Internment Locations
Arrested: September 1942
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
September 1942 - March 1943
Forty-two Issei men were sent in the eighth transfer group for incarceration in U.S. Army and Department of Justice camps on the Mainland. The internees were sent together from camp to camp. Some were paroled to War Relocation Authority camps and reunited with family members under confinement, others were transferred for repatriation to Japan.
Sharp Park Detention Station, California
March 1943 - August 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
August 1943
Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Texas
March 1945 - December 1945
Repatriated to Japan: December 1945
In 1942, after 35 years of living in the Hawaiian Islands, rice salesman Yaichiro Akata was arrested, forcibly removed from Hawaii, and incarcerated on the U.S. continent. Two of his sons, Tsutomu and Sukuu Henry Akata, also were arrested and imprisoned on the mainland.
The family, including Akata's wife and four younger children, was reunited at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s “enemy aliens” camp at Crystal City, Texas in 1945. In December, Akata repatriated to Japan, taking his family with him. There, in his native Fukuoka Prefecture, he worked as a farmer on land inherited from his father.
In 1947, the U.S. government's Alien Property Custodian seized Akata's modest house and property in the Nuuanu section of Honolulu, citing its ownership by an enemy residing in Japan. The government agency then sold the property the following year. Akata returned to Honolulu in 1952 and filed a lawsuit seeking return of his property, claiming, as he had at the time of his incarceration, that he had not done anything in support of the Japanese war effort.
Two years later, a federal court ruled in his favor, ordering the U.S. government to restore Akata's home and land, valued at $19,000. The court found that Akata’s incarceration and forced removal from Hawaii “infected whatever actions he took thereafter” and that had it "not been for his involuntary internment as a consequence of World War II," Akata would not have made the decision to repatriate, thus paving the way for the government’s improper seizure of his property. The ruling in Akata’s case was the first of its kind involving the impact of repatriation on World War II internees.