Woman of the Week: Yuri Kochiyama

Yuri Kochiyama was an American civil rights activist known for advocating many causes such as black rights and the anti-war movement. She was born on May 19, 1921, in California to a Japanese family and she attends a predominantly white school and attended San Pedro High School where she served as the first female student body officer she later graduated from high school in 1939 and attended Compton Junior College where she studied English, journalism and art she graduated in 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her life changed drastically and her father was arrested and detained at a hospital in which he was treated very unfairly mostly because he was the only Japanese in the hospital which Yuri can also recall saying, “they hung a sheet around him saying prisoner of war”.Yuri’s father then later died which made Yuri very aware of the government’s abuse and the racism in the country she lived in and made her want to be engaged in the many political struggles and soon after her father’s death she was forced out of her homes by the executive order 9066 which was passed by President Roosevelt which forced out 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry out of their homes and into various camps in which she lived for three years.

Yuri’s activism later started in Harlem in the 1960s where she participated in many movements such as movements for civil and human rights and a movement to stop the war in Vietnam. She later founded Asians Americans for Actions and worked to build a more political movement for Asian Americans which later tied on to the struggles for black liberation. She later met Malcolm X and joined his group the organization for Afro-American unity to work on issues of racial justice and human rights. In the 1980s Yuri worked in the redress and reparation movements for Japanese Americans in which she supported many political prisoners. Yuri, later on, passed on June 14, 2014, at the age of 93 after being a long-term freedom fighter for many movements such as being outspoken against the many World war two unjustified arrests, and she also worked on the treatment of Japanese Americans in these conditions.