Talk:Yuri Kochiyama

Hello! I am planning on improving this article to hopefully bring it up to GA status as part of WikiProject Women in Green. My main goals are to expand the article and improve its sources. It seems like almost all of the academic scholarship on Kochiyama was written by Diane C. Fujino, so she'll be showing up quite a bit, but I'll also try to include other sources where relevant. I will be working in my sandbox, so there will probably be a huge edit coming through once I'm done. You can check on my progress there. I am a fairly new editor, so I apologize if I make mistakes. If there are issues with my edits, please let me know and we can discuss it here. Thank you! Spookyaki (talk) 03:19, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

:Okay, about to transfer it over. Obviously there will be a lot of major changes. A few quick notes:

:Kochiyama's "Maoism"

:The original article's lead says that Kochiyama held Maoist beliefs. I don't think this is strongly supported by the sources. She was affiliated with various Maoist organizations, some (RAM) more closely than others (RCP, Shining Path) and generally spoke in neutral to positive terms about Mao the person. However, at no point did I see her personal philosophy described as Maoist. Fujino offers the following analysis of Kochiyama's views on Marxism:

:{{blockquote|While refraining from using Marxist language, Yuri believes that many in oppressed U.S. communities support the major premises underlying socialist theory, namely, distributing resources equitably among the people, valuing human rights instead of profits, developing a planned economy so that the needs of the populace could be met, providing nonexploitative jobs, and transferring power from the capitalist class to the working class. While Malcolm X and Robert Williams seemed to adopt some generic form of socialism, it is likely that they were also critical of Marxism for privileging class over race. In following Malcolm X, Williams, and the RNA, Yuri subscribes to the school of revolutionary nationalism that emphasizes race as the primary form of oppression. By contrast, other revolutionary nationalists, particularly those promoting scientific socialism or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, view class exploitation as the main source of oppression, even as they recognize the links between race and class. This theoretical contrast underlies differences in ideology and practice, and there have been major struggles within the revolutionary Blacl movement and among radicals of various backgrounds over the relative importance of class and race. (Fujino 2005, p. 189)}}

:This seem to contradict or at least complicate the idea that Kochiyama was a Maoist, so I have elected to not discuss it in the article.

:Kochiyama's "Islamic beliefs"

:Also mentioned in the lead. This one is more strongly supported. Kochiyama did convert to Islam in 1971, but she deconverted in 1975 (which was not mentioned in the original article). While it seems like she had great respect for Islam, I don't know that it's accurate to her say that her civil rights activism was influenced by her "Islamic beliefs." Their importance was overstated in the original article, which I have tried to correct.

:Shining Path

:I debated on whether or not to call Shining Path a terrorist organization. That is what they are called in Oxford Bibliographies, and they are designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom, and Peru. Subjectively, I think that their activities certainly resemble terrorism. However, they are not explicitly listed as a terrorist organization on their Wikipedia page. It seems probably relevant to mention if they are a terrorist organization, but it's also obviously a loaded term. I don't know. Guidance on this would be appreciated.

:Media Appearances Section

:This section was insufficiently cited and didn't really seem to be particularly necessary for the article, so I removed it.It was just a relatively short list of movies that Kochiyama had appeared in. A lot of them are now mentioned in the "Legacy" section with stronger citations.

:Further reading and external links

:I made some adjustments to the "further reading" and "external links' sections, collapsing them into a single section and changing out some of the links for more relevant ones.

:AllMusic Citation

:I recognize that AllMusic is considered to be a "no consensus" source (WP:ALLMUSIC), and that there are varying views on its reliability, though it is considered a "generally reliable source" by WikiProject Albums. My primary reason for using it was to confirm that the song "Yuri Kochiyama" was on the album Cinemetropolis. The song is discussed elsewhere, but the only semi-reliable source the that said the album it was on (and the year it was released, so I could fit it chronologically) was AllMusic. I can personally confirm that the song does appear on the Spotify release of the album. If the source is problematic, let me know. I will probably just end up removing the entire section about the Blue Scholars if so, unless there are any other suggestions.

:Overreliance on Fujino?

:Again, almost all of the scholarly material on Kochiyama was written by Diane C. Fujino in one way or another. I tried to vary it up as much as I could, but as it stands, would the reliance on Fujino be a problem for a Good Article Review? Would appreciate people's thoughts.

:I think I will pass this off to a peer review before GAR, so expect that soon. Thanks everyone! Spookyaki (talk) 21:05, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

::Actually, might just directly submit for GA review. Spookyaki (talk) 17:23, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

{{Talk:Yuri Kochiyama/GA1}}

{{Template:Did you know nominations/Yuri Kochiyama}}

The problem quote: "Kochiyama was an advocate for political prisoners, including imprisoned members of the civil rights movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and others, helping to found the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners (NCDPP) in the early 1970s."

Specifically, I don't know that anyone in the Puerto Rican independence movement who Yuri Kochiyama (is mentioned as) corresponding with counts as a political prisoner.

The wikipedia page for "Political prisoner" has this to say: "There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although numerous similar definitions have been proposed by various organizations and scholars, and there is a general consensus among scholars that "individuals have been sanctioned by legal systems and imprisoned by political regimes not for their violation of codified laws but for their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations". The status of a political prisoner is generally awarded to individuals based on the declarations of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, on a case-by-case basis."

The only imprisoned Puerto Rican independence movement person mentioned down the article is Lolita Hebron.

So I ask you, in what sense was Lolita Hebron a political prisoner? She fired her gun at a bunch of congress people at the Capitol as part of an armed attack that wounded five congressional representatives. Were there some other Puerto Rican independence people that were imprisoned that the opener refers to? Benevolent Prawn (talk) 04:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

:Sure, so the article references Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores, all of whom were imprisoned for the same armed action in 1954. Lebron is referred to as a "political prisoner" in Fujino's scholarly biography of Kochiyama, Heartbeat of a Struggle ("...famed Puerto Rican independence leader and political prisoner Lolita Lebron...", Fujino 2005, p. 224).

:Given that the primary definition on the Wiki page for political prisoner is "someone imprisoned for their political activity", and that the group undertook the attack on behalf of the Puerto Rican independence movement (Lebron shouted "Viva Puerto Rico Libre" during the shooting and "proclaimed upon arrest 'I came to die for Puerto Rico!'"), I think that the group fits at least one basic definition of the term. I have adjusted the section about Lebron and her allies to make their motivations more clear.

:If there are specific definitions of "political prisoner" that you feel Lebron does not meet, and you have sources that explain them, perhaps these definitions could be added in an explanatory footnote.

:Alternatively, perhaps the phrase "alleged" political prisoners could be used in the lead? Spookyaki (talk) 11:17, 15 January 2025 (UTC)