School Spirit : San Pedro High Grads Gather to Honor the Extraordinary Friend They Last Saw 50 Years Ago

The last time some of Mary Nakahara Kochiyama’s friends saw her, nylon stockings were new on the market, “Over the Rainbow” was a popular hit and Germany was about to invade Poland.

It was 1939, and Kochiyama and 300 classmates were graduating from San Pedro High School. Soon, many classmates would risk and lose their lives in World War II. Kochiyama and thousands of other Japanese-Americans would be uprooted from their homes and confined to relocation camps.

The sorrows and resentments of the war years could easily have destroyed young friendships among Kochiyama and her classmates, but the ties have stood the test of time.

Fifty years after the class of ’39 finished high school, more than 200 San Pedro High “Pirates” from the 1930s and 1940s showed up last weekend for a nostalgic homecoming in Kochiyama’s honor.

Why is this woman so well-remembered after so many years?

“I’ve thought about that many times,” said Sam Domancich, who helped plan the homecoming celebration.

One of the reasons so many people turned out--the luncheon had to be moved to a larger restaurant to accommodate the crowd--is that San Pedro is such a close-knit community, Domancich said. San Pedro was victory and the thrill of defeat.”

Indeed, during tribute speeches, Kochiyama was not at the head table but crouched in the audience, taking pictures of the speakers. Ben Tagami, president of the Japanese-American veterans of the celebrated 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd (“Go for Broke”) Regiment, offered her a scrapbook from the war era, but Kochiyama suggested it be given instead to her husband, a 442nd veteran.

Kochiyama has become a legend in San Pedro because of her friendliness and school spirit, friends said.

A sports enthusiast, she covered games for the school newspaper and phoned in results to the San Pedro News-Pilot.

Pedaled to Games

Retired teacher and tennis coach Nick Zorotovich, himself a 1923 graduate of San Pedro High, told his favorite story about how Kochiyama used to travel to all the games on a bicycle trimmed in the school colors, black and gold. Once, when the school bus was en route to a tennis tournament in far-off Santa Monica, players spotted the young cub reporter pedaling her way through Inglewood and stopped to pick her up, he said.

“San Pedro was a very sports-minded town, and this united all the nationalities,” Kochiyama said. “Everyone accepted the differences and saw the diversity as a plus.”

Kochiyama also is beloved for her efforts to boost morale among the Japanese-Americans who were confined to relocation camps during World War II and for Nisei soldiers who fought for America.

“The government calls them relocation camps, but we called them concentration camps,” Kochiyama said in an interview. Still, she said, “I grew up in a mostly white world, and I never got to know my own people till we were sent to camp.”

Kochiyama and her family first were sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center and then to Jerome, Ark.

In the camps, Kochiyama helped establish a youth organization called the Crusaders that conducted a letter-writing campaign for soldiers of Japanese ancestry who were fighting in the U.S. forces. “We started out with just five names, but by the time the camps closed, 2 1/2 or 3 years later, we were writing to 13,000,” she said.

Kochiyama said she and others spent their $8-a-month camp pay on postage and received contributions from soldiers themselves, who collected money in their helmets on the battlefield. San Pedro soldiers were steadfast in supporting the letter-writing effort, she said.

In poignant letters she wrote to her mother during the final months of the war, Kochiyama talked of her struggle to run USO Centers in Hattiesburg, Miss., and later in Minneapolis/St. Paul, after she was released from the camp in Arkansas.

In the yellowed letters, which the family has collected in a well-worn black notebook, Kochiyama asks for her mother’s recipes and speaks of spending her own money to keep the letters and post cards going out to servicemen.

In one letter, dated April 18, 1945, she told her mother she planned to live at the USO in Hattiesburg. “Then, the rent money can be used for stamps,” she said.

The letters to her mother also presage her later involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when she moved to Harlem and became more militant in her views.

Kochiyama said she became a follower of Malcolm X and was with him when he was assassinated in 1965. One of her most prized mementos is a Life magazine cover photo showing her kneeling over the slain black leader’s body, she said. The struggles of blacks to achieve equal rights “influenced all minority rights struggles,” and helped spawn the Asian-American movement in the late 1960s, she said.

Civil Rights Activities

Today, Kochiyama is a member of the New African People’s Organization, an outgrowth of the black power movement. She also has been active in New York-based Concerned Japanese-Americans and the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, groups that are seeking compensation for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Her life’s work is hinted at in a letter she wrote to her mother on Aug. 15, 1945, three days after Japan surrendered. First, she muses about the differences in the characters of the Japanese and American people that led to the conflict.

Yes, Japan has been defeated.... Strange, isn’t it, that one country’s greatness could be another country’s doom. America’s greatest gift to her people was freedom. And her people love it.

Japan’s greatest gift to her people was an orthodox way of life. And her people love it. ...

There is so much we human beings can’t understand. I guess because we only live once. If we lived, died and were reincarnated, and lived again after every death--living each time under a different color of skin and experiencing the hardship of every race, maybe we wouldn’t be so harsh and critical and selfish and limited. We would be humble and loving and kind and ‘broad’ because we would understand what it feels like to be black, yellow, brown and white.

Wishful thinking, isn’t it?

As Kochiyama accepted the tributes and applause of her high school friends last weekend, it appeared that some of the hopes she expressed in the letter to her mother may have been realized.

“Despite the war, hysteria, and the uprootment of Japanese-Americans, friendships have continued,” she said. “Fifty years have passed by without some of us seeing one another, yet on the strength of happy memories, warm relationships have remained intact.”