Group Media & Photos

Internment Locations

Arrested: December 1941


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

June 1943 - March 1944


Jerome Concentration Camp, Arkansas

March 1944 - May 1944


Tule Lake Segregation Center, California

May 1944 - November 1945


Returned to Hawaii: December 1945

Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.


Gijo Ozawa came to the islands as a Buddhist missionary in the early 1930s. He served as the minister of the Soto Zenshuji Temple in Wahiawa, Kauai, where he and his wife also ran the temple's Japanese language school. The Ozawa family spent the war years under internment on the Mainland, returning to Kauai in 1945. Ozawa later served as resident minister of the Taiyoji Temple in Waipahu on Oahu Island until his retirement.

A son, Walter Michio, was born in Tule Lake. Walter Ozawa would grow up to become a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and serve in a number of administrative positions in Hawaii, including director of the Honolulu city and county Department of Parks and Recreation and director of the state Office of Veterans Services.