Out of the Frying Pan: Reflections of a Japanese American

From vividly recollected personal experiences, Out of the Frying Pan is a fresh, personal account of one of the greatest injustices in 20th-century U.S. history. Bill Hosokawa, this country's leading Japanese American journalist, tells how he, his wife, and their infant child were herded into a U.S. World War II relocation camp in Wyoming.

After graduating from the University of Washington, the young Bill Hosokawa gained prominence as a reporter for the Singapore Herald, the Shanghai Times, and the Far Eastern Review. However, his interment during World War II abruptly put his budding journalism career on indefinite hold. To his good fortune, he found work at The Denver Post after the war, where he rose through the ranks from copy desk chief to associate editor and editor of the editorial page. And despite his temporary imprisonment, Hosokawa managed to begin publishing his popular "From the Frying Pan" column (many selections are reproduced within this volume)! in the Pacific Citizen in the early days of World War II, a column he wrote without interruption for over fifty years.

In Out of the Frying Pan, Hosokawa offers his insights on the gradual reassimilation of the Japanese American community into the mainstream of American life after the bitterness of internment. Bringing his narrative into the present, he examines with humor and insight the current place occupied by Japanese Americans in the larger culture of our nation. A searching and insightful memoir from an extraordinary man, Out of the Frying Pan is a significant statement on the state of race relations in the U.S. today.

Bill Hosokawa is a native of Seattle. In 1946 he joined THE DENVER POST, where he worked until his retirement. He is the author of NISEI (William Morris, reprinted by the University Press of Colorado), THIRTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE FRYING PAN, THE TWO WORLDS OF JIM YOSHIDA, THE URANIUM AGE, and five other books including the definitive history of THE DENVER POST, THUNDER IN THE ROCKIES.