AMY GOODMAN: Immediately after.

YURI KOCHIYAMA: He was only home not even twelve hours, and he was gone. So, we didn't get to talk to him. We don't think he could have talked the way he looked, jumbled or mumbled. We couldn't tell if he could see. We would put our hands in front of him. We didn't know if he could hear. And it was so fast, he was gone.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute. But were you detained, your family, after?

YURI KOCHIYAMA: Everybody was. Every person of Japanese ancestry, 120,000 from those three states, for three-and-a-half states, because it was the number one war zone, so 120,000 --

AMY GOODMAN: And how long were you held for?

YURI KOCHIYAMA: Well, everybody was -- at least two years, I think. And then, because there was this case, and nobody hears of, called the Endo case, where they found out in that case that actually the United States government had no right to take all the people into prison camps when there was nothing really official that could have said that we did some wrong to this country. And so --

AMY GOODMAN: My last question is: How did that shape your view of this country and what you spent the rest of your life doing?

YURI KOCHIYAMA: Well, I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here. There were millions of Indians. They were wiped out practically. I don't like to use "tribe," that's what the white people use on Indian, but nation after nation were wiped out. And then, when I heard about slavery, which was ten times worse, I thought, going to another continent and kidnapping adults and children and babies, and taking the people from another continent to America, they said there's no way they could know how many tens of thousands or a million Africans were taken, and what was the casualty? I mean, America never tells the casualty of the other side. But, at least, all this taught me a lesson.

AMY GOODMAN: Yuri Kochiyama. She will be 85 on May 19. She shares the same birthday as Malcolm X. We want to say special thanks to Link TV, where we conducted this interview.

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