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WHEN THE STORY OF PATRICIA HEARST'S arrest was reported on September 18, 1975, Wendy Yoshimura's story also appeared-with lesser sensation. Like Hearst, Yoshimura was a fugitive from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), though the charges against her were unrelated to Hearst or the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Yoshimura was charged with conspiracy to bomb a Berkeley naval building and was eventually convicted of three counts of illegal possession of weapons.1 Through connections in the radical underground, Yoshimura was in hiding with Hearst and two SLA members, Emily and William Harris. After their arrest, media attention on Yoshimura often came in the form of side stories, supplementing the news of the notorious kidnapped newspaper heiress who had allegedly converted to the radical beliefs of her SLA captors. But for many Japanese Americans thirty years after World War II and the internment of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast, Yoshimura became a figure through which an emergent community and consciousness could circulate in the public sphere. As expressed by Mike Iwatsubo, a Japanese American insurance broker from Fresno who helped spearhead the Wendy Yoshimura Fair Trial Committee (WYFTC), it was important that Yoshimura was a "name that ha[d] been making headlines recently," even if "this notoriety . . . is because of the linkage to Patty Hearst."2 Here was a person who could not only embody the history of the loss of civil liberties and rights because of her Asian ancestry but who was also, and perhaps more important, notorious.
In constructing Yoshimura as a compelling figure through which to call forth a Japanese American counterpublic, Iwatsubo specifically appeals to kinship based on family and race. As he further explains, "There must be another side of Wendy Yoshimura that has not had the glare of publicity. Wendy cried at jail when she could not hug her parents."3 Not only does Iwatsubo indict the U.S. government for intervening in a Japanese American's embrace of family, he also imagines his own familiarity to Yoshimura: "I for one feel a kinship to Wendy Yoshimura, who through a tragedy of history was born and weaned behind barbed wires in a U.S. run concentration camp."4 There are many reasons why the rhetoric of family is a powerful...