Rocky Mountain Jiho

The Rocky Mountain Jiho/Journal opened in 1962, and was a newspaper published in Japanese and English. Early-on it featured a weekly article by Journalist Bill Hosokawa (pictured here).

INTERVIEW WITH HIROKO HANSEN

My parents started the newspaper called the Rocky Mountain Jiho, and that was a weekly paper. Um, uh, it was English and Japanese, and I think people remember Rocky Mountain Jiho as a, a, uh, English paper, because the readership were, uh, in the community were, um, younger, uh, readers. And then there were [a] few Japanese.

Uh, so Japanese were, um, mainly the first generation or the second, mostly first generation from California, also from Japan directly too, uh, that came to Denver. And it was basically community, um, um, news about what was going on in the community, in the tri-state area with the, uh, the Denver Buddhist temple and the Simpson Methodist church.

And it was, um, I would say readership was, um, little over 2,000. I have a younger sister and we both were involved in it. And then, um, so, uh, whenever it was close to the deadline, we had to make up the, um, ads and then we would have little clippings and, and paste it on and we didn't have those, uh, glues then. So we had to struggle with that. And then once a year, just, uh, we would issue a New Year issue. Um, it took us probably about three nights of nonstop, almost no sleep to get that out. And then, uh, it was, I would say about 12 pages, uh, of the, or more, uh, depending on how much ad that we had. So we would have to make individual ad for, um, families.

And then this was important, because a lot of the people are dependent on reading the New Year issues and, um, finding out, oh, that family is still here, they're over here. And so it was important for the community to, especially the out towners, out of state, uh, families. And then because of the, the Japanese, we called it the Katsuji, um, it would be the, uh, Chinese characters, uh, that the typist would pick up and then it would type, but then a lot of the headlines were hand picked. All the huge characters. So we had a whole tray of the Chinese characters and then they would set it up and then, uh, I, it would be printed. And so that was a big challenge and we had to have that person also the typist and the Katsujii, uh, pick.