Yuri Kochiyama, Internment, and the Activist Life | Mickey Z.

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

June 5, 2014

“Our ultimate objective in learning about anything is to try to create and develop a more just society.”

- Yuri Kochiyama

One of the primary components of a corporate-owned media existing within a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy is conditioning the masses as to which of our fellow humans should be deemed a hero or a villain; whom are we to worship or mourn or demonize or ignore.

Case in point: The recent death of a charismatic and tireless justice-seeker, someone who’d been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and endured on this mortal coil until the age of 93.

You make the call: Do we lionize or marginalize?

Please allow me to introduce a few more details: I’m talking about a woman. A Japanese-American woman. A Japanese-American woman named Yuri Kochiyama who is perhaps best known for pushing the U.S. government into apologizing for and offering reparations for that time the Land of the Free™ -- in the midst of taking on the architects of prison camps -- interned more than 100,000 of its own citizens without due process.

If you don’t remember that time, well, chalk up another win for a corporate-owned media existing within a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and read on.

“The fundamentals of the American system”
In February 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the unrestricted power to arrest -- without warrants or indictments or hearings -- every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast (roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept under prison conditions.

The Supreme Court upheld this order and the Japanese-Americans remained in custody for more than three years. A Los Angeles Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched -- so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."

Life in the internment camps entailed cramped living spaces with communal meals and bathrooms. The one-room apartments measured 20 by 20 feet and none had running water. The internees were allowed to take along "essential personal effects" from home but were prohibited from bringing razors, scissors, or radios. Outside the shared wards were barbed wire, guard towers with machine guns, and searchlights.

The dislocated Japanese-Americans incurred an estimated loss of $400 million in forced property sales during the internment years, and therein may lie a more Machiavellian motivation than sheer race hatred.

"A large engine for the Japanese-American incarcerations was agri-business," says Michio Kaku, a noted nuclear physicist and political activist whose parents were interned from 1942 to 1946. "Agri-businesses in California coveted much of the land owned by Japanese-Americans."

While Yale Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow later called the internment camps "our worst wartime mistake," Howard Zinn pointedly asked: "Was it a 'mistake' or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamentals of the American system?"

Thanks to the work of people like Yuri Kochiyama, a formal apology was offered to the 60,000 survivors of internment camps in 1990. The U.S. government paid them each $20,000.

A lifetime of activism
While her reparations efforts might have been enough for any activist’s resume, Kochiyama’s radical journey was so much more than a single crucial victory. I cannot do justice to all her work here but let’s just say: She consistently stood up for revolutionary causes for more than half her life -- even bringing her children to protests.

"She operated on two levels simultaneously," explains her biographer, Diane Fujino, an associate professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. "She cared very much for the person in front of her, and she also worked to fight against the structural racism and imperialism in society."

This commitment, for example, led her to befriend Malcolm X and join his Organization of Afro-American Unity. Kochiyama was present at his 1965 assassination, captured by a Life Magazine photographer as she tenderly cradled the dying man’s head.

In 1977, she was arrested with a group of others for occupying the Statue of Liberty to draw attention to the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. More recently, she worked for nuclear disarmament, stood in support of political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Yuri Kochiyama died on June 1. May she Rest in Power.

As for us, may we double our efforts to bring down the system she exposed and challenged.

May we also begin the crucial work of reclaiming our history, of discovering and learning from the courageous struggles of the fellow earthlings who came before us.

And may we remember and honor this reality: The freedoms we experience today were not given to us; they were won. They were won by people like Yuri Kochiyama.

Yuri Kochiyama: Presente!

#shifthappens

To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person at National Animal Rights Day in NYC on June 8.

***

Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on a couple of obscure websites called Facebook and Twitter. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.

©WorldNewsTrust.com -- Share and re-post this story. Please include this copyright notice and a link to World News Trust.