Internment Locations
Arrested: September 1942
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
Twenty-three Issei men were sent aboard the U.S. Army transport ship the Ernest Hinds 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.
Also in this transfer group were two Issei women: a nun, Kanzen Ito, and a physician, Ishiko Mori. The women were kept apart from the male internees and had different confinement sequences from them.
Sharp Park Detention Station, California
Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Texas
June 1944
Repatriated to Japan: December 1942
Twenty-seven-year-old Kanzen Ito arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in July 1940 and was one of three women to take up positions as Buddhist priests at the Soto Zen temple in Paia, Maui Island. By late 1942, she and the temple's head minister, Sokan Ueoka, had been arrested and sent to the continent for incarceration.
Ito was one of only eight Hawaii women who were arrested and sent to the continent for wartime confinement. The eight were unlike the women who entered Mainland concentration camps as a way to reunify their families, for these eight women had been arrested and incarcerated. Kanzen Ito and physician Ishiko Mori were sent to the continent with the Seventh Transfer Group. Six women had been sent several months earlier in the Fourth Transfer Group; they were Kiku Horibe, Miyuki Kawasaki, Yoshie Miyao, Yuki Miyao, Haru Tanaka, and Tsuta Yamane.
In addition to the Paia priests, many other Soto Zen ministers from throughout the islands were confined during the war. They included the sect's bishop, Zenkyo Komagata, and priests Shunan Fujisawa, Zenkai Kokuzo, Gyokuei Matsuura, Koetsu Morita, Hozui Nakayama, Kosan Nishizawa, Gijo Ozawa, Tetsuo Tanaka, Taiyu Toda, and Kogan Yoshizumi.