Internment Locations
Arrested: May 1942
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was among 39 men (mostly Issei) who were sent on the fourth 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.
Also sent on the same ship were six Issei women internees: Kiku Horibe, Miyuki Kawasaki, Yoshie Miyao, Yuki Miyao, Haru Tanaka, and Tsuta Yamane. The women were kept apart from the men and had a different internment sequence from them.
Angel Island Detention Facility, California
June 1942 - July 1942
Lordsburg Internment Camp, New Mexico
July 1942 - June 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
June 1943 - October 1945
Returned to Hawaii: November 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with 450 other internees aboard the military troopship the Yarmouth.
Nanshin Okamoto came to the islands from his native Okinawa as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest. In the 1920s, he started a Japanese language school in Huelo on Maui island, and in 1932, he established the Rinzai Zen Mission of Paia.