Berkeley, CA – I just heard about the passing of Yuri Kochiyama from my father, another Nisei (second generation Japanese American) political activist, who lives in Berkeley about a mile from where Yuri was living. I didn’t know Yuri well, having only met her once when we were both attending the same program in the Asian American community. Nevertheless, she was the single most prominent individual Asian American activist of the 20th century and her life and politics pioneered the Asian American movement born in the late 1960s.