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Bill Hosokawa was born in Seattle, WA in 1915. Hosokawa’s interest in journalism started early and while a student at the University of Washington, a faculty adviser urged Hosokawa to drop out of the journalism school "because no newspaper in the country would hire a Japanese boy." Hosokawa rejected the advice, but when he graduated in 1937 he found the professor was right.
Hosokawa went to Singapore in 1938 to help launch an English-language daily. Later he moved to Shanghai, China to work for an American magazine. He returned to Seattle in 1941 just five weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Along with his wife and infant son, Hosokawa was sent to Heart Mountain in Wyoming. There, he was the editor of the camp newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sentinel. Hosokawa was released from camp to work for a paper in Des Moines, IA. In 1946 he moved to Colorado to write for the Denver Post where he remained for 38 years.
Hosokawa also authored books on the internment experience and wrote a column targeting discrimination in the Pacific Citizen for over five decades. Bill Hosokawa died in 2007 at the age of 92. (April 15, 2008)