Shigeki Fujimoto

Shigeki Fujimoto

Photo courtesy of Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

Shigeki Fujimoto (藤本茂樹)

Family and Incarceration History

Born to Isaku Fujimoto, founder of Fujimoto Trading Company in Hilo, and picture bride Umeyo Fujimoto, Shigeki was a U.S. citizen by birth who was raised in part in Japan. In 1939, Shigeki married Kikue Kishii, also a U.S. citizen by birth who had been raised in Japan, in an arranged marriage. The newlyweds returned to Hawai’i, the land of their birth to start their life together.

After the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI sought to arrest Isaku Fujimoto because of his prominent status in the Japanese American community in Hawai’i and his business ties to Japan. However, Isaku was in Japan on business and could not return to Hawai’i as civilian transportation was shut down. In his place, the FBI arrested his son, Shigeki Fujimoto.

At the time of his arrest in November 1942, Shigeki Fujimoto was 29 years old and a young husband and father. Shigeki and Kikue had two young sons. Kikue gave birth to their third son shortly after Shigeki’s arrest.

Shigeki was incarcerated at Sand Island from December 1942 to March 1943, after which he was transferred to Honouliuli Internment Camp. In November 1943, Shigeki was transferred to Tripler Army Hospital in failing health. Two months later, he was paroled, and in February 1945, he was released from parole. Shigeki never fully recovered his health, and he died at 49 years old. The shells he collected in the incarceration camps carried his story across generations to his descendants.

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In a Granddaughter's Voice

Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson, granddaughter of Shigeki Fujimoto, offers her personal thoughts regarding her grandfather's incarceration, the lasting impacts on his family, and her journey to reconcile her dark family history into a positive message for the future in this essay she wrote for Honouliuli National Historic Site.

 

Shigeki and Kikue Fujimoto on their wedding day.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Fujimoto Johnson

My grandfather, Shigeki Fujimoto (1913-1963), was a Japanese American civilian incarcerated at Sand Island and Honouliuli during World War II. In these incarceration camps, he collected shells that became our family’s heirlooms. I never had the chance to meet my grandfather, as he died when he was only 49 years old, long before I was even born. But his shells carried his story across generations to his descendants. In my children’s book, Shell Song, I imagine the shells he collected behind barbed wire representing lost time and loneliness and also the family he had been torn away from.

By all accounts, my grandfather was a very quiet man. My grandmother, Kikue Fujimoto, was, however, a vivacious storyteller and poet who documented their life in a handwritten autobiography and collection of tanka poems. Because of my grandmother’s storytelling, threads of my grandfather’s story persist.

At the time, my grandmother was pregnant with their third child (and that third child would grow up to be my father). My grandmother wrote in her autobiography:

“I had received orders from the military to call the police when I was ready to give birth. When I felt contractions in the middle of the night, the vehicle that came to pick me up was a truck used to transport convicts. I will never forget the shame I felt at that moment.”

Upon hearing that my grandfather’s health, both physical and mental, was deteriorating in incarceration, my grandmother decided to take the three young children all under the age of three to visit their father at Honouliuli. My father, the baby, met his father for the first time at Honouliuli Internment Camp.

My grandmother describes this visit in her autobiography:

"I boarded the military bus with the three boys. It took us on a winding road, kicking up clouds of red dust. After swaying back and forth on the roads for about three hours, we arrived at Honouliuli Internment Camp. The camp was made of temporary tents put up in rows, surrounded by barbed wire. It was a sad sight.

It was in a valley that was hot and humid during the summer and bone chilling in the winter. A large number of Japanese Americans were being held there. In the next area, Japanese POWs were under constant guard. Around the internment camp were guards on duty.

Seeing my husband’s sad, lonely face, I thought of his upbringing as a privileged child, not knowing poverty or suffering. Thinking of my husband being forced to work, his body having become even thinner than before and attacked by lice, and washing his own clothing, pierced my heart like needles.

Even though we were forbidden to bring in gifts to those we were visiting, I had brought my husband rice balls and rice cakes. I had told the guard that the food was my children’s lunch, and I was allowed to bring the food into the camp. Watching my husband with our third son cradled on his knee, eating ravenously with our two older sons made my heart ache.

When he held our third son for the first time, tears spilled from my eyes. After our short visit, my husband’s face as we said “goodbye” and our sons bursting into tears made what should have been a happy reunion, a painful one. During his internment, my husband did not mingle with others and spent his days in loneliness."

 

The family that Shigeki Fujimoto was forced to leave behind during his incarceration. His wife, Kikue, is pictured here with their three sons, the youngest of which was born while he was imprisoned at Honouliuli.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

I have considered my grandfather’s story from multiple angles, including my grandmother’s autobiography and from a bird’s eye view of the larger story of incarceration through the published works of scholars who studied the incarceration of Japanese Americans throughout North America and especially in Hawai’i, online archives of oral histories of our Japanese American elders, documents preserved by my family, and papers housed at the National Archives and at the Museum of Emigration in Oshima, Japan. But missing from all of these entry points into my grandfather’s story is his own voice.

I have often wondered: Had my grandfather also lived a long life, would he have spoken about those years lost to the incarceration camps? Would he have been willing to voice what he endured at Sand Island and Honouliuli? Would I have had the courage to ask him to share these stories with me? Would I have had the fortitude to carry these stories alongside him?

But my grandfather did not live long, and so I could not ask to hear his story in his own voice. Instead, I have returned time and again to the framework of his story, as documented by others. Time, fragments of story, and more time waft through the bare bones of his story. Standing amidst the labyrinthine, multifaceted shell of these stories, I listen for my grandfather’s voice.

My grandfather and those incarcerated with him are long gone from Honouliuli, released from the isolation and injustice of this place. Their stories and their memory are ours to hold and carry forward now. But this place remembers them still. Where tents and wooden structures once stood as primitive shelters against the sweltering heat, trees grow now, covering the valley in leafy arms that extend to the open sky. When I visited Honouliuli for the first time, just after Shell Song was released, a gentle breeze moved through the vegetation like a winged memory. Honouliuli stream trickles through the valley, stagnant and muddy in places, but nevertheless, watering the vegetation that grows over our ancestors’ memory. And birds called to each other overhead, like generational bearers of story and time.

And I have realized that though just an echo now, my grandfather’s voice persists because of those who continue the work of storytelling: those who tell the stories and those who listen to the stories. By preserving, hearing, and retelling the stories of those who came before us, we breathe life into stories that will continue on long after us. Our voices become part of an intricate long interwoven series of stories that connect all of us, stories in which something as small as a tiny shell can tell a story.

 

いとけなき二児を頼むぞといだきしめ, 涙ぐみつつつれ行かれむ “Take good care of them.” You fold our two young children in your warm embrace. Holding back a flood of tears you are torn away from us."

—Kikue Fujimoto, a poem she wrote about the day of her husband's arrest

Image credit: Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson

 

All information on this page was provided by Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson