Biography:
Jack Suetsugu Ishikawa was born on November 24, 1907, in San Jose, California. He was the oldest of seven children born to Asakichi and Kome Ishikawa, one of four brothers sentenced to three years in prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and, following Asakichi’s death in 1937, the head of the Ishikawa family. Ishikawa completed eighth grade in Mountain View, after which he spent most of his time assisting his father with truck farming strawberries. After he married Doris Tsugiyo Kumagai in 1929, the couple moved to Palo Alto, where Ishikawa found work as a contract gardener and Doris Ishikawa worked for a librarian at Stanford University. Their son, Jack “Jackie” Hideo, was born on July 15, 1930. Before the war, the family owned a home in Palo Alto, which they were able to rent out, under the care of their lawyer, William B. Tyler, while they were incarcerated.
The Ishikawa family arrived at Santa Anita on May 27, 1942 and at Heart Mountain on September 10, 1942. They lived in apartment 24-11-A. At Heart Mountain, Ishikawa worked as a cook in the mess hall and left camp seasonally to work on a farm in Idaho. He answered Yes to Questions 27 and 28 on the 1943 loyalty questionnaire. Ishikawa was arrested on March 27, 1944. He was tried and convicted in the June 1944 trial of 63 draft resisters. Ishikawa was sentenced to three years in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he joined three of his younger brothers. In 1945, Ishikawa applied for voluntary induction into the Army from Leavenworth, but was deemed unsuitable based on his physical. In the summer of 1945, Doris and Jackie Ishikawa relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, from Heart Mountain to be nearer to Ishikawa. The family eventually returned to the Santa Clara area, where Doris Ishikawa died on June 23, 1964. In 1967, Jack married Toyoko, a woman born in California who had been orphaned at a young age and thus spent more than thirty years in Japan. Toyoko died on January 23, 2003. Jack Suetsugu Ishikawa died on May 4, 2005, in San Jose.