 She encountered and became involved in radical politics during her last year of art college as a result of meeting Willie Brandt, founder of the Revolutionary Army in Berkeley, California.Yoshimura was born at the Manzanar Internment Camp for Japanese Americans where her American-born parents were incarcerated.After the war the Yoshimura family moved to Etajima, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima, where her father worked for the Allied Occupation forces.