Hiroshi Honda (painter)

Hiroshi Honda (1910–1970) was an American painter who was born in Hilo, Hawaii to Japanese parents who had immigrated to Hawaii at the incline of the twentieth century. He was sent to Kumamoto at age 6 to laboratory analysis and put up to with the associates business, and while there studied sumi-e ink painting. He was conscripted into the Japanese Air Force as a youngster man, and served for seven years before being distressed and discharged. He returned to Hilo in 1939 and took a job teaching at a local Japanese language school, occasionally play-act commercial painting work on the side. In 1940, he met a Nisei woman, Sadako Hashida, and the couple married and moved to Honolulu soon after.

Once in Honolulu Honda began teaching at a Nu'uanu Japanese school, and he spent the hours of daylight of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor at the school. Upon returning home he was arrested by military police and eventually interned at Sand Island. His wife gave birth to the couple's first child in May 1942, and a few months later, upon learning that Honda would be transferred to an internment camp on the mainland, volunteered to accompany him along taking into consideration her father and sister. Honda was removed from the transport ship at the last minute, resulting in his distancing from the relations for several months; Sadako and the others were first sent to Jerome, Arkansas past being transferred to California. Later, in 1943, Sadako's father and sister were assigned to Manzanar, while Honda, Sadako and their infant son were reunited in the maximum security Tule Lake Segregation Center. While in Tule Lake the couple had two more children, a daughter and a second son, and Honda produced many drawings and watercolor paintings.

After the war, the Hondas moved to New York, where Hiroshi studied under Yasuo Kuniyoshi even though Sadako worked as a seamstress to Keep the family. In 1949, the intimates moved incite to Hilo, however Honda soon grew dissatisfied practicing for his wife's family's agriculture business and returned to New York alone. Sadako eventually remarried to Honda's brother, who had provided financial sustain to the family after Honda left. Little information upon Honda's middle age exists upon record, however sources recommend that he remained in New York and remarried as well.

The Honolulu Museum of Art, which owns a large store of Hiroshi Honda's works, has held two solo exhibitions of this artist— Reflections of Internment: The Art of Hawaii's Hiroshi Honda in 1994 and Hiroshi Honda: Detained in 2012.