Internment Locations
Arrested: February 1942
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was among 166 men (mostly Issei) who were sent on the second transfer ship for internment in U.S. Army and Justice Department camps on the Mainland. These men were sent together from camp to camp, with some paroled to War Relocation Authority camps to reunite with family or transferred for repatriation to Japan.
Angel Island Detention Facility, California
March 1942 - April 1942
Fort Sill Internment Camp, Oklahoma
April 1942 - May 1942
Camp Livingston Internment Camp, Louisiana
June 1942 - June 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
Paroled to New Orleans, Louisiana: September 1944
Returned to Hawaii: November 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with 450 other internees aboard the military troopship the Yarmouth.
Toshio Hirano arrived in the islands in 1914 and joined his father and brothers in the plantation fields of the Waiakea Sugar Co. on Hawaii Island. In the 1920s, he ventured to California to attend Bible college and became an ordained minister.
In the years before the war, he served as a pastor in places like Turlock and the San Fernando Valley in California and in Hamamatsu City in Shizuoka, Japan. He returned to Hawaii in 1938, became a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, and at the time of his arrest was married with a young family.
After more than two years of Mainland incarceration, Hirano was granted parole in order to attend the Baptist Bible Institute in New Orleans.