Group Media & Photos

Internment Locations

Arrested: December 1941


Kilauea Military Camp, Hawaii Island


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.


Writing under the pen name Muin, Otokichi Ozaki belonged to one of the many dynamic Japanese poetry societies that gave Hawaii Island the name "Poetry Island" in the years before the war. With the internment of so many Big Island poets, like Rentaro Shito Degawa, Shoichi Gessho Koide, Minoru Koran Murakami, David Shugaku Marutani, Tadasuke Koryu Nakabayashi, Eikichi Seiyu Ochiai, Otokichi Muin Ozaki, Haruto Fuyo Saito, and Shigezo Kasetsu Shigekane, the Hilo societies fell silent, although many of the interned members continued to write throughout their captivity.


Family Torn Apart, edited by Gail Honda, is a collection of Otokichi Ozaki's World War II letters with poetry, published by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i as part of its internment trilogy. The other books in the series are Yasutaro Soga's memoir, Life behind Barbed Wire, and Kumaji Furuya's Internment Odyssey.