My actress friend Michi Kobi died on March 1 at age 91. For most of her long life, her internment during World War II weighed on her. It was what Fortune magazine in its April 1944 issue plainly called "U.S. imprisonment of persons of Japanese descent."
I knew about that part of her life during my three-decade-long friendship with her. But inattentive as I am, it only recently occurred to me, for example, that the artist she had taken me to meet in the 1980s, in Upper Manhattan, must have been Mine Okubo. Famed for her drawings of her internment, "Citizen 13660," Okubo, too, had been in the Topaz War Relocation Center as Michi had.
Yes, I knew Michi was an actress. But, again inattentive in the familiarity of friendship, I never asked her about her acting career in any significant way. One question I remember asking was a tease: What about your relationship to Isamu Noguchi? Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Li Xianglan) married the sculptor when she was appearing on Broadway as Shirley Yamaguchi but divorced him, it is said, because he had such a rigid notion of what a Japanese woman was or wasn't like. Michi's response was: "Oh, he was just a friend."