Kumaji Furuya
Biography
Kumaji Furuya was a Honolulu businessman, Fuji Furniture Store owner, community leader and poet who wrote under the name Furuya Suikei. JCCH records December 1941 arrest and Sand Island confinement, February 1942 mainland transfer, Angel Island March 1942, Camp McCoy March-May 1942, Camp Forrest May-June 1942, Camp Livingston June 1942-June 1943, Fort Missoula June 1943-April 1944 and Santa Fe April 1944-November 1945. He returned to Honolulu aboard Yarmouth in November 1945. His 1964 camp memoir Haisho Tenten was published in English by JCCH as An Internment Odyssey in 2017. This was US wartime civilian incarceration; no individual criminal conviction is established by the archive. Source: https://incarceration.jcchawaii.org/internees/furuya-kumaji-suikei
Photo source: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi. Kumaji Furuya at center, carrying Florence Yoko, greeted by his family upon returning to Honolulu in November 1945. From left: Hanzo, Seizo, Albert Tomochi, Robert Keiichi, Kumaji carrying Florence Yoko, and wife Jun. JCCH/Gregg Furuya Collection. Source image reproduced without alteration.
The original May 1, 1942 Camp McCoy civilian-internee roster individually records Kumaji Furuya, serial ISN-HJ-188-(CI), as permanently interned at the camp after transfer from Fort McDowell, California. This supplies a contemporaneous individual custody reference for the existing wartime chronology. May 1 is a roster observation, not an inferred first admission or release. The historical internment serial is not a modern BOP register number.
