This text is a part of Missed, a collection of obituaries about exceptional individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
In 1937, Invoice Hosokawa was majoring in journalism on the College of Washington, the place he had began creating a promising portfolio, having written for a number of small Seattle newspapers. So it got here as a shock when a professor of his known as him into his workplace and suggested him to vary his profession plan.
“No American writer is gonna ever rent you,” the professor stated. “We don’t like prejudice and discrimination, however it exists.”
Hosokawa knew that the professor was referring to: Hosokawa was Japanese American. However he spurned the recommendation. He determined, as he stated in a 2001 interview with Densho, a nonprofit that preserves the historical past of Japanese Individuals positioned in incarceration camps throughout World Conflict II: “To hell with that. Why, I’m going to go forward with this and do what I can.”
He would go on to have a decades-long profession in journalism, changing into one of many first editors of coloration at a metropolitan newspaper, The Denver Submit, writing a number of books and utilizing his work to advocate for the rights of Japanese Individuals, even after he was shipped to an incarceration camp by the federal authorities through the struggle.
Kumpei Hosokawa was born on Jan. 30, 1915, in Seattle to Setsugo and Kimiyo (Omura) Hosokawa, immigrants from Japan. His father ran an employment company for Japanese immigrants, and his mom was an artist who labored for a time as a major schoolteacher.
Rising up, he spoke Japanese at residence and didn’t be taught English till he enrolled in class and commenced going by the identify William. He spent summers working in salmon canneries in Alaska.
At Garfield Excessive Faculty in Seattle he was a sports activities editor for the college paper and fell in love with journalism. Shortly after enrolling on the College of Washington, he acquired his first job within the area, reporting for The Japanese-American Courier, a Seattle weekly.
As his faculty professor had predicted, Hosokawa struggled to search out work with a mainstream Seattle newspaper after commencement, so he briefly took a job as a press secretary for the Japanese consulate. The subsequent 12 months, 1938, he moved to Singapore along with his spouse, Alice, for a job as an editor with The Singapore Herald, an English-language newspaper.
He went on to report on political turmoil for the paper, touring to China, Japan and the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in northeastern China. He later moved to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the place he labored for the English-language Shanghai Instances and The Far Japanese Overview. Below the scrutiny of Japanese censors, Hosokawa carried out a fragile balancing act, writing articles that generally approached the road of Japanese propaganda and sometimes went over it.
In 1941, satisfied that struggle between the USA and Japan was imminent, he returned to Seattle. A month later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Within the weeks after struggle broke out, Hosokawa turned lively with the civil rights group Japanese American Residents League. In letters to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, he extolled the loyalty of Japanese Individuals amid rising anti-Japanese sentiment in America. He additionally persuaded The Seattle Instances to print a full-page unfold of images of Japanese Individuals performing on a regular basis actions to indicate that they have been “peaceable, law-abiding” and “constructive,” as he advised Densho.
But he, his spouse and his younger son have been among the many greater than 120,000 Japanese Individuals who have been incarcerated by the federal authorities below Roosevelt’s Govt Order 9066. Within the spring of 1942, they have been despatched to Puyallup Meeting Middle, a unexpectedly constructed camp close to Seattle. Skinny partitions did little to defend inmates from chilly spring rains, and guards patrolled the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter.
His household was later despatched to the Coronary heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming, the place Hosokawa turned the editor of The Coronary heart Mountain Sentinel, a weekly newspaper put out by inmates that lined camp occasions and ran editorials concerning the struggle effort. Regardless of censorship and a meager finances, Hosokawa constructed a readership that prolonged past the camp.
In October 1943, he and his household have been permitted to go away after he was supplied a job as a duplicate editor with The Des Moines Register.
In 1946, shortly after the tip of the struggle, The Denver Submit possession employed a brand new editor and writer, Palmer Hoyt, who needed to dispel the paper’s fame for being anti-Japanese. Hosokawa, now with a household of 4 kids, utilized for a job with paper as a reporter, though not with out some trepidation.
“The Submit had been a horrible newspaper, and it had been very hostile towards minorities,” he advised the Maynard Institute for Journalism Schooling in an interview. “I started to surprise if one man might change the paper and make it into the sort of publication that I’d wish to work for.”
He stated he expressed his issues to Hoyt, who advised him: “You don’t have to fret about that. You’ll go as far on this group as your skills will take you.”
Hoyt stayed true to his promise. He began Hosokawa as a reporter and made him editor of The Submit’s well-respected Sunday journal, Empire. In 1950, Hosokawa was despatched to Korea as a struggle correspondent, and 20 years later he reported from Vietnam through the struggle there. He remained with The Submit for practically 40 years, his final job as editorial web page editor.
In 1983, he moved to the The Rocky Mountain Information, additionally based mostly in Denver, the place he was a reader consultant. He retired in 1992.
From 1942 till 2000, Hosokawa had a daily column, Out of the Frying Pan, in The Pacific Citizen, a newspaper put out by the Japanese American Residents League. Amongst different topics, he wrote about life along with his household, civil rights and Japanese American literature; he was an early champion of John Okada’s landmark 1957 novel, “No-No Boy,” the story of a Japanese American draft resister.
As an creator himself, Hosokawa revealed “Nisei: The Quiet Individuals” (1969), which was among the many first mass-market histories of Japanese Individuals. It portrayed the younger Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Individuals, as overcoming the hardships of incarceration to search out success, calling the expertise a “trial by hearth” from which they emerged “tempered, powerful, resilient.”
Reactions to the guide have been combined. Some lauded it for capturing the neighborhood’s resolute spirit; others stated it soft-pedaled the struggling of the struggle years and promoted mannequin minority myths by attributing Japanese American success to inherited cultural components. Even the title was criticized as evoking silent conformity. But the guide bought effectively.
Hosokawa wrote about 10 extra books, together with one concerning the residents league, “J.A.C.L. in Quest of Justice” (1982) and “They Name me ‘Moses’ Masaoka” (1987, with the J.A.C.L. chief Mike Masaoka). They appeared within the Eighties, on the top of the battle to redress wrongs towards wartime Japanese Individuals, and represented one thing of an official historical past of the J.A.C.L. Whereas effectively researched, the books appeared supposed as an apologia for the group, notably its collaboration with the federal government within the mass removing of Japanese Individuals in 1942.
He additionally wrote “Thunder within the Rockies” (1976), a historical past of The Denver Submit that targeted on Hoyt’s management. Hosokawa was 90 when he revealed his closing guide, “Colorado’s Japanese Individuals” (2005), which recounted the expansion of Japanese communities in cities like Denver because of wartime resettlement.
In retirement, he turned concerned with the Japan America Society of Colorado and the American Civil Liberties Union, which awarded him the Whitehead Memorial prize in 2000 for lifetime service on behalf of victims of inequality. In 1987, the Japanese authorities awarded him the Order of the Rising Solar, one of many nation’s highest honors.
When he was honored by the Anti-Defamation League in 2007, Hosokawa described his life as “a exceptional demonstration of the alternatives accessible to Individuals below our system.”
He died on Nov. 9, 2007, in Sequim, Wash. He was 92.
