Hattie Kawahara Colton grew up in Portland, the child of Japanese immigrants. She picked strawberries and won a $100 scholarship from The Oregonian to finance her Reed education. She was influenced at Reed by professors George Bernard Noble and Robert Philip Terrill, played women's basketball on the Okayama team, and earned her license to referee basketball professionally from Reed professor Evelyn R. Hasenmayer. In April 1942, she was interned with other Japanese-Americans at the stockyards of the North Portland Assembly Center, where she stayed with her family until September 1942, when they were relocated to Minidoka, Idaho. Armed guards drove her and Ruth Nishino Penfold, class of 1943, and Midori Imai Oller, class of 1942, to the Reed campus to take their final exams. She earned her M.A. from Mt. Holyoke College in 1943 after interviewing Harry S. Truman. She wrote her doctoral thesis on U.S. - Japanese relations, 1931-1941, for which she received her Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota. She was active in politics and ran as a precinct delegate in Detroit for the Democratic Party. She received a Ford Foundation grant to study politics in Japan, where she met her husband, Kenneth E. Colton. She taught for most of her career. In 1989, she received an apology and a $20,000.00 check from the United States government (signed by President George Bush, Sr.) for her wartime incarceration.
