My father, Bill Hosokawa (1915–2007), was a prolific Japanese American journalist and author who chronicled the history of Japanese Americans. He documented the experiences of Issei and Nisei related to Executive Order 9066 in his books Nisei, The Quiet American, JACL In Quest of Justice, and Colorado’s Japanese Americans. Despite his body of published work, my dad (like many Issei and Nisei) avoided discussing the emotional impact of forced relocation, uncertainty, and distrust during and after World War II.
He was an editor and columnist for The Denver Post for 38 years yet rarely used his editorial column for personal discussions. One exception was the following piece that he wrote in the form of a letter to me. In it, my dad describes Christmas at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, where he and his family were incarcerated during the war. It captures the authentic spirit of the holidays.
2024 has been a difficult year. I offer my dad’s 1977 Christmas column “When the Grayness Left Heart Mountain” as a reminder of the true character of Americans.
* * * * *
Dear Mike:
A long time ago, when you were just a toddler, you were a small part of a dramatic Christmas experience. Of course you were too young to remember, but it is worth knowing about so let me tell you the story now.
It was Christmas of 1942, just 35 years ago and not a happy time for a world at war. It was a particularly depressing period for your mother and me who, along with you and 10,000 other people were living in a place called Heart Mountain, Wyoming. This community was made up of row on row of black tar paper-covered barracks. It was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers so we couldn’t get out.
We were there because our country, in its infinite ignorance, figured we could not be trusted to be loyal because our forebearers had migrated to the United States from Japan. So, without bothering to make formal charges, the government suspended our constitutional rights and forced 118,000 of us Japanese Americans out of our homes and into 10 concentration camps in the desert West.
Out of our barracks window we could see only gray sand, scudding gray clouds, and gray sagebrush that stretched to the gray horizon. Our cubicle had gray wallboard on four walls and ceiling and a floor gray with desert dust ground into it.
As Christmas approached, we tried to make our lives brighter with little gifts purchased through mail order houses, even a little tree of sagebrush draped with cotton snow. Yet, the grayness permeated the air, for we were lonely in the midst of the 10,000. It wasn’t longing for any particular friends; it was the hollow, numbing feeling of being outcast, unwanted and forgotten. We were outcast from the home communities where we belonged, our loyalty suspected by our nation in a war emergency, forgotten by our fellow citizens.
On Christmas Eve we went to the mess hall for a party. It was crowded with wide-eyed children and their parents trying to be cheerful as song-leaders struggled almost frantically to whip up the Christmas spirit. Slowly, the crowd warmed up joining in singing the carols we had learned as children in a happier day.
Then, came Santa Claus riding from mess hall to mess hall in an olive government truck. Clad in an ill-fitting red suit, his whiskers awry, he stomped into our mess hall, full of loud cheer. The younger children, you among them, gaped in pop-eyed amazement. Many of the tots were too young to remember previous Christmases, and here was a real live Santa Claus with a great bulging sack on his back.
The gifts were passed out, and there was one for everyone from the youngest child to the oldest grandmother. There were books and toys and games, pictures to hang in bleak barracks, wash clothes and toilet soap, trinkets and useful gadgets, all of them poured into the desert camp by the great, generous heart of fellow Americans who had heard of our plight.
Cards from the donors were enclosed with the gifts. They came from the Joneses, the Smiths and the Browns, and common folk whose names indicated they probably came to America with later waves of immigration. The gifts were from Billings, Montana and Boston, Massachusetts; from a mountain town in New Mexico and an orphanage where the youngsters had saved pennies to buy presents for little evacuee children like you who had no home either.
The grayness left the camp that night and never really returned. It wasn’t due to the presents alone. But, they were symbols to remind us that we no longer were forgotten exiles in our native land. They—the American people—remembered us, and had let us know this with an outpouring of affection from cities and hamlets the country over.
I have never forgotten that night, nor the goodness in the hearts of the people.
Merry Christmas
Dad
*This letter was originally published in The Denver Post's editorial page on December 25, 1977.
© 1977 Bill Hosokawa
