Biography
Takashi Hoshizaki was a Japanese American participant in the Heart Mountain draft-resistance movement. After being confined at Heart Mountain during World War II, he was prosecuted for refusing military conscription and imprisoned at McNeil Island in Washington.
Forced-removal chronology
The institutional biography records confinement at Pomona Assembly Center, followed by arrival at Heart Mountain on August 20, 1942. These are confinement-stage milestones, not a complete continuous-custody span or a change to the draft-resistance case. Heart Mountain institutional biography.
Sharon Yamato’s September 14, 2016 Discover Nikkei article reproduces Hoshizaki’s contemporary diary. His June 27, 1944 entry says he received the three-year sentence that afternoon. The article identifies trial Judge T. Blake Kennedy, U.S. Attorney Carl Sackett and defense lawyer Samuel Menin. It also reproduces his March 26 FBI arrest and Cody jail entry and March 29 transfer to Casper, distinct stages before McNeil Island. The sentence is an imposed term; no new duration or release date is calculated.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation’s individual biography states that President Harry Truman pardoned Hoshizaki on December 24, 1947. This later pardon is separate from his earlier physical release from prison and does not change the recorded custody endpoints or duration.
In his narrator-edited July 28, 2010 Densho interview, Hoshizaki recalls being processed in McNeil Island’s main penitentiary for roughly a week or two before transfer to its minimum-security farm, where he lived in an open dormitory. He contrasts this with overcrowded pretrial county jails. At McNeil he attended seminars organized by imprisoned conscientious objectors and continued a mathematics correspondence course after moving to the farm. These recollections describe conditions and education during his already recorded imprisonment. Densho interview, segment 26.
