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.