This is a group photograph of Japanese American prisoners at the Lordsburg Interment Camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Prison camps were created following the events of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Executive Order 9066 authorized the creation of military exclusion zones which authorized the removal of those considered a danger to national security. Much of the west coast became designated military exclusion zones, and up to 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to prison camps for the duration of the war, although most of them did not pose a threat.
Seisaku Aoyagi was one of these prisoners pictured in the photograph, and he was an Issei and registered Alien during World War II. He was sent from his home in Hawai'i to Lordsburg, a prison camp that is infamous for the killings of two elderly Issei prisoners.
The infamous killings of Toshio and Hirota Isomura happened at Lordsburg on July 27, 1942. These two elderly prisoners were shot and killed by a guard, Private First Class Clarence Burleson, who claimed they had been running towards the fence to escape. The guard was found not guilty by an army court-martial board even after prisoners testified that Kobata and Isomura were both physically disabled (Kobata had tuberculosis and Isomura had a bad back). This led to a protest of prisoners, and it turned out that Colonel Lundy had violated the Geneva Convention by forcing prisoners to build military facilities in harsh conditions without pay. Colonel Lundy was retired and Lordsburg was closed after this, with everyone in the camp relocating to the Santa Fe Detention Camp in New Mexico.
Seisaku Aoyagi returned home to his family Hilo, Hawai'i after he was released from the prison camp.
