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extra=born Mary Yuriko Nakahara; May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014 was an American civil rights activist born in San Pedro, California. She was interned at the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas during World War II, an experience that influenced her later views on racism in the United States. While interned, she helped run a letter-writing campaign to Nisei ( 'Second-generation') soldiers, wrote for the Jerome camp newspaper, and volunteered with the United Service Organizations (USO).
After the end of the war, Kochiyama moved to New York and eventually to Harlem, where she became involved in the civil rights movement. At first working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Kochiyama's friendship with civil rights leader Malcolm X led her to affiliate with Black nationalist organizations such as the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).
Kochiyama advocated for political prisoners, including imprisoned members of the civil rights movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and others, helping to found the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners (NCDPP) in the early 1970s. She played an influential role in the Asian American movement and was a member of the organization Asian Americans for Action (AAA). In the 1980s, she participated in the redress movement for Japanese Americans interned during World War II, resulting in the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered reparations to internment survivors.
Kochiyama is noted for her revolutionary nationalist views and her opposition to imperialism. She drew controversy in 2003 by praising Osama bin Laden, comparing him to Malcolm, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and Fidel Castro. She has also been the subject of several biographies, children's books, and documentaries and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside 1,000 other women.
Due to the relative affluence and prestige that came with the success of her father's fishmongering business, Kochiyama enjoyed a comfortable childhood. She was raised Christian, with her family attending the St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. She also attended several nearby Christian Science and Presbyterianism churches on her own initiative, working as a Sunday school teacher. However, she criticized aspects of the religion that she viewed as being overly sectarian or chauvinistic.
Kochiyama attended San Pedro High School. While there, she became involved in numerous extracurricular activities. She attended Japanese language school; became the school's first female student body officer; wrote articles for the local San Pedro News-Pilot; played tennis; and served as a counselor for the Bluebirds, the Girl Scouts, and the YWCA. After graduating, she attended Compton College, where she studied art, journalism, and English. She graduated in June 1941 with an arts degree, after which she struggled to find employment due to racial discrimination.
In accordance with Roosevelt's order, the remaining members of Kochiyama's family were sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center. While there, Kochiyama worked as a nurse's aide and helped to organize a group of Sunday school students called "the Crusaders". Despite being imprisoned, many Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) men joined the United States military as part of the 442nd Infantry Regiment. Because many of the Crusaders had relatives who had joined the military, they initiated a letter-writing campaign, first covering six soldiers but expanding to include roughly 3,000. The family spent seven months at Santa Anita before being sent to Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas. While imprisoned at Jerome, she continued her work on the letter-writing campaign; wrote for the camp newspaper, the Denson Tribune; and volunteered with the United Service Organizations (USO).
Yuri met her future husband, a Nisei soldier named Bill Kochiyama, while working with the USO. They initially planned to get married at Camp Shelby, where Bill was stationed, in 1944, but the wedding was postponed due to objections from Bill's father, who wanted to meet Yuri before the two married. Soon after, Kochiyama left the camp to work with the USO in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and later to work with Nisei soldiers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Jerome War Relocation Center closed on June 30, 1944, and Yuri's family returned to San Pedro in 1945. Yuri moved to New York on January 23, 1946, and married Bill on February 9 of the same year.
Kochiyama was present at Malcolm's assassination at the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm was holding an OAAU rally, on February 21, 1965. While it is not entirely clear what happened that night, Malcolm was shot multiple times by several assailants wielding shotguns and semi-automatic handguns. Initially, Kochiyama stayed to comfort Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz, and his children. However, eventually, Kochiyama went onstage to try to render aid to Malcolm, resting his head on her lap. A photograph taken by Life magazine depicts this moment.
After the mass arrest of 17 RAM members in 1967, Kochiyama joined the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), a Black separatism organization which claimed five states in the Southern United States as the territory for a new Black nation. She took an oath of citizenship to the RNA on September 13, 1969, and, in accordance with the practice adopted by many Black activists of adopting Muslim names, she began to go by her Japanese name, Yuri. After attending the organization's Brooklyn Consulate, she also began to take classes on various aspects of revolutionary life with the RNA and acted as the organization's "communication person" in Harlem.
Kochiyama served on the board of the Committee for Puerto Rican Decolonization and the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, though she was asked to resign from the Solidarity Committee due to her support for paramilitary organizations such as the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN, 'Armed Forces of National Liberation'). She also participated in an occupation of the Statue of Liberty on behalf of Lebrón and her fellow imprisoned activists on October 25, 1977, seizing it for nine hours before she and the other participants were arrested and released the next day. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of Lebrón, Flores, and Cancel and posthumously granted clemency to Figueroa, who had died of cancer in 1978.
Kochiyama helped form the David Wong Support Committee in 1987 on behalf of prisoner David Wong, who had been sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison by an all-white jury for the murder of a fellow inmate. Kochiyama wrote letters to, fund-raised for, and visited Wong in prison. In 2004, Wong's conviction was overturned by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, granting him a new trial where his charges were ultimately dismissed. Soon after, he was deported to China. Kochiyama also formed a similar support committee for Yū Kikumura, an alleged member of the Japanese Red Army convicted of planning to bomb a United States Navy recruitment office in the Veterans Administration building in 1988. Kochiyama believed that Kikumura's sentence was an example of political persecution and organized in his defense. Kikumura was ultimately released from prison in the United States, after which he was deported to Japan.
On November 19, 1989, the Kochiyamas' third child, Aichi, was killed after being hit by a taxi in Manhattan. Soon after, Kochiyama was fired from her position at the UMCOR. In April 1993, Kochiyama joined a delegation to Peru organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) to gather support for Abimael Guzmán, the imprisoned leader of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary group Shining Path. A year earlier, in 1992, Guzmán had been arrested by police acting on behalf of Japanese-Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori. Kochiyama was originally skeptical of working with Shining Path, which had been criticized by some members of the American left-wing movement for its use of violence. However, according to Kochiyama, after being given "reading materials" by RCP member Phil Farnham to "become ‘educated’ on the real situation in Peru", she "came to completely support the revolution" there.
Later that year, on October 25, Bill died of cardiac complications. Then, after having a stroke in 1997, Yuri moved to Oakland to live near her family. In 2000, she moved to a retirement home, and in 2004, she published the memoir Passing it On, which discusses her early life, her time at the Jerome War Relocation Center, her friendship with Malcolm, and the deaths of her children. Kochiyama died in Berkeley, California on June 1, 2014, at the age of 93.
Kochiyama's integrationist stance was challenged by her time attending lectures at the OAAU Liberation School, whose instructors advocated for self-defense as opposed to nonviolence and emphasized both international solidarity and the systemic causes of racism. In the 1966 issue of her family newsletter, the North Star, she praised the Black power movement and criticized integration's "frailty". Fujino also claims that Kochiyama was also influenced by the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School (BARTS), which was founded in 1965 by poet, educator, and activist Amiri Baraka (later Amiri Baraka) "for black people, and only black people". According to Fujino, Kochiyama may have developed an appreciation for the effect exclusionary, autonomous spaces had on white supremacy from observing BARTS's policies and practices. Fujino characterizes Kochiyama's views by the late 1960s as being firmly in line with the principles of revolutionary nationalism. Later in life, Kochiyama tied the Black freedom struggle with the Asian American movement, praising civil rights activist Robert F. Williams for his overtures to Mao Zedong and drawing connections between the redress movement and the movement for reparations for Black Americans.
Kochiyama also opposed American military presence in Okinawa Islands, calling American military installations there "invasion bases" whose purpose was to "attack, supply military arms and ammunitions, and to transport supplies, and to train and entertain U.S. soldiers". While she initially supported Japanese control over the islands in 1969, her views had changed by 1970, as she criticized the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty as "the combining of American military might and Japanese economic power to rule a vast Pacific empire". She also criticized Japanese militarism, including the Japanese military's war crimes and its sexual enslavement of comfort women during World War II.
In response to actions of the United States following the 2001 September 11 attacks, Kochiyama stated that "the goal of the war on is more than just getting oil and fuel. The United States is intent on taking over the world" and that "it's important we all understand that the main terrorist and the main enemy of the world's people is the U.S. government". She drew comparisons between the targeting of Arabs and Muslims after the attacks and the targeting of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, claiming that both led to "racial profiling".
Interviewed in 2003, Kochiyama said that she "considers Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro... I thank Islam for bin Laden. America's greed, aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped. War and weaponry must be abolished". The statement generated some controversy, with Vox Dylan Matthews criticizing Kochiyama's statement, characterizing bin Laden as "a mass murderer... a vicious misogynist and hardly the brave anti-imperial class traitor Kochiyama fancies him as".
In 2005, Kochiyama was one of 1,000 women collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize through the "1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005" project, though the prize ultimately went to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. Then in 2007, she was the subject of the play Yuri and Malcolm X, written by Japanese American playwright, Tim Toyama. In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from California State University, East Bay, and in 2011, a song titled "Yuri Kochiyama" was released on the Blue Scholars album Cinemetropolis.
After Kochiyama's death in 2014, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center released an online exhibition entitled "Folk Hero: Remembering Yuri Kochiyama through Grassroots Art". The White House under President Barack Obama also released a statement honoring Kochiyama's legacy. The statement praised Kochiyama for her "pursuit of social justice, not only for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, but all communities of color". She is featured in the book Rad American Women A–Z, which was written in 2015 by Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl.
On May 19, 2016, Kochiyama's 95th birthday was commemorated with a Google Doodle, prompting both praise and condemnation of Google and Kochiyama, whose comments regarding bin Laden and Mao Zedong were criticized. The Doodle's critics included Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who called for a public apology from the company. Kochiyama is the subject of the 2024 book The Bridges Yuri Built: How Yuri Kochiyama Marched Across Movement, which was written by her great-granddaughter Kai Naima Williams and illustrated by Anastasia Magloire Williams.
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