MOUNTAINS OF MEMORY, DEPTHS OF GRATITUDE: Stories of Hawai`i’s Japanese Internee Fathers and Their American Military Sons in Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile

Dr. Gail Okawa, a granddaughter of a Japanese Christian minister from Hawai`i imprisoned in US internment camps during WWII, will introduce her 18-year book project Remembering Our Grandfathers' Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai`i’s Japanese in World War II in an illustrated talk. Her presentation will share her journey of discovery—learning what happened to her maternal grandfather Rev. Tamasaku Watanabe, who was arrested immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack and, along with hundreds of Hawai`i Japanese, exiled from the Hawaiian Islands to prison camps run by the US Justice and War Departments in Louisiana, Montana, and New Mexico, with others imprisoned at the Honouliuli Internment Camp on O`ahu.

Dr. Okawa learned, too, and will share stories of imprisoned fathers who had sons in the highly decorated Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate), 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and Military Intelligence Service. Some visited their interned fathers and fought and, in some cases, died in Italy in the Rome-Arno campaign and in the breach of the Gothic Line, in France during the rescue of the Lost Battalion, and in New Guinea in the Pacific.

Inspired to travel in 2019 to sites in Europe where the Nisei sons fought, she learned that the Italians and French in liberated villages have not forgot the sacrifices of the Nisei decades later, and she will interweave wartime stories with present-day remembrances.

Dr. Okawa's book will be available at the Honouliuli National Historic Site bookstore, which is located in the Pearl Harbor National Memorial bookstore, and she will be there for a book signing following her presentation.