Nisei Veterans Memorial Center hosts “Internment: Stories from Maui” exhibit

The Nisei Veterans Memorial Center opens its exhibit, Internment: Stories from Maui. 

The exhibit will be open to the public Jan. 22, 2022 to May 20, 2022, Monday through Friday from 12 to 4 p.m., by appointment only. Call the NVMC at 808-244-6862 to make arrangements. All guests are required to be vaccinated and wear masks.

On Feb. 19, 1942,  President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 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.

Japanese-Americans in Hawaiʻi were already being arrested prior to Executive Order 9066, according to the NVMC.

“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 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,” according to an event announcement.

The exhibit features personal stories, photographs and information on the two locations on Maui which served as detention centers.

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.

The Nisei Veterans Memorial Center is a nonprofit organization that aspires to a world where people act selflessly for the greater good. NVMC owns and manages an intergenerational campus on Go For Broke Place in Kahului that serves as a home for Kansha Preschool, Maui Adult Day Care Center’s Oceanview facility, the Stanley Izumigawa Resource Center and the NVMC Education Center.