Internment Locations
Arrested: December 1941
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
A group of 172 Hawaii men (mostly Issei) was sent aboard the military transport ship USS U.S. Grant for internment in U.S. Army and Department of Justice camps on the Mainland. Together, the men were sent from camp to camp.
In June 1943, this transfer group was split into two, with this group sent directly from Camp Livingston to the Santa Fe Camp.
From there, some internees were paroled to War Relocation Authority camps, where they were reunited with family members. Others were transferred for repatriation to Japan.
Angel Island Detention Facility, California
March 1942
Camp McCoy Internment Camp, Wisconsin
March 1942 - May 1942
Camp Forrest Internment Camp, Tennessee
May 1942 - June 1942
Camp Livingston Internment Camp, Louisiana
June 1942
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Texas
March 1943
Returned to Hawaii: December 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.
Arriving in the Hawaiian Islands from his native Hiroshima in 1915, Isao Ichiba first worked as a Japanese language teacher in the Kona district of Hawaii Island. Five years later, he moved to the sugar plantation community of Ewa on Oahu Island and for the next twenty years served as the principal of the Japanese language school there. He also was an active member of the Hawaii Japanese Education Association, an organization of language schools and teachers from throughout the territory.
In the period just before the war, Ichiba participated in a number of U.S. military-support and defense preparedness activities along with other plantation community leaders. One of the last of these events occurred in November 1941, just several weeks before the Pearl Harbor bombing, when the community honored U.S. Army inductees from the Ewa plantation town.
Along with Ichiba, several other teachers at the Ewa Japanese school were incarcerated during the war. They included Ichiba's wife, Misao Ichiba, Kotaro Taira, and Yoshiyasu Terao.