Group Media & Photos
Hanzo Shimokawa Alien Registration Card. JCCH/Hanzo Shimokawa Collection.
Kiyoshi Frank Ichikawa (back left) and Hanzo Shimokawa (back right) with three other internees at the Fort Missoula Internment Camp. JCCH/Hanzo Shimokawa Collection.
Fort Missoula Internment Camp, October 1943. Hanzo Shimokawa (back row, 7th from L), Kiyoshi Ichikawa (2nd row, 5th from L). JCCH/Hanzo Shimokawa Collection.
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. This internee was in a sub-group of Second Transfer Group internees who were sent from Livingston to Missoula before being transferred to Santa Fe.
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
Fort Missoula Internment Camp, Montana
June 1943 - April 1944
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
April 1944 - October 1945
Returned to Hawaii: November 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with 450 other internees aboard the military troopship the Yarmouth.
Hanzo Shimokawa was born Hanzo Kurihara in 1889. After earning a teaching certificate, he left Japan at the age of twenty to study art in the United States. He became a Japanese language school teacher instead, first in Laupahoehoe on Hawaii Island and then in Honolulu, where he met a fellow teacher and his future wife, Shigeno Shimokawa. Hanzo took Shigeno's surname upon their marriage, and the couple returned to the Big Island, where they reared seven children and taught at Japanese language schools until Hanzo's arrest and internment.
Their son, James Wataru Shimokawa, served in the U.S. Army during the war as a trained linguist with the Military Intelligence Service.
Hanzo Shimokawa returned to the islands after internment, and when Japanese language schools were allowed to reopen, he served as the principal of Sheridan Gakuen and Fort Gakuen in Honolulu.