Miyao, Yoshie

Yoshie Miyao was the step-mother of Rev. Shigemaru Miyao, whose late father had been the founder of the Izumo Taisha Shrine. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor bombing, Shigemaru Miyao and his wife, Yuki Miyao, were arrested. Yuki, it is believed, was mistaken for Yoshie, who continued to perform religious services at the shrine until her arrest later in December.

The imprisonment of the Miyao adults left the three young Miyao children to be cared for by relatives of grandmother Yoshie, the Inokuchi family of Waipahu. In time, the Inokuchi family head, Kakuji Inokuchi, would also be arrested and sent to the Honouliuli Internment Camp.

Yoshie and her daughter-in-law were confined together at Sand Island. They were among a group of only eight Hawaii women who were arrested and sent to the Mainland for internment. They were unlike the women who entered Mainland internment as a way to reunify their families, for these women had been arrested and incarcerated.

In addition to Yoshie and Yuki Miyao, four other women were sent in the Fourth Transfer Group; they were Kiku Horibe, Miyuki Kawasaki, Haru Tanaka, and Tsuta Yamane. Two more women, Kanzen Ito and Ishiko Mori, were sent several months later with the Seventh Transfer Group.

From the Crystal City camp, Yoshie Miyao successfully petitioned the U.S. government to allow the transfer there of her fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Florence Atsuko Mikami, from her place of incarceration at the Rohwer camp in Arkansas. Yoshie Miyao was Florence Atsuko's paternal aunt as well as maternal step-grandmother by way of the Miyao family and she had reared Florence from infancy.