Bill Hosokawa - Career

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 were 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 forty 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 Post's Sunday magazine for twenty-five years.

He left the Denver Post in 1984 and took a position as the reader ombudsman at the Rocky Mountain News, which is 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.

Hosokawa worked to promote opportunities from Nisei and Sansei Japanese Americans during his career. He often helped Japanese Americans, as well as recent immigrants, find jobs and counseling. According to the Rocky Mountain News, Hosokawa once even gave away his living room couch to a couple who needed it. He also worked to promote positive Japan – United States relations. He served as the Honorary Consul General of Japan for Colorado from 1976 until 1999.