Internment Locations
Sand Island Internment Camp, Honolulu, Oahu Island
This internee was among 39 men (mostly Issei) who were sent on the fourth 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.
Also sent on the same ship were six Issei women internees: Kiku Horibe, Miyuki Kawasaki, Yoshie Miyao, Yuki Miyao, Haru Tanaka, and Tsuta Yamane. The women were kept apart from the men and had a different internment sequence from them.
Angel Island Detention Facility, California
Lordsburg Internment Camp, New Mexico
June 1942 - June 1943
Paroled to Chicago, Illinois
June 1943 - May 1944
New York, New York
May 1944 - December 1945
Returned to Hawaii: December 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.
Seiyei Wakukawa immigrated to Hawaii from Okinawa as a child and graduated from the University of Hawaii. He also was a student in Japan. Wakukawa was a small business owner and sometime Japanese language school teacher at the time of his arrest.
According to Wakukawa, a letter he wrote from confinement to President Roosevelt resulted in his early parole in 1943. He taught Japanese on the Mainland until his return to the islands at the end of the war. He then worked for the Japanese language newspaper the Hawaii Times, retiring as an editor in the 1970s.
In 1981, Wakukawa testified at the Seattle hearings of the bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the results of which would form the basis of the federal government's reparations to incarcerated Japanese Americans.