Caught in the mass evacuation of Japanese from the west coast in 1942, Kohno and his mother were placed in a couple of internment camps, after his father was arrested by the FBI and county sheriff the night of Pearl Harbor. They wound up in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where his mother took ill. His father was imprisoned in different detention camps.

From the camp in Crystal City, Texas, where Kohno had joined his father, they were repatriated to war-torn Japan and he met his ailing mother at the ship to take them there. He was a thirteen-year-old lookalike American outsider in Japan and spent the thirteen years there in isolated exile.

He did well for the two years he attended St. Joseph College, a Marianist high school in Yokohama, and found a job with the U.S. government as an interpreter/translator. He came back to the land of his birth in 1959 to get married and complete his college education at the University of Washington. He majored in English, Advanced Writing Curriculum, and Far Eastern Studies and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was also editor-in-chief of the campus literary magazine, Assay.

He is the author of a number of works: The Last Fox: A Novel of the 100th/44nd RCT; The River of Time: A Collection of Short Stories, and Westward Lies the Sun.

His sons, David and Kevin, live in Utah and Oregon. He calls Beaverton, Oregon, home.