The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

This paper comprises two parts: in the first, I analyze how the state utilizes reparations to perpetuate their antiblack and imperialist violence. I closely read Japanese American reparation testimonies, testimony guidelines, and other documents to argue for Japanese American reparations as a site for not representing truth but producing it. Drawing primarily on the works of The Honorable Sylvia Wynter, I show that the state imposes a temporal structure on Japanese Americans' experiences to engulf them within the surrounding antiblack and neoliberal model minority myth. My paper then turns to the praxis and speeches of Yuri Kochiyama to understand modes of experiencing that contest the state’s imposition. I argue that reparations and experiencing the past are not temporally stable, and by reading her diary entries to her biography, I demonstrate that her experience of the past shifts throughout her growing interaction with revolutionary politics. I trace Kochiyama’s subjectivity across various social and political spaces, such as the black nationalist Republic of New Afrika and the Asian Americans for Action. By analyzing Kochiyama’s reparations testimony and how she contests the state’s imposition of time and the model minority myth, I argue that Kochiyama can help reimagine reparations beyond the state’s time.