WASHINGTON — As San Jose Rep. Mike Honda sat down to grab a quick lunch at the Washington Hilton last month, he didn’t look like a man nearing the abrupt and unwelcome end to a 35-year political career.

The 75-year-old Democrat had dropped his final bill in the hopper, a measure that, if passed, would bring 25,000 Syrian children, ages 3 to 10, into the United States over the next three years, to stay until their country’s civil war ends. He then voted with 95 House colleagues against a temporary budget bill that will keep the government running until April 28.

Earlier in the day, Honda had given a speech to the International LGBT Leaders Conference and was preparing to hand his congressional case files over to the team for Fremont attorney Ro Khanna, a fellow Democrat who drubbed Honda, 61 to 39 percent, in the Nov. 8 election for the seat that includes much of Silicon Valley.

“There are things that need to be finished that I just can’t drop,” Honda said. “We’re on the payroll until Jan. 2. We’ve got to give the people their due.”

That’s what Honda, a former science teacher and grade school principal, has been doing since he was first elected to the board of the San Jose Unified School District in 1980.

“I ran for school board because it’s a policy position where I could do something for the kids,” he said. “You’re the person responsible for making policy reflective of the community.”

There’s a 1970s-era Sunnyvale High School yearbook photo floating around of a young Mike Honda, with longish black hair, sideburns and the requisite male teacher’s corduroy sport coat.

“If you had told me then that I’d spend 16 years in Congress, I’d have asked you what you were smoking,” he said.

While Honda still likes to style himself as “a simple schoolteacher,” his political path was anything but an accident. Even before he won his school board seat, he had spent nearly a decade on the San Jose City Planning Commission. He was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 1990 and to the Assembly in 1996. He won the open congressional seat in 2000, after Republican Rep. Tom Campbell left to run unsuccessfully against Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

It’s the type of wide-ranging experience that’s helped him do a job for the South Bay community he’s lived in for more than 60 years, Honda said.

“I was here in ‘the Valley of Heart’s Delight,’” he said, using the old, Chamber of Commerce-approved slogan for the area that decades ago was dominated by mile after mile of fruit trees. “I’ve seen the valley go from cow chips to silicon chips.”

As a congressman, Honda contributed to those changes. He’s been involved in the growth of nanotechnology, introducing bills allowing the government to invest in the young industry and backing efforts to increase research and development. Honda also has been a supporter of network neutrality, a position hailed by much of the Silicon Valley tech community, and backed Apple in its refusal to cooperate with the FBI in decrypting the iPhone of the man involved in the 2015 terrorist attack that killed 14 people in San Bernardino.

Honda also has had to deal with the social costs of that high-tech boom. With South Bay traffic snarled on a daily basis, the congressman, from his spot on the House Transportation Committee, helped pull together more than $400 million for the BART extension to Warm Springs in south Fremont, scheduled to open sometime this year.

But many of his concerns in Congress have dealt with civil rights, an emphasis that has everything to do with his early upbringing.

Honda was born in 1941 in the Sacramento-area town of Elk Grove. Although both his parents were born in the United States, they were pulled from their home after the attack on Pearl Harbor and taken to Colorado’s Amache internment camp for Japanese residents, where Honda spent his early years.

His father was recruited into the military to teach Japanese, but that didn’t change much for his family.

“In a brutal irony, my father wore the uniform of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service while his family lived behind barbed wire in a Colorado internment camp,” Honda wrote in 2011.

His Colorado experience, combined with a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a country that in the late 1960s was staggering toward civil war, helped him see the need to ensure rights for everyone.

In Congress, he has sponsored bills backing LGBT rights, worked to eliminate human trafficking and called on Japan to apologize for its World War II treatment of “comfort women,” women from occupied countries enticed or abducted to serve as prostitutes in military brothels.

More recently, Honda has condemned the call by President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters for a registry of Muslim immigrants, a plan he termed “hate, not policy.”

Honda’s defeat in November was a disappointment but not a shock. Khanna had lost a close race to Honda in 2014 and never really stopped campaigning.

“I knew there was going to be a problem when I only won by four percentage points” in 2014, Honda said. “I thought Ro would take another shot at it, and I was right.”

He wasn’t helped by a congressional ethics investigation into charges that he had used his congressional staff for political purposes. The investigation still hasn’t been completed, but Khanna used it to hammer Honda throughout the campaign as a corrupt political insider.

Combine that with the 40-year-old Khanna’s none-too-veiled suggestion that Honda was too old and too out of touch tech-wise to represent Silicon Valley, and Honda’s race was uphill all the way. He finished second in the June primary, and the numbers only got worse from there.

“Over time, it all took its toll,” he said. “But that’s politics.”

But now Honda will be doing his work from his San Jose home. He’s got some interests, such as looking at ways to better prepare young children for school. He also plans to continue work on efforts to increase screening for hepatitis B, an often symptomless disease that disproportionately affects Asian Americans.

He’s also looking to work on his personal life, which he said has often has been put on hold during his time in Washington.

“After 16 years, I’ve got no regrets,” he said. “Now I may do some fishing again.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth