Real Life: Survival Stories

You find the garage key in your pocket - do you drive to Berkeley?

Real Life: Survival Stories

Show Notes

A woman born at Manzanar wakes up thirty years later with a garage key in her pocket - what do you do?

You find the garage key in your pocket - do you drive to Berkeley?

In this episode, we follow the life of Wendy Yoshimura from her birth inside the Manzanar internment camp to her years in the Bay Area counterculture and the day police discovered explosives in a Berkeley garage she had rented. The episode traces the choices, movements, and affiliations that put her name on an explosive investigation and asks what separates proximity from culpability.

Person: Wendy Yoshimura Date: January 17, 1943 (birth) and March 31, 1972 (garage discovery) Location: Manzanar; Berkeley; San Francisco (625 Morse Street) Event: Police discovered a garage containing dynamite, blasting caps, a machine gun, and kidnapping/assassination notes Topic: Association with Willie Brandt and the Revolutionary Army; underground networks of the 1970s

- Born inside the barbed wire of Manzanar, returned to the U.S. at thirteen and was placed in second grade for not speaking English. - Graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley and moved through Bay Area counterculture during the Vietnam era. - Rented a Berkeley garage on Hearst Avenue that police later described as a “massive bomb factory.” - Police found explosive materials, a machine gun, and handwritten plans targeting Robert McNamara and UC Berkeley at that garage. - At the time of the March 31, 1972 raid, Wendy was not at the garage and was later found living under a false name in a San Francisco apartment.

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