United states internment camps.-yuri kochiyama is a grassroots civil rights activist who has involved herself in a wide range of issues from international political prisoner rights, nuclear disarmament, and japanese redress for world war ii internment. in the 1940s yuri kochiyama and her family were one of the many japanese americans to be sent to internment camps following the bombing at pearl harbor. several years later she saw many similarities between how the japanese had been treated in the camps and how many minority groups, especially blacks, were treated in the u.s. at the time.for more than sixty years afterwards yuri kochiyama has been an enthusiastic activist and a key supporter of many civil rights groups: in the 1960s she was a member of the harlem parents committee organizing protests for more street lights in her neighborhood, and in 1977 she and 29 others from the puerto rican group the young lords stormed the statue of liberty to bring attention to the issue of puerto rican independence. perhaps most famously, yuri kochiyama was a close friend and associate of malcolm x, and was by his side at his assassination in 1965.more information about yuri kochiyamaas 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 womens ambulance and defense corps of america, which preceded the womens 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 couldnt speak perfect english, because no ones 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 didnt know where their father was. finally, a lawyer located him in a federal prison across the bay on terminal island. yuris mother pleaded with authorities to take him to the hospital and send him back to jail when he was better. meanwhile, yuris 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.when seichi nakahara was finally returned to a hospital, his bed was the only one in the ward bearing the sign prisoner of war. the children were allowed to visit only once. peter came in his uniform, and his father quivered when he saw him. unable to recognize his son, he thought that someone had come to interrogate him. a week later, on the evening of the 20th, the hospital sent seichi home in an ambulance. overjoyed at first, the nakaharas soon realized he was dying.because he couldnt talk, we didnt know if he could hear, yuri said. we waved our fingers in front of his eyes, but he didnt move.by next morning he was dead at age sixty. the fbi called to warn that anyone attending the funeral would be under surveillance. friends defied the five-mile travel ban placed on japanese americans to show up at his service. fbi agents stood at the doors.on february 19, 1942, president franklin d. roosevelt signed executive order no. 9066, authorizing the military to remove people of japanese ancestry from their homes to prison camps. yuri considers her family lucky because they had more than a month to prepare, while some only had forty-eight hours. after being forced to live for six months in a horse stall at the santa anita racetrack, yuri, her mother, and oldest brother were tagged, numbered, and loaded onto cattle trains. no one knew where they were going. the nakaharas ended up in a concentration camp in jerome, arkansas.they lived in barracks, twelve to a block. the camps ran self-sufficiently. everyone had a job. first-generation issei women ordered cloth from the sears-roebuck catalogue to make curtains for the toilet stalls. yuri continued to teach sunday school. many of the second-generation nisei gis were stationed in the south and would visit by the busloads on the weekends. the young women formed their own uso in the camp for them.one weekend, the all-japanese-american 442nd regimental combat team visited. (it would go on to become one of the most decorated battalions in us history.) it was yuris job to register each soldier and find him a bed. after discovering that most of the men hailed from hawaii, she asked each for his name, rank, and home island. when one particularly dashing young man reached the front of the line, he answered, manhattan island.impressed by his smart mouth and good looks, yuri fell hard for bill kochiyama. he was very good-looking and he had a different kind of personality because he was brought up in new york and he never knew the kind of racism west-coast asians did, yuri said. he was so confident and outgoing. i was crazy in love.bill told yuri he had sixty sisters and sixty brothers. it turned out that he was raised in an orphanage. his father worked as a servant for a family on park avenue and would visit once a week. he once told bill that his mother had passed away and to never mention her. bill never did.when the 442nd left for europe, yuri wrote bill every day, three times a day, for twenty-two months. returning from the front lines, he would find stacks of letters waiting for him. burdened by the weight of yuris love letters, bill buried many of them in the trenches. embarrassed to receive so much mail when some had none, bill asked yuri to write to other men. she organized a cadre of pen pals so that no one in bills team would go without mail. after the war, yuri and bill reunited in new york. they married on a february afternoon, having met in person just three times.
