Sand Island

Sand Island was built out of the harbor — a tidal flat called Kamoku'ākulikuli that Native Hawaiians fished for generations, expanded by dredged coral into 'Quarantine Island,' the processing station where thousands of contract laborers were held and examined before being sent to the sugar and pineapple plantations. The island's first American purpose was sorting people; its second was imprisoning them.

On December 8, 1941 — the day after Pearl Harbor — Sand Island became Hawaii's first internment camp. Within hours of the attack the FBI had lists ready: Japanese language teachers, Buddhist and Shinto priests, businessmen, community leaders, anyone deemed influential in the Japanese community. They were held in tents on the island's quarantine grounds before barracks went up — up to four hundred fifty internees and dozens of POWs, including Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the first prisoner of war taken by the United States in World War II, captured when his midget submarine beached at Waimanalo.

The camp ran for fifteen months while Honouliuli was built in the island's interior — internees remembered Sand Island as the worst of it, the heat and the tents and the humiliation of men who had built lives in the islands being caged on a quarantine island in the harbor. When the internees were finally released, they were often met at home with suspicion: if you'd been taken, the logic went, there must have been a reason.

The island is a state recreation area now — campgrounds and beaches on land that held a quarantine hospital, an internment camp, a POW enclosure, and a military reservation, all layered on the same dredged coral. The air raid shelters are still there. Nothing marks most of it.