Group Media & Photos
Undated. Front Row (L-R): Yokichi Tasaka (1st). Back Row: Ishichi Matsuda (1st), Miyakichi Ota (7th), Kazuyuki Kawano (9th), Katsuichi Kawamoto (10th). JCCH/Takuzo Kawamoto Collection.
Internment Locations
Arrested: December 1941
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was in the first group of 172 men (mostly Issei) who were sent aboard the military transport ship U.S. Grant for internment in U.S. Army and Justice Department camps on the Mainland. The internees were sent together from camp to camp, with some paroled to War Relocation Authority camps to reunite with family or 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 - June 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
June 1943 - September 1943
Repatriated to Japan: September 1943
Included among the repatriates who left from New York on the M.S. Gripsholm were 72 Hawaii internees and their families.
Ishichi Matsuda immigrated to the islands from his native Yamaguchi Prefecture. After serving out his three-year contract on the Wainaku Sugar Plantation on Hawaii Island, he moved to Oahu, where he eventually opened a grocery shop, the I. Matsuda Store, at A'ala Market in downtown Honolulu. He also supplied produce for the Japanese imperial naval training ships that frequented the islands.
Interned to the Mainland, Matsuda repatriated to Japan in 1943. His family remained in the islands and he returned to Hawaii in the 1950s.