C. Doris Hoshide, 99, dies; Map Service translator

C. Doris Hoshide was sent to a World War II internment camp in Wyoming, where she worked as an elementary school teacher. (Family Photo)

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

C. Doris Hoshide, 99, who became a translator for the Army Map Service after she was released from a World War II-era internment camp for Japanese Americans, died of respiratory failure May 12 at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville.

Mrs. Hoshide was among more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in camps during the war, ostensibly because they were considered a threat to national security. In 1942, she was sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center in north-central Wyoming, where she worked as an elementary school teacher.

The following year, she was allowed to leave Heart Mountain to work in Cleveland for the Army Map Service. After the war, she moved to the agency's Washington headquarters and became a geographic research specialist. She transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961 and retired in 1972.

Mrs. Hoshide wore an ever-present smile, said family friend Frank H. Wu, a professor at Howard University's law school. She did not often speak about the irony of having spent 30 years working for the government that had once imprisoned her. But in 2001, less than two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she told a Washington Post reporter that she could relate to Arab Americans' fears that they would be treated as enemies by their countrymen. That's what had happened to her.

"All our freedom was gone because people compared us to people from Japan," she said. "We had nothing to do with Japan; we were Americans."

Chiyoko Doris Aiso was born Jan. 2, 1911, in South Pasadena, Calif. She was a nisei, the child of immigrants from Japan, whose father worked in construction and whose mother was a teacher. When she was a girl, she and her family often went by horse and buggy to the beach, where her parents dove for abalone.

She graduated from high school in Hollywood and entered the University of California at Los Angeles, where she changed her major from education to geography after she was advised that Japanese could not get teaching jobs. Barred from Greek sororities because of her heritage, she became one of the first members of Chi Alpha Delta, a first-of-its-kind Asian American sorority.

She graduated in 1934 and moved to Seattle, where she worked as a youth director at a Methodist church and met her husband-to-be, Toshio Hoshide. He would also be interned at Heart Mountain and became a cartographer for the Army Map Service. He died in 1997 after 62 years of marriage.

The couple, who settled in Rockville, were among the first of a wave of Japanese Americans who came to the Washington area after the war, said Wu, who wrote about Asian American history in his book "Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White."

"A little community sprang up in the late '40s and early '50s in Washington," Wu said. "They were the people who greeted others when they got here."

Mrs. Hoshide had no immediate survivors but remained close with many local families, who knew her as Aunt Doris. She received a silver pin in recognition of her service with the Japanese American Citizens League and was an honorary board member of the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation, for which she volunteered as a fundraiser.

She served as a board member of the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation and was a member of the Ikenobo Ikebana Society, a Japanese floral-arrangement group. She established endowments at her alma mater for two undergraduate scholarships as well as a prize for distinguished teaching in Asian American studies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/17/AR2010051703899.html