March 18, 2005

SP Native Living Her Manifesto
Yuri Nakahara Kochiyama, Veteran of the WWII Internment Camps Honored by Historical Society
By Arthur R. Vinsel, Community News Reporter

     Saturday, March 19, the San Pedro Bay Historical Society is honoring Yuri Nakahara Kochiyama at the International Women’s History Month luncheon at Ante’s Restaurant, in San Pedro. Kochiyama, a San Pedro native and life-long activist committed to human rights and justice, recently published her memoir, Passing It On, which documents some of life’s lessons she picked up along the way.
     Random photos from her rich, yet sorrow-tinged life reflect a cheery 1939 San Pedro High School graduate, by 1968, a hot-eyed human rights and peace activist and now, a seasoned grand dame of dissent, ever hopeful her 83 years have worked a positive influence in this world.
     Old friends knew her as Mary Nakahara when the family lived at 893 W. 11th St., where her merchant father, Seiichi “Pop” Nakahara, operated a thriving wholesale fish market. Months before Pearl Harbor, the FBI had him under surveillance from a nearby house suspecting he was a spy. Pop Nakahara was a ham radio operator. He simply enjoyed chatting with his seafood suppliers at sea.
     Change came harshly when Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and all Americans of Japanese ancestry became suspect, especially the 120,000 that were rounded up in the West—destined for bleak camps in the desert wastelands, like the Jews in Europe. Those experiences shaped her thinking for her lifetime.
     “Every American, of whatever background, was affected,” she wrote in Passing It On. But none more than her father, who was dragged from their house in pajamas during the Christmas season of 1941, held incommunicado at Terminal Island Federal Prison without medical care, despite respiratory illness, diabetes and ulcers that became terminal.
     Pop Nakahara was sent home a shell of himself, no longer able to speak. He died a few days later, April 21, 1942, never charged with anything.
     “We believe he was tortured,” says the author, who shortened her middle name Yuriko to Yuri and abandoned her given Western name. Her late husband, Masayoshi, raised in a New York orphanage, delighted in learning at age 18 that he had an English first name, William.
     He went by “Bill” to his dying day 12 years ago, a proud U.S. Army veteran who served in the all Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, “The Go For Broke” outfit that became the most-decorated American military unit in history. They compiled a staggering 308 percent casualty rate. That’s right. Many wounded Nisei GIs refused hospitalization, returning straight to battle in bandages, to be wounded and re-counted as fresh casualties, again and again. Luck ran out for hundreds.
     Yuri left San Pedro nearly 60 years ago for a new life in New York with racial epithets ringing in her ears from brief postwar jobs waiting tables in Beacon Street’s greasy spoon cafes. She’d apply under the name Mary Wong, hoping to pass as Chinese. Someone would always raise the question: “Is that a Jap?” and she would be let go— usually before some patriotic patron threw a cup of coffee at her. “You’d better leave, for your own good,” was her common severance message.
     “I always took waitress jobs,” says Kochiyama of all her working years. “That way if one of my kids was sick, I could just quit and take another job later.”
     Her eldest son, Billy, and daughter Aichi, died young due to traffic accidents. Grievously disabled and disheartened for years by complications and a leg amputation, Billy Kochiyama put down his crutches one night on the Staten Island ferry and stepped overboard. Aichi and her young daughter, Akemi, were run down by a taxi veering onto a New York sidewalk. Aichi died three days later, though her daughter survived. Within six months, Aichi’s grieving husband, Alkamal, died of sickle cell anemia.
     Based in New York City, a proud radical, Kochiyama was never a paid human rights group employee, always a citizen volunteer. She visited forbidden Cuba as a brigadista with the 1988 Venceremos Brigade and also Peru. Malcolm X visited the Kochiyamas’ Harlem apartment in 1964, shortly before his assassination, to be interviewed by visiting Japanese journalists. She still remains in touch with his daughters, Attilah Shabazz and Ilyasah Shabazz.
     A tough idealist still with a zest for living, Yuri came back in 2003 for her 64th SPHS reunion with old friends including her best pal from the 1930s, Virginia Martinez. They worked summers in a Harbor City tomato cannery during the Depression. In 1942, they joined the San Pedro chapter of the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps, which became the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). But, Yuri and three Nisei girlfriends from Terminal Island, Wilmington and Palos Verdes were subsequently “asked to resign” over their race.
    Yuri says she isn’t bitter—that’s against the personal manifesto she wrote at 22 to guide her life—but resolved to work for change. The greatest current need is to end the war and occupation in the Middle East and curb U.S. intervention and meddling elsewhere.
     “There is too much damage and devastation. The feelings between people will still not be good and it will take a long time to curb people’s anger. But we must stop war. We must stop racism. We must stop classism.”
     Yuri uses a walker due to a 1997 stroke, but still participates in human rights and dignity rallies. Friends will push her in a wheelchair at marches.
     Elderly people can be politically conservative, but Kochiyama, the patriotic-radical, doesn’t discuss these purposeful outings with fellow tenants at the San Pablo, a seniors’ assisted living center in Oakland, where she lives near a daughter, Audee.
     “I don’t talk much politics with them,” she explains. They’re pretty old.”

Mitchell Mardesich of the San Pedro Bay Historical Society with Yuri Nakahara Kochiyama at her home in Oakland. Her memoir is available at Williams’ Bookstore in San Pedro.