Throughline - Yuri Kochiyamas’s lifetime of activism

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama lived a life dedicated to social justice for people of all backgrounds. Not only a pillar of the Asian-American movement, she also fought for Black liberation and the rights of political prisoners. Today on the show, how Yuri Kochiyama’s 50 years of activism was informed and practiced.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abd al-Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. The date was February 21st. It was a Sunday. This is the voice of Yuri Kocciama in an archive recording about the fateful day in 1965, when civil rights activist Malcolm X was assassinated. Yuri was there when there was a distraction in the audience. And just then the gunfire went off, and his hand was up.

I remember this. I turned around quickly, and the next thing I saw was Malcolm falling back in a dead faint. Yuri ran up to Malcolm X. And picked up his head and just put it on my lap. At that moment, someone snapped a photo. Yuri is dressed in all black, kneeling on the ground, her back hunched over Malcolm, her hands holding up his head and her eyes pointed down at his face. And he's in her arms, eyes closed, wounds exposed, white shirt, stained with blood. This photo is an enduring image of Yuri Kuchiyama.

But why was she there? And how did she become an active member of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and beyond? Today on the show, the story of Yuri Kuchiyama and how her experience of Japanese internment during World War II catapulted her into a lifelong fight for social justice and a more just vision of America. That's coming up after a quick break. December 7th, 1941. December 7th is a date. A date which will live.

We won't forget. In infamy. On December 7, 1941, at 7.55 a.m., Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. And within hours, Yuri's family, the Nakaharas, got a knock on their door. Three guys walked in. I didn't know what they were until later, but it was the FBI. They asked if Mr. Nakahara lived there. I said, oh, yeah, but he just came home in the hospital, and he's sleeping in the back. He had had a ulcer surgery.

They didn't say anything. They just went in the house, went to the back, woke up my father and said, put on your bathroom, slippers, I guess. And they took him away just like that. Yuri's father is detained. And this happened to 2,000 or 3,000 Japanese American immigrant men in particular, who were picked up after the bombing of police. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

We were calling each other up saying, did anyone come to your house yet? Some of the people said yes, some said no, but they all had heard over the radio that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. So we said, oh, my God, we're all going to be in trouble. Five weeks went by before Yuri was allowed to visit her father. A week later, he was released. but just one day after returning home, he died,

perhaps from being moved so soon after his surgery. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestors. Military authorities therefore determined that all of them would have to move. Before long, Yuri, who was 20 years old at this point, Along with her family and many other Japanese people were forced to leave their homes. Their fate's unknown.

There were some people on the street who had signed saying, We're sorry to see you go, you know, you Japanese go. But there were also people who had signed to say, get out, Japs. The hysteria of war was really high. The relocation centers are supervised by the War Relocation Authority in unsettled parts of California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. It helped her to recognize herself as a Japanese American. This is what Yuri says.

And to see the strength of the Japanese American community and to survive as not just individuals, but to come together as community. You know, people grew gardens. They figured out how to put up partitions in the bathrooms to have a little privacy and dignity. There was great protest inside the concentration camps. She talked to a lot of people inside the camps. She listened to discussions of more politicized Japanese Americans inside the camps. And I would say she started to grow a social consciousness, a sense that problems in the United States had social and structural origin.

We always called the camps relocation centers while we were there. Now it feels apropos to call them concentration camps. And when people say, well, doesn't that diminish what happened in Nazi Germany? Their response has been that those were death camps. But these, that Uri and Japanese Americans were placed in were concentration camps. There was barbed wire, there were centuries, they were forced to. to be placed into them. Their freedoms were limited.

120,000 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. Yuri spent two years living in a camp. In that experience, forever changed the way she viewed the U.S. and its history. Even if you took history in school, I don't think we learned very much of anything. Historically, Americans have always been putting people behind walls.

First, there were the American Indians who were put on reservations, Africans in slavery on plantations, Chicano is doing migratory work, and even to the Chinese when they worked on the railroad camps. You're taught what a good country America is, and it does so much good to the world and all that crap. I believed it wholeheartedly. And suddenly for the first time,

I felt something different. Yuri's family was imprisoned in internment camps until the end of the war in 1945. But the experience and what she had learned there stayed with her. Five years later, when the U.S. entered war with Korea, Yuri was married to Bill Kocciama, a World War II vet who she'd met at one of the internment camps.

Now she and Bill were living in New York and in search of community. In New York, there was not a large Japanese-American community. And so there wasn't a ready Japanese-American or Asian-American activist community to plug into. And in some ways, Yuri and her husband, Bill, were doing that work. They're supporting Asian-Americans in route to the Korean War, right?

Hosting gatherings at their home, giving soldiers a sense of camaraderie. This is, people would call it community activism. The first place I worked in New York was chock full of nuts. Very famous restaurant. And I got a job as a, you know, waitress. I loved that job. And it was the first time I'm working with just black people.

Two of the guys were from the south. And so I mentioned to them that I lived a year and a half in Mississippi, and that U.S.O, which is service everybody. U.S.O. stands for the United Service Organizations, a nonprofit that provides live entertainment to soldiers and their families. But no black soldiers came in. And so they said, what was the address? I gave the address.

I couldn't forget $2.25. They said, that's the main drag. No black soldiers came in. soldiers even wearing a uniform can go in anywhere on the main drag. I was shocked. Then I got really interested and wanted to find out everything I could about what black people have gone through and it made me a shame when I could think of Asians who were just as racist as whites towards blacks anyway. It was experiences like that, talking to coworkers and neighbors who were black and Puerto Rican

that began to educate Yuri about the deep roots of segregation and racism in America. The sickness and ugliness of racism was exposed to the entire nation and to the rest of the world as well. We will meet your physical force with soul for us. She started to invite civil rights activists. She was quite unusual. She would just see people announced in the world. the newspaper that they were speakers coming through town and she would call up Columbia University and invite them to her home. And she was always also so extraordinarily modest and she just did

this to try to get exposed and get the people around her exposed, right? She also began getting involved in the labor movement. Racism is something that it seemed like all people of color. if not people of color, it would be poor people, have gone through that this country is not only race conscious, but class conscious. Meanwhile, Yuri's family was growing. You know, she became an activist and an organizer in her 40s as the mother of six children. Wow. Right, right? By the time I had six kids, we had to move to a larger...

apartment and you know we were living in the housing project low-income housing and they were building a new low-income housing in Harlem. So her family moves to Harlem in 1960. She tells a hilarious story of how they carried their whole life, their whole apartment full of stuff on the subway back and forth multiple times from midtown Manhattan to New York, I mean to Harlem. Gee, Harlem, I mean, activism, I mean, Harlem was the place to go. She was really primed when she moved to Harlem to get involved after the growth in her political consciousness during the 50s, right?

And the activism around her in Harlem is mostly in the Black movement. She got involved in supporting better quality schools for the children of Harlem, right? Now, now including her own children. And then she got involved in a labor struggle at a medical site where they were going to build a new medical building and were doing their typical right discrimination in hiring.

During the summer of 63, it was a fight for jobs for Black and Puerto Ricans. Corps had organized this, the Congress on Racial Equality, to demand jobs for Black and Puerto Rican construction workers. And, you know, some of what they were doing was putting their bodies on the line to block the entry of construction trucks onto the site and to slow down the work. And Yuri did that.

And she got arrested. She was one of more than 600 arrested. The hearing started after the summer. and one day Malcolm walked through the door. Malcolm X. You know, he was this monumental figure, especially in Harlem, right, where he was based. And in the black community, you know,

people greatly admired him. Not everyone agreed with him, but he was a force to be reckoned with. All the black activists all ran over to Malcolm. come and circled him. They were shaking hands with it. I said, gee, I want to shake his hands, too, you know. But I thought, gee, maybe it's not right for me because I'm not black. And somebody's not going to like that. You know, wondering why Asianists wants to do that. And I said, doggone it. I'm going to somehow, I'm going to shake his hand.

And she did shake his hand. And then I said something very stupid. I mean, he said, I admire what you're doing, but I don't agree with you about everything. And he said, well, what don't you agree with me about? And I said, you're a harsh stand on integration. And he said, well, I don't have time to talk to you. But he said, if you're really interested,

he said, you could call my secretary and make an appointment. After her chance meeting with Malcolm X, Yuri decided to write him a letter to clarify what she meant when she'd said, your harsh stand on integration. She says, if people could show their true dedication to black liberation or to racial justice, could you then accept the togetherness of all people? So even though she always had a vision for the togetherness of all people, she was even then recognizing that the blame didn't reside within black people

who wanted autonomous spaces, but in folks who exhibited anti-black racism and that they were the ones who needed to change before all people could come together. In other words, Yuri thought integration could be the key to bringing people together. through non-violence. And in order for it to happen, non-black Americans first had to recognize that they were the problem. Malcolm X seemed receptive to her feedback.

He invites her to attend his organization of Afro-American Unity, newly formed after he left the nation of Islam, the OAAU's Liberation School. And Yuri joins and studies, and it transforms her life. I feel that Malcolm did more than anyone else to let me see what's really happening in the world and why. They talked about black liberation in the U.S., but also connected the dots between freedom struggles all around the world.

He absolutely was for black liberation that was front and foremost for him. And he was also an internationalist and a third worldist. When he talked to the Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors in the Kocayama's home in 1964, he said to them, right, you have been bombed and you bear the scars of the bombs. And we, too, as black Americans in the United States, also bear the scars of bombs. So he was constantly making these connections in large scale. Well, I think the Black Liberation Movement had an influence on every movement because they were really more advanced.

And I think all the other movement sort of followed suit knowing what racism has done to this country and the feeling of white superiority that has spread all over the world. Yuri kept organizing well after Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, up until 2014, when you're going to, she died at the age of 93. She was involved in Asian Americans for action, fighting for reparations for Japanese American incarceration. And she found connections between the Asian American struggle

and the struggles of other groups. She protested and organized alongside the young lords, a group fighting for self-determination for Puerto Ricans and colonized people. She lobbied for the release of political prisoners. And in the aftermath of 9-11, she was a group. She spoke out against the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. Yuri Kocayama always said and operated by the ethos that my people's liberation is intricately linked to your people's liberation, right? I cannot be free if you're not free. We need to think about how things impact the most vulnerable among us, right, and work out of those best interests. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit.

If you want to hear the full story about the life of Yuri Kuchayam, check out the episode, Our Own People. And join us next week as we turn to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It was unimaginable to see 200,000 people anywhere at that time. Looking out at that crowd from the small town in Mississippi, I have this kind of feeling that comes up in me, a sense of it. awe and pride and so on. It feels a certain way, and I still get it.

I remember thinking very clearly, but they support us. They support us. The March on Washington and the man behind it all. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the ThruLine production team. Music by Ramtinada Blui and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Cain, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna.

I'm Randabed-Fat-Bad. Thanks for listening.