Group Media & Photos
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 U.S. Grant military transport ship 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. This internee was in a sub-group of First Transfer Group internees who were sent from Livingston to Missoula before being transferred to Santa Fe.
Angel Island Detention Facility, California
3月 1942
Camp McCoy Internment Camp, Wisconsin
3月 1942 - 5月 1942
Camp Forrest Internment Camp, Tennessee
5月 1942 - 6月 1942
Camp Livingston Internment Camp, Louisiana
6月 1942 - 6月 1943
Fort Missoula Internment Camp, Montana
6月 1943 - 4月 1944
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
4月 1944 - 10月 1945
Returned to Hawaii: November 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with 450 other internees aboard the military troopship the Yarmouth.
Jinshichi Tokairin was by the outbreak of World War II a successful businessman in Honolulu. He was the owner of the Tohoku Hotel on Beretania Street and the Nuuanu Onsen Teahouse in the valley of the same name. He was an executive officer in some of the most prominent community organizations of the day: the United Japanese Society, the Japanese Benevolent Society (which oversaw the funding for and development of what would later be known as Kuakini Hospital), and the Honolulu Japanese Hotel Association.
The oldest Japanese organization in the islands, the Hotel Association included some one dozen innkeepers who also led sightseeing tours to Japan. In 1938, the group sponsored a trip led by Tokairin to China, Manchuria, and Korea to provide gifts and support to Japanese imperial forces in the occupied lands. Other members of the Hotel Association who also were interned included Tokuji Baba, Sukeichi Koide, Yuichi Nakamura, and Ichiro Sato.
During World War II, two of Tokairin's sons served in the U.S. military. Hideo Tokairin was inducted into the army in late 1941 and was a member of the 100th Infantry Battalion. He was wounded in action in fall 1943 and was awarded the Purple Heart. Bert S. Tokairin was a member of the army's Military Intelligence Service. He would later become a federal magistrate.