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| Shojiro Horikawa 1944 |
Shojiro Horikawa was born in Fukushima-ken, Japan, on April 5,1889, He attended a foreign language college in Japan before he immigrated to the US. at the age of 17 years through Vermont in March 1908. He traveled through Canada to Seattle, Washington, where he attended Broadway High School. Later, he went to San Francisco and attended Heald Commercial College. He was a buyer of stationery and office supplies for the Oriental Steamship Company.
In 1925, he married Kinuye, who was born in Nara-ken, Japan on December 18, 1904. They lived on Sutter Street in San Francisco. Shojiro worked as an official translator for several life insurance companies, and later, he established the Olympic Printing Shop in San Francisco and owned it for 14 years.
In the April of 1942, the Horikawa family with sons, Noboru Richard and Jun Herbert were evacuated from Watsonville to the Salinas Assembly Center. They were moved to the Poston, Arizona internment camp, on July 3, 1942. Shojiro worked as an interpreter and translator, and became the superintendent of the Poston Print Shop. Later, Shojiro taught in the Adult Education language translating class, and then was elected camp block representative. On November 30, 1943, Noboru Richard Horikawa was granted an educational leave from Poston to attend the Westtown School at Westtown, Pennsylvania. He lived at the school dormitory, and was the captain-elect of the school's basketball team.
On January 18, 1944, Shojiro, Kinuye and son, Jun departed from Poston after Shojiro accepted a job to work at the Message Publishing Company printing plant. They lived in an apartment house, and Jun Herbert attended the Friends Select School.
In February of 1945, Noboru Richard Horikawa was drafted into the US Army and sent to Camp Gorden. He graduated from the Military Intelligence Language School at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and was assigned to the Allied Translator Interpreter Service (ATIS) GHQ, Document Section at Tokyo, Japan. His job was to examine and analyze all captured enemy documents and select pertinent documents for micro filming for the Washington DC archive collection. He was discharged as a Tec/5.
Sources: http://www2.hsp.org/collections/Balch%20manuscript_guide/html/japanese.html
http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/resources/military/111/?view=print
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf596nb4h0&doc.view=items&style=oac4&item.position=4541
