Internment Locations
Arrested: December 1941
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was among 166 men (mostly Issei) who were sent on the second transfer ship for internment in U.S. Army and Justice Department camps on the Mainland. These men 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 - April 1942
Fort Sill Internment Camp, Oklahoma
April 1942 - May 1942
Camp Livingston Internment Camp, Louisiana
June 1942 - June 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
June 1943 - March 1944
Jerome Concentration Camp, Arkansas
March 1944 - May 1944
Tule Lake Segregation Center, California
May 1944 - November 1945
Returned to Hawaii: December 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.
Rev. Kanryu Mochizuki arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1932 and served as resident minister at the Kapalapala Nichiren Buddhist Temple in Ka'u, Hawaii Island, until his appoinment as bishop of the sect in 1941. He was arrested and interned shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
In August 1944, a Buddhist ancestral service called Obon was conducted at the Honouliuli Internment Camp on Oahu by internee and Soto Sect bishop, Zenkyo Komagata. He beat upon a taiko drum that had been left in his care by Bishop Mochizuki, before the latter's transfer to the Mainland. The drum had been donated in the 1920s to the Nichiren mission by Honolulu building contractor Masao Sakamoto, who also would end up interned during the war, for a while at Honouliuli.
In the decades after the war, the drum's disposition would remain unknown until its discovery in the basement of the Nichiren temple in Nuuanu Valley by a researcher in 2017. Inscribed on the drum is the date of the Obon service as well as the names of four Honouliuli internees: Masao Sakamoto, Sumida Daitaicho (Battalion Commander Sumida, who is likely Shinzaburo Sumida), Minoru Urata, and Gyoso Kodama.