Upon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn’t find a waitressing job anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn’t until she and her husband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to her. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father away to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family’s internment. She still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the United States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief system was only fear. When Kochiyama found
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