Interviews

1. From Reparations to Redress

2. The Strength of Evidence

3. A Reporter’s Responsibility

Hosokawa,Bill

(1915 - 2007) Journalist

A Reporter’s Responsibility

Well, the fence was a very big issue. One of the main causes of resentment in the assembly centers was that they were all fenced in. And when they, these people first came to Heart Mountain, there was no fence surrounding the camp site. There was really no need for a fence. You could walk 20 miles through the sagebrush and not run into anything. And after the camp was pretty well settled, the army decided to put up a barbwire fence around the camp and put up watchtowers. ... As I recall, some of the camp leaders got -- organized a petition-signing campaign, as I recall. And they sent that on to the WRA.

And of course, this was important news. It had to be covered. And we did cover it with a -- it was the top story with a headline all the way across the top of page one. But at the same time, we had the responsibility of not stirring up the anger of the people so that there might be an incident. And that would've been very, very dangerous. So the paper had a responsibility to report the news without being provocative about it. And I think we managed to do that by playing the story right down the middle, the top story on page one. But we reported it objectively, and that satisfied the readership.

fences Heart Mountain Heart Mountain concentration camp imprisonment incarceration newspapers towers United States watchtowers World War II World War II camps Wyoming

Date: July 13, 2001

Location: Washington, US

Interviewer: Alice Ito, Daryl Maeda

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

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)