George Hoshida

1. Gila River War Relocation Center
   Dates unknown
2. Jerome War Relocation Center
   Dates unknown
3. Kilauea Military Camp
   Dates unknown

George Yoshio Hoshida (1907, Japan-1985, Hawaii) was a Japanese American artist known for his drawings made during World War II, when he was incarcerated in three US internment camps and two Justice Department camps between 1942 and 1945. Nearly 300 of his works form the George Hoshida Collection, held and displayed by the Japanese American National Museum, founded in 1992 in Los Angeles, California. Born in Japan, Hoshida had immigrated as a five-year-old child with his family to Hawai'i in 1912; it was then a territory of the United States. As Japanese nationals, the family were prohibited by United States law from ever becoming naturalized. Hoshida grew up to live and work in Hawai'i and married there. After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the United States feared that Japanese in the islands might aid Japan, and interned many. They eventually transferred Hoshida and others to internment centers on the mainland of the United States. He was not reunited with his family until 1944, when they were all transferred to the Jerome War Relocation Center in the Arkansas Delta west of the Mississippi River. They were transferred to another center before being released in 1945, after which they returned to Hawai'i. It was not until passage of the Walter-McCarran Act in 1952 that Japanese Americans born in Japan were allowed to become naturalized US citizens.