Friday, November 21, 2008
Hattie Kawahara Colton, 87, a retired associate dean of the Foreign Service Institute, a State Department-run foreign policy training center, died Nov. 17 at Carriage Hill nursing home in Bethesda. She had coronary artery disease.
She was a first-generation Japanese American, and her college career in her native Portland, Ore., was interrupted when she was forcibly relocated with her family to an internment camp in Idaho during World War II.
The federal government at the time considered people of Japanese descent security threats.
After she was released, Dr. Colton wrote an essay for Mademoiselle magazine in 1944 titled "I Am an American," which described her emotional connection to American culture.
The mass internment of Japanese Americans was "a great blow to our security and hopes," she wrote, "but we never lost faith in the country which is our home."
Dr. Colton worked for the State Department from the early 1960s until retiring in 1989. She spent much of her career at the Foreign Service Institute, where she was a Far East specialist.
Hattie Masuko Kawahara had attended Reed College in Portland for three years when, in 1942, she was sent to the internment camp.
She was released with help from the American Friends Service Committee and enrolled at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1943 and a master's degree in political science in 1945.
She received a doctorate in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1949 and later received a Fulbright Scholarship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to visit Tokyo for research on the legislative process in Japan.
While in Tokyo, she and her future husband taught at the International Christian University. They settled in the Washington area in 1958.
Her honors included the State Department's Superior Honor Award and a Mount Holyoke recognition as one of its 50 most outstanding graduates.
Her husband of 41 years, Kenneth Colton, died in 1995.
Survivors include three children, Kendrew Colton of Bethesda, Barbara Colton of Radnor Township, Pa., and David Colton of Falls Church; three sisters; a brother; and four grandchildren.
-- Adam Bernstein