picture, Hideo Kaneshiro, Tule Lake, 1943-1945
date: label: date made
content: 1943-1945
notes: label: Description
content: Hideo Kaneshiro was born on October 10, 1921 in Paauhau on the island of Hawai’i in Hawai’i. He is considered to be a Kibei-Nisei, which is an American-born Japanese person who lived and was educated in Japan. Because of family circumstances, Kaneshiro left the island of Hawai’i and moved to Okinawa in 1925, when Kaneshiro was four-years-old.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro attended elementary school in Okinawa and was sent to Kuroshima as a top shell diver. Life as a diver was harsh, because air tanks and adequate protection from the elements were not available yet. Kaneshiro returned to Hawai’i with his father in his early twenties and took several jobs. One such job was in defense work in construction, but it was after this that he was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Honolulu. This led to Kaneshiro’s incarceration at a number of prison camps in Hawai’i and on the mainland.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro was detained at the INS Service Station in Honolulu around September 1942, and was transferred to the Sand Island Detention Camp where he stayed until March 2nd, 1943. Sand Island Detention Camp was used as an Army internment camp to house Japanese Americans as well as expatriates from Germany, Italy, and other Axis countries. Over 600 Hawaiian residents came through Sand Island Detention Camp before its closure in March, 1943.
label: Description
content: While in the Sand Island Detention Station, Kaneshiro studied painting with the artist Hiroshi Honda, and it became a life-long hobby for Kaneshiro. Kaneshiro’s work has been exhibited locally at various sites in and around Honolulu.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro was sent to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah on March 14, 1923 and was then transferred to the Tule Lake Relocation Center in September of 1943 after he answered “no” to questions 27 and 28 in the loyalty questionnaire. Tule Lake segregated prisoners based on who was considered disloyal or disruptive, and Kaneshiro was considered to be disloyal. The Tule Lake records listed Kaneshiro as a renunciant of US citizenship by the United States Army.
label: Description
content: Question 27 on the loyalty questionnaire asked if Nisei men were willing to serve on combat duty wherever ordered, and question 28 asked if individuals would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any form of allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. These questions caused unrest because citizens resented being asked to renounce loyalty from the Emperor of Japan, especially when they had never sworn loyalty to the Emperor. Not only that, Japanese immigrants were barred from becoming U.S. Citizens on the basis of racial exclusion, so renunciation of their Japanese citizenship was problematic. Not only that, young men worried that answer “yes” to Question 27 would mean they had volunteered to join the Army. Individuals who said “no” to both questions were considered disloyal to the United States and were labeled as such; most of these people were segregated from the “loyal” and sent to the Tule Lake camp.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro was sent to the Crystal City Family Internment Camp and then to Seabrook Farms in New Jersey before he returned to Honolulu in 1947. Kaneshiro later had a career as a chef for Pan-American Airlines.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro is currently active with the Itoman Shijin Kai, the Hawai’i United Okinawa Association.
label: Description
content: Kaneshiro was one of the four thousand plaintiffs in the suit Abo v. Clark in 1946, a lawsuit that overturned the forced renunciation of American citizenship by the plaintiffs. Kaneshiro’s renunciation of his American citizenship was declared null and void, and his American citizenship was fully restored.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: California, Tule Lake
setName: label: See more items in
content: Military and Society: Armed Forces History, Japanese American
label: See more items in
content: Executive Order 9066
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Hideo Kaneshiro
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2015.0248.09
label: catalog number
content: 2015.0248.09
label: accession number
content: 2015.0248
objectType: label: Object Name
content: photograph
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: paper (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/8 in x 3 13/16 in; 10.4902 cm x 9.652 cm