Group Media & Photos
Gila River Concentration Camp, Arizona. Row 1 (L-R): Shizuo Yoshikane (7th from L); Kanichi Murata (3rd from R, carrying child). JCCH/Shizuo Yoshikane.
Internment Locations
Arrested: May 1942
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
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 - June 1944
Gila River Concentration Camp, Arizona
June 1944 - November 1945
Returned to Hawaii: December 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.
About a month after his arrest, Kanichi Murata's father, Ryoichi Murata, a principal of a Japanese language school in Honolulu, also was arrested. Father and son were both held at the Sand Island Camp until August, when father Ryoichi Murata was sent into internment on the Mainland.
In November, Kanichi Murata married widow Kikuye Shinkawa, and a month later, the new family, including Kikuye's two young sons, left Hawaii for the Jerome Concentration Camp in Arkansas.
Within a few months of the Muratas' Mainland confinement, Kanichi's older brother Kenichi Murata volunteered for the U.S. Army, becoming a member of the Military Intelligence Service. Another brother, Jack Keiichi Murata, was already serving in the U.S. military as a member of the 100th Infantry Battalion. He would be wounded in action.
After the war and the lifting of the ban against foreign-language radio programs in Hawaii, Kanichi Murata was put in charge of all Japanese programming for the Honolulu radio station KGMB.