Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Bill Hosokawa Interview
Narrator: Bill Hosokawa
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary), Daryl Maeda (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: July 13, 2001
Densho ID: denshovh-hbill-01-0017

BH: One of the first Caucasians I met at the camp was a fellow named Vaughn Mechau, M-e-c-h-a-u. He was a reports officer, former newspaperman, and he and I hit it off very quickly. And when he became aware of my background, he asked me if I would go to work for the, his reports department. And one of the functions of the reports department was to publish a newspaper. That seems to be a contradiction in terms, a newspaper in a concentration camp. But he asked me if I would take the job as, as editor.

I had been afraid in Puyallup, Camp Harmony, that since I was being blackballed, I would not be given any assignment of any consequence in the new camp. And I didn't want to be washing dishes or whatever. And so I was very pleased when Mechau said, "We want to use your experience as a newspaperman to start a newspaper." And we had many conversations. How do you publish a free newspaper in a concentration camp? And we knew that we had to tread a narrow line between asserting ourselves, like I had in the PC columns, and not riling up the people to the point where there would be revolts. So that was the job I had.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.