reducing the number of Africans is done by allowing the spread of HIV-AIDS, a perverse and grotesque way of eliminating millions of Africa’s future. 


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tags: revolution, dissent, Yuri Kochiyama