Group Media & Photos

Internment Locations

Arrested: December 1941


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 - June 1943


Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico

June 1943 - October 1945


Returned to Hawaii: November 1945

Arrived in Honolulu with 450 other internees aboard the military troopship the Yarmouth.


Katsuichi Tanaka's son Charles Kunio Tanaka volunteered to serve as a Japanese language translator during the war. He received training at Camp Savage, Minnesota and became a member of the army's Military Intelligence Service. 

Another son, Shoso Tanaka, worked for and then operated the family's Tanaka Store during the war. After war, Shoso married the sister of internee Oyobu Takesono, who along with her husband, Buddhist priest Seikaku Takesono, also had spent the war years in internment on the Mainland.