Tak Hoshizaki
Tak Hoshizaki was born on October 3, 1925 in Los Angeles, just east of Little Tokyo. He was in his junior year at Belmont High School when he and family was forced into the detention camp at the Pomona fairgrounds and then moved to Heart Mountain.
Hoshizaki graduated high school inside camp. A half-year later he refused induction and was tried with the other 62 young men for violating the Selective Service Act. He was part of the group that was released from the McNeil Island federal penitentiary on July 14, 1946 -- Bastille Day.
Hoshizaki studied at Los Angeles City College and at UCLA, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in horticulture. In 1953, he was one of about six Heart Mountain resisters who were drafted again for the Korean War -- but this time, with all his rights restored and as a free citizen, he served two years as a medical technician at Camp Hood, Texas. He was honorably discharged and returned to UCLA to earn a Ph.D. in plant physiology. He worked for 13 years as a research scientist at the Space Biology Laboratory at UCLA, and later did research for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developing systems for growing food in outer space and studying the response of plants in weightlessness. He retired in 1989 in Los Angeles with his wife Barbara, a botanical taxonomist.
|
