Internment Locations
Arrested: December 1941
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was in the first group of 172 men (mostly Issei) who were sent aboard the military transport ship U.S. Grant for internment in U.S. Army and Justice Department camps on the Mainland. The internees 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
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 - June 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
June 1943 - September 1943
Repatriated to Japan: September 1943
Included among the repatriates who left from New York on the M.S. Gripsholm were 72 Hawaii internees and their families.
Koten Suetomi arrived in the islands as a Shingon Buddhist missionary in 1916. He spent seventeen years as the resident minister of the Hilo Hooganji Temple before transferring to the Shingon Mission's Honolulu headquarters in 1937. It was in this capacity as bishop of the Shingon sect in Hawaii that he fell under the scrutinity of government authorities and was arrested following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.