William Kunpei Hosokawa (, January 30, 1915 – November 9, 2007) was an American writer and journalist.
Of Japanese descent, while interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, he was the editor of the internment camp's newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sentinel. After being freed from the camp in 1943, Hosokawa worked as a columnist and editor at The Denver Post for 38 years. He retired from the newspaper industry in 1992, at the age of 77.
Hosokawa was also a prolific author. His best-selling book Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1969) chronicles the experiences of second-generation Japanese Americans, known as Nisei. Hosokawa published his final work, Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present (2005), when he was 90 years old. His other books include Out of the Frying Pan (1998), Thirty-Five Years in the Frying Pan (1978), Thunder in the Rockies (1976), The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida (1972), and The Uranium Age (1955).
Hosokawa was a recipient of the 2007 Civil Rights Award from the Anti-Defamation League.
Early life
Bill Hosokawa was born on January 30, 1915, in Seattle, Washington. His parents were recent immigrants from Japan. His father, Setsugo Hosokawa, who immigrated from Hiroshima, Japan, in 1899 at the age of 15, worked as a migrant farm worker and a railroad section hand in Montana. Hosokawa's parents eventually settled in Seattle.
Hosokawa graduated from Garfield High School in Seattle. He enrolled at the University of Washington, where he earned his bachelor's degree in journalism in 1937. In 1936, while a student at UW, Hosokawa's professor and adviser strongly recommended that he abandon his journalism career goals, because no newsroom would hire a Japanese American.
Career
Hosokawa and his new wife, Alice Miyake, moved to Asia in 1938 because he was unable to land a job at any major metropolitan newspaper in the United States. He found a job working at an English-language newspaper in Singapore. He was later employed by a magazine in Shanghai, China.
Hosokawa's wife returned to the U.S. in anticipation of the birth of their first child. Hosokawa did not see his son, Michael, until the baby was 14 months old. The family lived in Seattle in 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. As a result, Bill Hosokawa, his wife, and the couple's infant son were among 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were sent to Japanese internment camps during World War II.
The Hosokawa family was sent first to an assembly center at the Puyallup, Washington fairgrounds where the family, along with others from the Seattle area, lived in horse stalls while the camps were being built. The family was moved to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming when he was 27 years old. Hosokawa's later writings and news reports were influenced by his time spent interned with fellow second-generation Japanese Americans, who were known as Nisei, and their children, such as his son, who were known as Sansei. Since Hosokawa had journalism and writing experience, he was appointed the editor of the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sentinel.
Hosokawa and his family were released from the internment camp in 1943, so he could work as a copy editor at The Des Moines Register. However, the experience of internment stayed with Hosokawa. For more than 40 years Hosokawa published a column in the Pacific Citizen entitled From The Frying Pan. His column offered his personal observations on the internment of Japanese Americans. His topics included bigotry and what he called "native fascism". His later entries sometimes focused on parenthood and travel, but he usually stayed on the topic of discrimination.
Hosokawa finally received a position with a major metropolitan newsroom after World War II, when he accepted a job with the Denver Post. He served as a war correspondent for the Denver Post during the Korean War and Vietnam War. He also worked at the Post as a columnist, associate editor, and assistant managing editor at the paper. He also held the post of the editor of the Denver Posts Sunday magazine for 25 years.
He left the Denver Post in 1984 and took a position as the reader ombudsman at the Rocky Mountain News, which was the archrival of the Denver Post. He remained with the Rocky Mountain News for eight years, until his retirement from the newspaper business in 1992.