NPS Photo
Many incarcerated Americans worked jobs while in the camps, some doing the job that they held professionally if they were lucky. One such man, Masao "Sam" Nishimura, was the only tailor in Honouliuli and therefore undertook all the repairs needed for his fellow detainees. Nishimura was friends with a man who worked in the mess hall, Dan Toru Nishikawa. Nishikawa is described as being somewhat of a leader to the internees and was well-liked. One day a man named Nobutaro Harada, a grocery store owner, gave Nishimura a leftover cotton rice bag with a capacity for 100 lbs of rice from the mess hall. He decided to fashion an apron out of it and asked Nishikawa to decorate it, since Nishikawa had established himself as an artist in the camps. Upon seeing the bag, Nishikawa balked. He described it as "huge like a decorative apron worn by a sumo wrestler". After thinking for a bit, Nishikawa painted in kanji 地獄谷 jigokudani, or "Hell Valley", as a way to describe Honouliuli. The name resonated through the camp as it so accurately described the reality of the people living there. In a literal valley, a gulch where air sat, humid and stale, the incarcerated constantly bitten by bedbugs, mosquitoes and terrorized by cockroaches. They could not read newspapers, they could not write letters, they had nowhere to go and were separated from their families. It truly was Hell Valley. |
Last updated: March 13, 2025