Internment Locations
Arrested: December 1941
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
A group of 172 Hawaii men (mostly Issei) was sent aboard the military transport ship USS U.S. Grant for incarceration in U.S. Army and Department of Justice camps on the Mainland. Together, the men were sent from camp to camp.
In June 1943, this transfer group was split into two, with this group sent directly from Camp Livingston to the Santa Fe Camp.
From there, some internees were paroled to War Relocation Authority camps, where they were reunited with family members under confinement. Others were 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 - August 1942
Sent Back to Hawaii: August 1942
This internee was part of a group of about nineteen internees (all Nisei, likely mistaken for Issei) who were returned to Hawaii in August 1942. Some spent the rest of their incarceration in Hawaii, while others were sent once again to the Mainland but this time to War Relocation Authority camps.
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
August 1942 - March 1943
Honouliuli Internment Camp, Oahu Island
March 1943 - November 1944
Transferred to the Mainland: November 1944
Tule Lake Segregation Center, California
November 1944 - November 1945
In the 1920s, Masao Sakamoto donated to the Nichiren Buddhist mission in Honolulu a taiko drum. By 1944, the drum was in the care of Soto Zen Buddhist bishop, Zenkyo Komagata, then a prisoner at the Honouliuli Internment Camp on Oahu Island.
Sakamoto, now at his seventh place of incarceration, was a prisoner at Honouliuli as well. In August of that year, during the Obon season of Buddhist ancestral rites, Komagata led a service at the Honouliuli camp and beat upon Sakamoto's taiko drum.
In the decades after the war, the drum's disposition remained 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 (a nickname) -- a tangible reminder of Hawaii's Japanese American incarceration.