Internment Locations
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was in the first group of 172 men (mostly Issei) who were sent aboard the military transport ship U.S. Grant for internment in U.S. Army and Justice Department camps on the Mainland. The internees 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
Camp McCoy Internment Camp, Wisconsin
March 1942 - May 1942
Camp Forrest Internment Camp, Tennessee
May 1942 - June 1942
Camp Livingston Internment Camp, Louisiana
June 1942 - August 1942
Sent Back to Hawaii: August 1942
This internee was part of a group of about nineteen internees (all Nisei, likely mistaken for Issei) who were returned to Hawaii in August 1942. Some spent the rest of their incarceration in Hawaii, while others were sent once again to the Mainland but this time to War Relocation Authority camps.
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
August 1942 - December 1942
Transferred to Mainland: December 1942
Sent aboard the military troopship the Lurline with more than 430 other Hawaii residents for incarceration in Mainland camps.
Jerome Concentration Camp, Arkansas
January 1943 - November 1943
Des Moines, Iowa
Returned to Hawaii: November 1945
In the 1930s, Lawrence Takeo "L.T." Kagawa pioneered the establishment of nondiscriminatory insurance rates for people of color in the islands. He opened a Hawaii branch of the California Occidental Insurance Co. and named it Security Insurance Agency, offering to local people insurance rates at equitable prices.
In 1940, he was among a group of prominent community leaders behind the development of a modern multi-story department store in downtown Honolulu called The House of Mitsukoshi. Modeled on its well-known Tokyo namesake, it carried the latest in Japanese home goods and boasted the first escalator in the territory. Executives in the venture included Kagawa as its president, general manager Kazuaki Tanaka, and directors Shigeru Horita and Eiichi Kishida, all of whom would be interned with the outbreak of war. The Mitsukoshi property would be seized by the federal government in 1942, and the department store converted into the headquarters for the American USO.
In the postwar years, Kagawa would join with other Honolulu businessmen and returning Nisei soldiers (including the future Sen. Daniel K. Inouye) to create Central Pacific Bank, a financial institution catering to the islands' large Japanese American population. He served on the bank's charter board of directors along with fellow internees Koichi Iida (also the bank's first CEO), Kazuyuki Kawano, Sadato Morifuji, and Kinzo Sayegusa.
Kagawa renamed his insurance business Occidental Underwriters of Hawaii and it became one of the largest insurance companies in the islands.