Group Media & Photos
Arrested: May 1942
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
6月 1942 - 7月 1942
Lordsburg Internment Camp, New Mexico
7月 1942 - 6月 1943
Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico
6月 1943 - 11月 1944
Paroled to Grand Junction, Colorado
Returned to Hawaii: December 1945
Arrived in Honolulu with about 775 other internees aboard the military troopship the Shawnee.
Kazuyuki Kawano arrived in Hawaii from Kumamoto Prefecture in 1906 and a decade later opened a small retail store in Waipahu, Oahu. By the beginning of World War II, his shop had grown into a department store in an eponymous two-story building on Waipahu's main street, and Kawano was on the board of directors of the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce.
While Kawano was sent into internment on the Mainland, two of his sons served with the U.S. armed forces. Henry Toshio Kawano trained as a linguist at the Military Intelligence Service Language School at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Roy Tomoaki Kawano was a member of the 100th Infantry Battalion.
In the postwar years, Kazuyuki Kawano joined with other prominent businessmen and returning Nisei soldiers to create Central Pacific Bank, a financial institution catering to the islands' large Japanese American population. He served on the bank's charter board of directors along with fellow internees Koichi Iida (also the bank's first CEO), Lawrence T. Kagawa, Sadato Morifuji, and Kinzo Sayegusa.