Former Hawaii first lady Jean Ariyoshi treasures the intricate shell hatband her uncle made for her while he was confined at the Honouliuli internment camp during World War II.

In an effort to help educate the public about what life was like for internees, Ariyoshi has given the gift she received when she was 9 or 10 to the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, where it will be part of an exhibit of items made by Americans of Japanese ancestry while at the Sand Island and Honouliuli camps on Oahu.

The shell band will be a permanent part of a collection of handmade crafts by former internees next spring, when the center expands its gallery space.

At her Nuuanu home, Ariyoshi, who wrote about her uncle Dan Toru Nishikawa and the shell band in her book, “Washington Place: A First Lady’s Story,” recently gave it to Carole Hayashino, president and executive director of the cultural center, for the exhibit.

“This is really amazing,” Hayashino said as she delicately took it and thanked Ariyoshi. “Such a wonderful gift,” she said.

Government records offer scant information about the campus, but through handmade crafts and various internee accounts, the cultural center is piecing together its own historical record.

Ariyoshi, wife of George Ariyoshi, the first governor of Japanese ancestry in the nation, said she decided to give the shell band to the cultural center earlier this year when President Barack Obama announced the designation of Honouliuli as a national monument. Her intent is to share her uncle’s internment camp story and promote awareness of how the civil rights of internees were violated.

When the Sand Island camp closed, Nishikawa and other internees in March 1943 relocated to the Honouliuli camp — a dry, hot gulch in Kunia surrounded by barbed wire and manned by guards. Internees of German and Italian descent and prisoners of war also were confined there.

Honouliuli was the largest internment camp and was used the longest in Hawaii. The site was bulldozed after the war ended, but remnants of the camp still remain.

In April, Ariyoshi heard of a planned auction in New Jersey of hundreds of photographs and handmade artifacts collected in the 1940s from Japanese internment camps. “I said, ‘Oh, what a pity,’ because these things really, really should go home where they came from,” she said.

An outcry from family members of internees appalled by the auction prompted its cancellation. The items were later acquired by the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles.

This weekend, Ariyoshi will travel to Washington, D.C., to attend an event of the National Association of Japan-America Societies on Tuesday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Other families of former internees have also stepped forward to donate artifacts since Honouliuli was designated a national monument.

“Each of these pieces, I’m sure, has a story,” said Ariyoshi.

In the initial aftermath of the war, former internees rarely, if ever, spoke about their experiences at Honouliuli. Some began to open up about the camps only decades later.

In 1981 Nishikawa talked to The Honolulu Advertiser about his life as an internee and his life before the camps.

Born in Honolulu, Nishikawa moved to Japan and lived with his grandparents while attending school. He returned to Hawaii and worked as a salesman for the Japanese newspaper Nippu Jiji. He often visited the Japanese Consulate to collect bills or take print orders. His frequent visits to the consulate along with having two older brothers who were military officers in Japan made the FBI suspicious, leading to Nishikawa’s arrest in 1942, according to Ariyoshi and Nishikawa’s son, Albert.

According to the 1981 article, Nishikawa created handmade crafts to give to family members while he was confined at both camps. One of the pieces was a necklace for his wife made out of seashells he collected on camp grounds. Nishikawa sanded the shells on the concrete floor of a shower room because the rough surface was similar to sandpaper.

Creating handicrafts helped internees pass the time and endure harsh conditions.

Nishikawa said in the article, “It’s something you gotta do.”

Otherwise, he said, “you’re gonna be nuts if you think of the family. So that’s why I was forced to make something, you see. … Try to make something, then you forget the hours.”

Nishikawa nicknamed the internment camp “jigoku dani,” or hell valley. When an internee who owned a tailor shop in Haleiwa asked him to decorate a rice-bag apron he was making for another internee who worked at the camp’s kitchen, Nishikawa wrote the phrase in boldface letters across it with a paintbrush, according to an excerpt from a translated memoir from the cultural center’s online records of former internees.

Nishikawa was married to Ariyoshi’s mother’s sister, Grace. Soon after Nishikawa was interned and his bank account frozen, Grace and the couple’s son, Albert, moved in with Ariyoshi’s family in Wahiawa.

The couple wanted to adopt Ariyoshi, who was the youngest of six children at the time. Ariyoshi said her aunt was unable to have more children, and her parents had a difficult time feeding the family during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, her father declined the offer.

Nishikawa also created floral paintings on larger seashells. Other handmade artifacts, including drawings and a miniature wooden drawer donated to the cultural center by Nishikawa’s family members, are included in the exhibit.

Nishikawa was released from Honouliuli in mid-1944.

Sometime after Nishikawa died in 1991, Albert, who resides in Manoa, donated his father’s paintings and drawings to the cultural center.