Author Description

From vividly recollected experience, Out of the Frying Pan is a fresh, personal account of one the greatest injustices in 20th-century U.S. History. Bill Hosokawa, this country's leading journalist of Japanese descent, 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, 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 in 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 interment. 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.