NVMC Extends Internment: Stories from Maui Exhibit to March 16

Internment photo. PC: Nisei Veterans Memorial Center

Due to the high volume of visitors, the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center announced it has extended its exhibit Internment: Stories from Maui, through March 16, 2018.

The exhibit will remain open to the public Monday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m.

The exhibit features personal stories, photographs and information of two Maui locations that served as detention centers after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans to camps in the United States. Approximately 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were interned.

NVMC says Japanese-Americans in Hawaiʻi were already being arrested prior to Executive Order 9066. Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, US military personnel began rounding up Japanese residents in Hawaiʻi whom they perceived as being influential in the community.

Those detained included businessmen, priests, Japanese language school teachers and professionals. Mauians including Teiichiro Maehara, Kiyoji Hotta and Shigeru Murakami were interned in camps on the mainland while their sons, serving in the US Army, lost their lives on the battlefields in Italy.

NVMC’s mission is to ignite the potential in people by inspiring them to find the hero in themselves through the legacy of the Nisei Veterans.

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