BILL HOSOKAWA PAPERS

William “Bill” Kumpei Hosokawa was born in Seattle, Washington, on January 30, 1915, to first-generation, Japanese American parents Setsugo and Kimiyo Hosokawa. The couple immigrated to the United States from a small village near Hiroshima, Japan, in 1899.

Bill Hosokawa graduated from Seattle’s Garfield High School in 1932. With ambitions of becoming a journalist, he worked part-time at the Japanese American Courier, a weekly Seattle newspaper, while attending the University of Washington. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism in 1937. After graduation, Hosokawa took a secretary position at the Japanese Consulate in Seattle, as he had difficulty finding employment in the field of journalism.

On August 28, 1938, Hosokawa married Alice T. Miyake (1917-1998) of Portland, Oregon. The couple went on to have four children together: Dr. Michael C. Hosokawa, Susan Hosokawa Boatright, Peter E. Hosokawa (1948-2007), and Christie Hosokawa Harveson. Shortly after marrying, the couple moved to Singapore, where Hosokawa worked as managing editor for the English language newspaper, the Singapore Herald. In 1940, sensing that political tensions in Singapore were increasing, Hosokawa’s pregnant wife returned to the U.S. to live with relatives. From 1940 to 1941, Hosokawa lived in Shanghai, China, and wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review and Shanghai Times. He returned to Seattle in October 1941, just five weeks before the outbreak of war in the Pacific.

In Seattle, Hosokawa helped form the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) Emergency Defense Council, a group that served as an intermediary between the local government and the area’s residents of Japanese descent. From 1941 to 1942, he served as Executive Secretary for the Seattle JACL.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, Hosokawa, his wife Alice, and their one-year-old son Michael prepared to be forcibly removed by the U.S. government to a temporary detention center. On May 15, 1942, they were sent by bus to fairgrounds in Puyallup, Washington. For three months, the Hosokawa family were incarcerated, along with 7,000 other inmates, in cabins divided into ten-foot living spaces. Hosokawa volunteered for the U.S. Army twice; once after the attack at Pearl Harbor and again while living at the Puyallup Detention Center in Washington. He was rejected both times.

In August 1942, the Hosokawa family was moved to a concentration camp, known as Heart Mountain Relocation Center, in Wyoming. While incarcerated there, Hosokawa edited a weekly newspaper called the Heart Mountain Sentinel, which was printed using the Cody Enterprise’s press. By autumn 1943, the War Relocation Authority began permitting persons with sponsors or leads on jobs to leave the concentration camps for communities throughout the Midwest. During an inspection tour of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Hosokawa met War Relocation Director Dillon S. Myer. Myer contacted Gardner Cowles, owner of the Des Moines Register, and recommended Hosokawa for employment at the newspaper. After 14 months at Heart Mountain, Hosokawa and his family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where Hosokawa worked as a copy editor for the Des Moines Register until 1946.

In 1946, Hosokawa and his family moved to Denver so that he could begin work at the Denver Post. During his 37 years at the newspaper, Hosokawa held a variety of reportorial, editorial, and administrative positions, including copy editor, telegraph editor, make-up editor, Empire magazine editor, executive news editor, assistant managing editor, Sunday editor, columnist, and associate editor (1962-1976). From 1976 until 1983, the last seven years of his tenure, Hosokawa was the Denver Post’s editorial pages editor.

During the Korean and Vietnam wars, Hosokawa was sent to Asia as a correspondent for the Post and produced the “Post Writer at the War Front” and the “Far Eastern Report” news series. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Award in International Reporting for coverage of the Zengakuren student riots in Japan in 1961 and served as a juror for the award in 1968, 1970, 1975, 1976, and 1980.

In addition to the Denver Post, Hosokawa wrote the “From the Frying Pan” column and several editorials for the Japanese Citizen’s League weekly newspaper, Pacific Citizen, from 1942 until 2000. In the February 20, 1987 issue of the Pacific Citizen, Hosokawa explained that the “Out of the Frying Pan” column was named as such, “…because I had escaped from the fire of war in Asia to the frying pan of a concentration camp in my own country.”

Hosokawa also contributed articles to publications including Reader’s Digest (U.S. and Japan editions), Saturday Evening Post, American Legion, and the New York Times. He was a roving editor for Reader’s Digest (Japan edition) from 1984 through 1985, when the magazine ceased publication. From 1985-1992, Hosokawa served as ombudsman for the Rocky Mountain News, writing a weekly column addressing reader concerns about newspaper practices, ethics, and accountability. From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, he was a featured columnist for the Rocky Mountain Jiho and Rafu Shimpo.

In addition to being a journalist, Hosokawa taught journalism courses at the University of Colorado (1974-1976), University of Northern Colorado (1973-1975), and University of Wyoming (1985). He was active in several professional journalist and author organizations, acting as president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors (1956), Colorado Authors’ League (1978-1979), and the Colorado Freedom of Information Council (1988-1990). Hosokawa was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and served on several Society committees related to awards, ethics, and international relations. He was a board member for the Advisory Council of Technical Journalism at Colorado State University and the National Writers Club (1987-1993). Hosokawa served as a delegate to the Japanese American bilateral meeting of the International Press Institute in 1972, 1973, 1975, 1979, and 1981.

Hosokawa was commended for his work in the field of communications, and his honors included the JACL’s Nisei of the Biennium Award (1958); the University of Colorado’s Outstanding Journalist Award (1967); the National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Western Heritage Award (1967); the American Jewish Committee’s Media Award (1976); Denver Press Club’s Colorado Communicator of the Year Award (1985); the Asian American Journalists Associations’ Pioneer Journalist Award (1988); and the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists’ Lowell Thomas Award (1990). Hosokawa was chosen to be featured on the Newseum’s News History Wall in 1997, and was inducted into the Denver Press Club’s Hall of Fame that same year. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors’ Hall of Fame.

From 1965 to 1979, Hosokawa served on the Executive Board of the JACL’s Japanese American Research Project (JARP), a project co-founded with the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1962. Originally, the project was established to produce a scholarly publication on first-generation Japanese Americans, known as "Issei." The project, however, yielded two monographs; the first being Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1969). The book was initially met with controversy, as some JACLers believed its title perpetuated negative racial stereotypes of Japanese Americans. Despite the controversy, the title remained, the book was met with critical and commercial success, and its publisher, William Morrow and Company, issued a second edition in 1976. The University Press of Colorado published a revised version of Nisei in 1992 and 2002.

JARP produced a second book in 1980, called East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States by Dr. Robert Arden Wilson and Bill Hosokawa. Although Dr. Wilson was originally charged with writing the manuscript, JARP hired Hosokawa in 1979 to take on the task of rewriting Wilson’s manuscript after the project became overrun with delays. Two years earlier, the JACL had contracted Hosokawa to write the story of the organization’s history as part of the Masao W. Satow Memorial Project. The project yielded JACL In Quest Of Justice, published in 1982.

Other books that Hosokawa authored include Thunder in the Rockies (1976), Thirty-five Years in the Frying Pan (1978), Old Man Thunder: Father of the Bullet Train (1997), Out of the Frying Pan (1998), and Colorado’s Japanese Americans: 1886 to the Present (2005). He co-authored books with Jim Yoshida (The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida, 1972) and Mike Masaoka (They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga, 1987).

Hosokawa’s books and articles centered on the subject of Japanese Americans and the challenges they have faced, primarily focusing on the World War II era of incarceration and the community’s subsequent post-war civil rights movement. While Hosokawa was initially a critic of the redress movement of the 1970s—an effort to seek restitution for Japanese Americans who had been forced into incarceration camps during World War II—he became a supporter after the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians published their report, Personal Justice Denied, in 1983. The nine-member, federally-appointed commission investigated the circumstances surrounding Executive Order 9066 and conducted eleven hearings in ten U.S. cities from July to December 1981. Over 750 witnesses testified. The Commission’s findings became integral to passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Under the Act, the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund was established, and wartime survivors were issued a formal apology and monetary recompense of $20,000.

Beginning in 1995, Hosokawa became involved in the planning process for the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington, D.C. He served on the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation’s Board of Directors until 2002. Hosokawa largely wrote and edited Patriotism, Perseverance, Posterity: The Story of the National Japanese American Memorial for the Foundation and was consulted on the memorial’s inscriptions.

In addition to his involvement in Japanese American causes throughout his lifetime, Hosokawa worked to strengthen relations between Japan and the U.S. From 1974 to 1999, he served as Honorary Consul General of Japan in Denver. During this period, he contributed to several projects to bolster goodwill and commerce between Colorado and Japan, most notably with the Economic Development Association of Longmont (EDAL), Governor Romer’s Japan Task Force, and the Colorado-Yamagata Sister States Committee. Hosokawa co-founded the Japan America Society of Colorado in 1988. From 1986 to 1992, Hosokawa was a lecturer in Asian Affairs at the University of Denver, where he assisted with the development of a Japanese business and culture certificate program and the administration of the Understanding America exchange program. From 1985 to 1991, Hosokawa served on the Board of Trustees of the Iliff School of Theology.

Hosokawa’s diplomatic efforts were honored several times, most notably with the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Grade by the government of Japan (1987); an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from University of Denver (1990); the Institute of International Education’s World Citizen Award (1991), Denver’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Business Social Responsibility Award (1996); the University of Colorado-Denver’s Distinguished Service Award (1999); the American Civil Liberties Union’s Carl E. Whitehead Memorial Award (2000); and the Anti-Defamation League’s Civil Rights Award (2007).

Bill Hosokawa passed away at his daughter Christie’s home in Sequim, Washington, on November 9, 2007.