Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | internment
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November 18, 2007

Bill Hosokawa in 2005, sitting next to a caricature at the Denver Press Club
Bill Hosokawa died of natural causes at age 92 in Sequim, Washington, where he lived with his daughter. He was a pioneering Japanese American journalist, author and diplomat who lived in Denver for 60 years. Those are the facts of Bill's life and death. But there's lots more to Bill than just the facts. I wrote an obituary for Bill that will run in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, the APA civil rights organization. Bill was a leader within the JACL, and a columnist for the PC for decades. I'm the editorial board chair for the newspaper, and a national board member of JACL, and I knew Bill because we'd run into each other at many events in Denver. So it made sense for me to write the obit for the PC. But I also owed it to Bill to write about him because he was a role model for me as a writer -- we both wrote columns for Denver's Japanese community newspaper (he kept his up long after I ran out of juice and got too busy). I wrote about Bill's influence on my career years ago, in one of my columns.

December 7, 2006

I grew up being apprehensive every December 7. I'm Japanese American, and was born long after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, but for a long time I felt an inescapable sense of responsibility for the attack. My early years were spent in a military environment -- my dad was in the U.S. Army. But I still felt... guilty every December when people started mentioning "Pearl Harbor Day" and when I started to hear comments and sometimes jokes about those "sneaky Japs. " Being Japanese American means feeling an ambivalence because for many Japanese Americans, 120,000 of them, December 7, 1941 wasn't just the day Pearl Harbor was bombed and drew the United States into World War II. Japanese Americans were just as outraged at the attack as everyone else in the U.S. -- Daniel Inouye, the senior senator from Hawaii and a WWII veteran and medal of honor recipient, tells the story of being a young man in Honolulu that day, and shaking his fists at the Japanese planes and screaming, "damn Japs!" There's another side to this story.
April 22, 2005

11:00 a.m. Here I sit in my rental car, mere yards from the water. I'm waiting for the Bainbridge Island Ferry in Seattle -- I missed the last one by just seconds and the next one leaves in an hour. Bainbridge Island is the place captured poetically in the book and movie, "Snow Falling on Cedars" (which means, come to think of it, that it snows in Seattle, at least sometimes).
October 18, 2004

Thank you very much, Michelle Malkin. Thanks a bunch for writing your book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror." Thanks for trying to prove that not only was putting Japanese Americans into U.S. concentration camps during World War II the right thing to do, but also urging that the United States use racial profiling as a tool today, against Muslims.