Beacons of Change : Rebels With a Cause, These Four Activists Tell How They Want to Reshape L.A.--and the World : NOBUKO MIYAMOTO: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST : ‘Once the light is turned on, you can’t turn it off.’

They are solitary voices shouting to be heard, pleading to be supported, but willing to stand alone.

They are activists--like Californian Harry Wu, a human rights advocate who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps before immigrating to the United States in 1985. He risked his freedom in June while entering China in his continuing efforts to draw attention to human rights violations.

What makes activists take such risks?

Activism is a lifelong pursuit, says Craig Jenkins, a sociology professor at Ohio State University. Those who take up a cause rarely let go. The causes are as diverse as the activists, says Jenkins, who chairs the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section of the American Sociological Assn.

Activism in the 1990s has taken a more local focus. While few gain the international attention of Wu, who remains jailed, many are at work in the neighborhoods. The following are four Angelenos who live their lives committed to bringing light to darkness.

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As a teen-ager, Nobuko Miyamoto danced the lead in “Flower Drum Song” on Broadway; she performed in the film the “King and I”; and in 1961, she passed for Puerto Rican in “West Side Story.”

Then, in 1967, she vanished from stage and screen. Frustrated by the limited roles and the stereotypes of Asian Americans perpetrated by the entertainment industry, Miyamoto, a Japanese American, walked away, stepping onto a path of self-discovery that took her into the heart of the civil rights movement.

“For the first time in my life, I knew I was doing the right thing, and I knew that I was getting involved in something that was more important than my own self,” she says.

In 1968, she went to work with an Italian filmmaker on a documentary about the black civil rights movement. “It was a very potent time, and we went into the eye of the storm and made this film called ‘Seize the Time.’ . . . I was able to see the world from the inside of the struggle.”

She was gassed and struck by police as the film took her inside the Black Panthers. While in New York, she met Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama.

“I jumped into the water and it felt good,” Miyamoto, 55, says today. “I had never been around militant Asians before. It was during Vietnam, and there were all the news clips of Asians being killed--gain: World War II to Korea to Vietnam, three wars in which Asians were body counts. So a lot of consciousness was being raised through that, and then there were questions of our own identity.”

In 1970 she began writing music about the Asian American experience and in 1978 founded Great Leap Inc., a theater group focusing on presenting a holistic view of Asian Americans. It has become her street to march upon, her medium for sharing visions.

“Once the light is turned on, you can’t turn it off,” she says of her years as an activist. “If you do, it creates a lot of bitterness. It’s like human energy wants to keep growing and reaching for the sun, reaching for light, reaching for understanding. If that stops, then something inside you dies.”

Her most recent work is an autobiographical one-person play, “A Grain of Sand.”

“One of the things that drove me to finish ‘Grain’ and really put that out there was because a lot of young people and a lot of Caucasians don’t realize that an Asian movement was part of the civil rights movement.”