Elementary School) and Kōchi Agricultural High School, where he was a competitive middle- and long-distance runner and participated in races at the national level at Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium. After graduating from high school, he returned to the United States in 1939 to study modern agricultural methods at the behest of his parents and teachers. Ishimoto first lived with a Japanese farmer friend of his father, before moving in with an American family in Oakland, California and attending an elementary school to learn English. He continued to study at Washington Union High School in Fremont, San Jose Junior College (now San Jose City College), while working on a farm over the summers, and in January of 1942, enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, School of Agriculture (now the University of California, Davis). His studies were cut short, however, as the war in the Pacific quickly escalated. On February 19, 1942, president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans across the west coast. Internment and post-war education (1942-53) On May 21, 1942, Ishimoto was forcibly sent to the Merced Assembly Center in central California before being transferred to the Granada War Relocation Center, or Camp Amache, in Colorado, where he was assigned to work as a firefighter. It was at the camp that Ishimoto first learned how to use a camera and develop film in the darkroom from fellow incarcerated Japanese Americans. Though cameras had initially been confiscated by authorities, by May 1943 restrictions on cameras had lifted in camps outside of the Western Defense Command (including Amache), and Ishimoto began taking photographs around the camp using a Kodak 35mm camera. Ishimoto and his fellow photographs used creative solutions to work through the technological limitations in the camp, recalling how his friend fashioned an enlarger from a ketchup container and the bellows from a folding camera. After being granted temporary permission to leave the camp and visit Illinois in January of 1944, Ishimoto was twice questioned about his responses in the loyalty questionnaire before being officially released from the camp in December of 1944. The War Relocation Authority had established its first resettlement office in Chicago, with the express goal of dispersing Japanese Americans from the west coast in order to weaken the strength of ethnic enclaves and diminish their allegiance to Japan. Thus, Ishimoto found himself in Chicago, where he worked for