Hohri, William Minoru, 1927-2010

Biography / Administrative History

William Hohri, the youngest of six children, was born in 1927 in San Francisco, California to Issei parents. His mother, a picture bride, and his father, a Christian missionary, immigrated in the United States in 1922. At the age of three, they fell ill with tuberculosis and Hohri and two siblings were sent to Shonien, an orphanage formerly located in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hohri remained at Shonien for three years and recalls this as a very negative, but important time of his life. At the age of six, he was reunited with the rest of his family in Sierra Madre, California. The family moved frequently during Hohri's childhood, but finally settled in the Sawtelle area of West Los Angeles and North Hollywood.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hohri's father was arrested and detained in Fort Missoula, Montana until he was sent to Manzanar. On April 3, 1942, Hohri and the rest of his family were sent to Manzanar where they were detained until August 25, 1945. In 1944, Hohri graduated from high school and left Manzanar and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. In March 1945, he attempted to visit his father, but was jailed for traveling without a permit (despite the rescindment of the exclusion order in January 1945) and forced to leave the state at gunpoint under an individual exclusion order. Hohri has stated that it is incidents like these that fueled the redress movement.

Hohri graduated from the University of Chicago and in 1951, he met his wife Yuriko in Chicago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Hohri actively participated in anti-war protests and civil rights rallies as a member of the United Methodist Church. After participating in the Iva Toguri campaign, he began his involvement in the redress movement. In May 1979, Hohri and others founded the National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR). Although Hohri initially worked with the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), he and the NCJAR definitively split in May 1979 after the JACL moved towards supporting a congressional commission to study the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. In 1983, Hohri and twenty-four plaintiffs sought redress through the courts and filed a class-action lawsuit against the government for 27 billion dollars in damages. The Supreme Court heard the case in 1987 but the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed the case in 1988. The NCJAR disbanded soon thereafter. Nevertheless, as Mitch Maki and other scholars of redress have pointed out, the NCJAR lawsuit contributed significantly to the redress effort. The archival research conducted for the lawsuit (by Aiko and Jack Herzig) uncovered valuable documentation of constitutional and civil rights injustices. Furthermore, the suit and the large monetary sum attached to it may have also made Congress more amenable to the passage of redress legislation, which included a substantially smaller financial award.

From the guide to the William Hohri papers, 1937-1988, (bulk 1942-1946 and 1981-1983), (Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, Calif.))