Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature

(Michael S) #1

Hosokawa, Kumpei William “Bill”
(1915– )
Bill Hosokawa was born and raised in Seattle.
Although he began speaking English only in kin-
dergarten, he took an early interest in reading and
sports. As a teenager, he spent several summers
working in Alaskan canneries. In 1933 Hosokawa
entered the University of Washington to study
journalism, despite being warned that no newspa-
per would hire a Japanese American. Soon after,
he took part-time employment with a local nisei
newspaper, The Japanese-American Courier. In
1937 Hosokawa earned his bachelor’s degree. After
a brief period of working for the Japanese consul-
ate in Seattle, he moved to Singapore to found an
English-language newspaper, the Singapore Herald.
In 1940 he migrated to Shanghai, where he wrote
for the Shanghai Times and the Far Eastern Review.
He returned to Seattle in October 1941 and was
rehired by the Japanese-American Courier.
In spring 1942, Hosokawa was incarcerated by
the U.S. federal government with other Japanese
Americans, first at Puyallup Assembly Center, then
at Heart Mountain, where he was named editor of
the inmate newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sen-
tinel. Despite the privations of camp existence,
Hosokawa enjoyed the position. In October 1943,
Hosokawa resettled in Des Moines, Iowa, and was
hired as copy editor by the Des Moines Register.
Three years later, he was engaged as copy editor
and reporter by the Denver Post. Hosokawa re-
mained with the newspaper until 1983, serving
successively as Korean War correspondent, editor
of the Post’s Sunday magazine Empire, and as-
sociate editor. In 1977 Hosokawa was named the
Post’s editorial page editor. After leaving the Post,
Hosokawa worked for the Rocky Mountain News,
retiring in 1992. Meanwhile, he remained active in
a nisei political organization, Japanese American
Citizens’ League (JACL), and wrote articles and
a weekly column, “From the Frying Pan,” for its
weekly newspaper, The Pacific Citizen.
In the mid-1960s, the directors of the Japanese
American Research Project at UCLA persuaded
Hosokawa to write a history of Japanese Ameri-
cans using the materials the project had amassed.
The product was Hosokawa’s 1969 book, Nisei:


The Quiet Americans. Nisei was among the first
mass-market histories of Japanese Americans, and
the first written by a Nisei. Despite the book’s title,
the first third of the text covered issei generations,
and the book was praised for its readable narrative
and rich detail regarding prewar Japanese com-
munities. While Hosokawa was later criticized for
his conservative assimilationist version of history
and for attributing Japanese-American success to
inherited cultural factors, the book was widely ad-
opted as a text in the new field of Asian-Ameri-
can studies. Meanwhile, its popular success helped
bring the story of wartime incarceration to a main-
stream audience. In succeeding years, Hosokawa
cowrote a second history of Japanese Americans,
East to America (1980). He meanwhile published
two other books: The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida
(1972), the story of a nisei forced to fight for Japan
in World War II, and Thunder in the Rockies (1976),
a history of The Denver Post. Hosokawa also re-
leased a volume of favorite Pacific Citizen columns,
Thirty-Five Years in the Frying Pan (1978). Out of
the Frying Pan: Reflections of a Japanese American,
another selection of columns coupled with a brief
memoir, followed in 1998.
Hosokawa gained increased notoriety in Japa-
nese-American circles with a pair of historical
volumes, JACL in Quest of Justice (1982) and They
Call me Moses Masaoka (1985). These twin works,
which appeared at the height of the Japanese-
American redress struggle, represented an “official
history” of the JACL, and seemed designed pri-
marily to answer criticisms of the organization’s
wartime actions—notably the organization’s col-
laboration with the mass removal in 1942. The
books portrayed the JACL and its leaders as civil
rights heroes, and failed to treat adequately ei-
ther conflicts within JACL (including those over
its support of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immi-
gration Bill) or its contested actions. In particu-
lar, Hosokawa did not discuss the wartime draft
resistance campaign of the Fair Play Committee at
Heart Mountain camp or the efforts of JACL lead-
ers to stifle it.
Hosokawa has remained active as a writer. His
book, Colorado’s Japanese Americans: From 1886 to
the Present (2005), mixed a set of individual life

Hosokawa, Kumpei William “Bill” 111
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