Excerpts and Photo from the Denver Post.
Bill Hosokawa, a former Denver Post editor and author who was held by the American government in an internment camp during World War II, died Friday.
Hosokawa, 92, was active in the Japanese-American community and a recipient of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Whitehead award for lifetime service on behalf of those who suffer inequality.
He was a reserved figure working in an occupation known for colorful characters, those who knew him said.
Hosokawa was profoundly affected by his time behind barbed wire in the Heart Mountain Camp in Cody, Wyo., his daughter, Susan Boatright, said Saturday.
“It was a humiliating experience,” she said. “He came away from it not as a bitter man but as someone who wanted to educate the world about that experience and make sure it never happened again.”
Among the books he wrote were “Nisei: The Quiet Americans,” about the prejudice Japanese immigrants and their children faced in the United States.
He was sent from his home in Seattle to the camp in a desolate stretch of Wyoming in 1942, along with his wife and an infant son.
“In the eyes of the government, I was not a native-born American citizen - I was an enemy alien,” he said in an interview years later. “Why? Because my parents were born in Japan, a country with which we were at war.”
While at Heart Mountain, he organized and was the editor of a newspaper distributed to the camp’s residents called The Heart Mountain Sentinel.
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