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A former Minidoka inmate she came back to Seattle with her husband after the war and joined the local Japanese American Citizens League. She was chapter president by the time the redress movement began to gain steam in the 1970s . Cherry helped get the grassroots movement off the ground, took the lead in preparing the community for the CWRIC hearings, and was heavily involved in lobbying for redress and reparations.

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Her father was arrested shortly after Pearl Harbor. After six weeks in detention, which aggravated existing health conditions, Kochiyama’s father died upon his release. Imprisoned in Jerome, Arkansas, during the war, she relocated to New York with her family and adopted increasingly radical political views as she became active in Asian Americans for Action (AAA) and other civil rights organizations. Kochiyama came into contact with the civil rights movement through Malcolm X, and she continued to work with black nationalist groups well past his 1965 assassination—supporting political prisoners and building coalitions between black and Asian American activists. She also advocated for nuclear disarmament, an end to the Vietnam War, Japanese American redress, Puerto Rican independence, and many other issues until her death in 2014.

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Aki grew up in a diverse neighborhood in Seattle. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was sent to a wartime camp. Then, she left the camp to go to college. After the war, she returned to Seattle and became a teacher.

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She was sent to a camp at 15. She continued studying for school in camp and won multiple academic awards. She left the camp to major in biology, but she got tuberculosis. She moved to New York and became a costume designer, and later shifted her focus to investigating the untold stories of the camps. Then, she wrote a book about it.

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In the 1960s, she joined Asian Americans for Action (AAA).
In 1978, she investigated the wartime camps and uncovered evidence disproving government claims of “military necessity.” Her findings were the foundation of the report leading to the redress bill, as well as the coram nobis cases that overturned convictions for challenging the exclusion.