Yuri Kochiyama Exhibit and Archives

About

Yuri Kochiyama is one of the most iconic figures in Asian American community, civil rights and social movement history. This digital exhibition and archive containing over 3,500 images deepens our understanding of her politicization and growth as a child to later becoming an organizer and social movement activist. Reading letters she wrote to servicemen, political prisoners, politicians, and old friends reveals the complex thinker she was and the concerns that weighed upon her daily decisions in the face of political and personal turmoil. Diary entries about her family’s removal to the Santa Anita Detention Center and the Jerome concentration camp and her messages in the Crusaders’ newsletters reveal her empathy towards human suffering and her tenacity of will. One can see links between her stories of mass incarceration and her work on behalf of political prisoners and many other issues. We invite researchers, educators, counselors, students, and lifelong learners to learn about the wrongful mass incarceration and one woman’s journey for social justice through her rare and revealing documents and ephemera left for posterity.

Acknowledgements

This website was made possible by the late Yuri Kochiyama and the Kochiyama family who made these archives accessible to the public through the University of California and the Asian American Studies Center. The digitization of archival materials and the creation of the exhibition was made possible by grants from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program of the California State Library and the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program of the National Parks Service. Archival materials on the activities of the Crusaders, an organization that Yuri founded with fellow incarcerees, were made available by the Japanese American National Museum. This project was supported by Densho where the digital archives from the UCLA Yuri Kochiyama collections are also housed.

We also acknowledge the following individuals who contributed to the creation of this website: 

Karen Umemoto, Principal Investigator
Diane Fujino, Curator
Darlene Lee, Curriculum Developer and Co-Curator
Marjorie Lee, Librarian and Archivist
Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Deputy Director
Betty Leung, Administrator
Arnold Pan, Writer & Editor
Daniel H. Kim, Software Engineer
Helen Seto, Digital Collections Research Assistant 
Barbra Ramos, Marketing Manager
Christine Wang, Research Project Coordinator
Lauren Higa, Project Coordinator
Christine Lee, Project Coordinator

And special thanks to our Digitization Team: Justin Arcangel, Andrae Chin, Lauren Higa, Harmony Hsu, Joanne Luong, Tom Nguyen, Helen Seto, Mary Grace Stevens, and Christine Wang.