Drive the H-1 west past Waipahu and look mauka toward the Waiʻanae range. Somewhere in that fold of dry ridges is a gulch that held more than 4,000 people behind barbed wire during World War II, and for about 50 years almost nobody on this island could tell you where it was. We grew up here and never heard the name Honouliuli in a classroom. The people locked up there mostly did not talk about it, and the brush swallowed the rest. This is the story of how that camp came to be, who was held in it, how two volunteer librarians found it again in 2002, and how you can finally walk down into it yourself.
Related: Puʻuloa: The Hawaiian History of Pearl Harbor Before 1941 | The Annexation of Hawaiʻi and the Road to Statehood | Diamond Head History: Lēʻahi and Fort Ruger
December 7, 1941: Martial Law Comes to Hawaiʻi
The bombs were still falling on Puʻuloa when the Territory of Hawaiʻi went under martial law. Governor Joseph Poindexter declared it around 3:30 that afternoon at the urging of General Walter Short, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended, and the Army took over the courts, the mail, the newspapers, and just about everything else. It lasted 35 months, until October 24, 1944, the longest stretch of martial law ever imposed on an American civilian population. For most kamaʻāina that meant blackout curtains and gas masks. For a few thousand neighbors it meant a knock on the door.
The FBI and military police started making arrests that first night, and they went straight for the people who held the community together: Buddhist and Shinto priests, Japanese language school teachers, newspaper editors, and the volunteer consular agents who helped older Issei with paperwork back in Japan. By December 10 the FBI had picked up 493 civilians, 43 of them American citizens. Nobody was charged with a crime. The legal basis was martial law itself, which let the Army hold anyone it considered a security risk for as long as it liked.
Those first detainees went to the U.S. Immigration Station and then to a five acre (2 ha) camp on Sand Island in Honolulu Harbor, where the Army seized the quarantine station on December 8, strung barbed wire, and put men in canvas tents on bare coral that flooded every time it rained. Doctors, architects, and two sitting territorial legislators, Sanji Abe and Thomas Sakakihara, followed the priests and teachers in, along with Germans, Italians, Norwegians, and Finns. More than 600 local residents passed through Sand Island on their way to Department of Justice camps on the mainland before it closed to civilians on March 1, 1943.
Why Hawaiʻi Was Different From the Mainland
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forced into camps. Washington seriously considered doing the same thing here. The math stopped them. Japanese immigrants and their American-born children made up more than a third of the territory’s population, and you cannot run a Pacific war effort after locking up a third of the workforce. So the Army settled on selective internment: pull the leaders and the teachers, and leave everyone else working under military rule.
How many were taken is still a slippery number. The National Park Service puts it at more than 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry from Hawaiʻi by war’s end, counting family members who followed their husbands and fathers to mainland camps; other historians count 1,200 to 1,800 internees proper. Either way it was a small fraction of the roughly 150,000 Japanese Americans living here, which is a big reason the story stayed quiet for so long. Most families were untouched, and the ones who were not often carried a shame they had done nothing to earn. Not one Hawaiʻi internee was ever found guilty of sabotage, espionage, or any act against the United States.
Building Jigoku Dani (1943)
Sand Island sat in the middle of Honolulu Harbor, a combat zone if the Japanese fleet came back, and it was tiny. The Army wanted a camp built for the long haul, out of sight and away from the coast. It chose a deep gulch on plantation land mauka of Waipahu, where Honouliuli Gulch cuts down from the Waiʻanae mountains toward the ʻEwa plain. On March 2, 1943, the 149 civilians still held on Sand Island were trucked up to the new site.
What they found was a 160 acre (65 ha) compound laid out in seven sections, split down the middle by a concrete irrigation aqueduct the plantation had built years before. Army records list 175 buildings, 14 guard towers, and more than 400 tents, all inside a double eight foot (2.4 m) barbed wire fence. Of the 17 confinement sites used across the islands during the war, this was the only one built specifically for prolonged detention, and it became both the largest internment site and the largest prisoner of war camp in the territory.
The internees gave it a name of their own: Jigoku Dani, Hell Valley. Anyone who has stood in a leeward gulch at two in the afternoon will understand: the walls trap the heat, the trade winds never reach the bottom, and the mosquitoes come up in the evening. The gulch also hid the camp completely from the road and the ocean. The Army chose it for that isolation, and the men inside felt every bit of it.
Who Was Held There
Over its three years Honouliuli held roughly 400 civilian internees, with about 300 inside at the peak. Most were American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and most of those were men who had been community leaders before the war. The rest were mainly German Americans, with a scattering of Italian, Irish, Russian, and Scandinavian residents, housed in their own compound.
Sanji Abe is the name we keep coming back to. Born in Kailua-Kona in 1895, he won a seat in the Territorial Senate in 1940, the first person of Japanese ancestry ever elected to that body. In 1942 a Japanese flag turned up in his Hilo movie theater, the Yamato Za. Abe said it was not his, and a misdemeanor charge was dismissed, but the Army arrested him anyway that September and sent him to Sand Island, where a review board recommended he be held for the duration. He resigned his Senate seat in February 1943, rode the truck to Honouliuli with the others in March, and was paroled to a ranch in Waiʻalae a year later. He never ran for office again.
Sam Nishimura, a Hawaiʻi-born nisei tailor from Haleʻiwa, was picked up by the FBI in April 1942 and held at Honouliuli until January 1944, separated from his wife and six children. Years later his daughter Grace Fukunaga, who was seven when he was taken, put the whole buried history in one line: nobody around her even knew the word Honouliuli. His granddaughter remembered that he never showed any bitterness about it.
Daily life on the civilian side was dull more than brutal, and the records are honest about that. There were mattresses, hot showers, a dispensary, a dental clinic, and a mess hall that seated 1,000. Internees worked camp jobs for 10 cents an hour, and families could visit twice a month. The Swedish vice consul, inspecting under the Geneva Convention, praised the food and the gardens the men planted. Then he went home, and the men stayed behind the wire. Through 1943 and 1944 the Army paroled some internees and shipped others to mainland camps as “evacuees,” and after the last transfer in November 1944 just 21 Issei and Kibei men remained. Some of them were still there in September 1945, a month after the war ended.
The Prisoner of War Camp
Five of the seven compounds were never meant for local people at all. They were built for prisoners of war. The first POWs to arrive, in late 1943, were Korean laborers captured when U.S. forces took the Gilbert Islands in November 1943. Korea was a Japanese colony then, so these men had been conscripted against their will, and the Army kept them apart from the Japanese prisoners after fights broke out. Three of them mimeographed a camp newsletter, the Free Press for Liberated Korea, and kept it going until December 1945.
The summer of 1944 brought a flood of new prisoners from both the Pacific and Europe. By the end of the war about 4,000 POWs were held at Honouliuli: Japanese soldiers, Okinawans conscripted into the Imperial Army, Koreans, Taiwanese, Italians, and a group the Park Service identifies as Filipino, plus Japanese civilian women and children displaced from the Pacific islands. The POW compounds were rougher than the civilian side, with pyramidal tents sleeping six to eight men, cold showers, and pit latrines. Repatriation started in December 1945 and ran into 1946.
The legal ground under all of this gave way in the end. On February 25, 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Duncan v. Kahanamoku that the military tribunals which had tried civilians in Hawaiʻi were never authorized by the Organic Act. (Yes, that Kahanamoku: Duke was serving as a military police officer when he arrested Duncan, a civilian shipfitter, after a fight with two Marines.) The ruling came too late to help a single internee, but it put on the record that what happened here was unlawful. In 1988 President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which named racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership as the causes of the internment, Hawaiʻi included, and sent a presidential apology to every surviving internee.
Forgotten for Fifty Years
When the last prisoners left in 1946, the Army dismantled the camp. Oʻahu Sugar leased the land from the Campbell Estate and farmed the plain around the gulch, and the gulch itself went back to the weeds. There was no plaque. The former internees went home to Hilo and Haleʻiwa and picked up their lives, and most of them said nothing. Within a generation the exact location of the largest internment camp in the islands was simply gone from memory.
It took a television station to start the search. In 1998 KHNL called the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi looking for local internment material to run before a broadcast of Schindler’s List, and the center had almost nothing to give them. Two volunteers there, Jane Kurahara and Betsy Young, both librarians by training, decided that was unacceptable and went at it the way librarians would: archives, old photographs, phone calls, more phone calls. It took about four years.
The break came from a photograph. One wartime picture showed a concrete aqueduct running through the compounds with the ridgeline behind it. In 2002 the trail led them to Larry Jefts, a farmer working land in the area, who looked at the photo and agreed to take them in along with Bert Hatton of the Campbell Estate. The group hiked for about three hours, found the aqueduct, lined up the mountains against the old photograph, and knew. Nearby they found a concrete slab and an old grease trap: the floor of the mess hall where the internees had eaten every meal. That slab is where, 13 years later, the Secretary of the Interior would untie a maile lei.
From Gulch to National Park (2002 to 2026)
Finding the camp was the easy part. Park Service archaeologists first surveyed it in 2006, Congress ordered a study of the site in 2010, and the camp went on the National Register of Historic Places on February 21, 2012. Meanwhile the ground changed hands: Monsanto bought a large parcel that included the gulch from the Campbell Estate in 2007 and later donated about 123 acres (50 ha) of it to the United States.
On February 24, 2015, President Obama used the Antiquities Act to proclaim Honouliuli National Monument, the fifth site in the national park system tied to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. The dedication came on March 31, 2015, with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and a crowd of JCCH volunteers standing in the gulch for Hawaiian and Shinto blessings. On March 12, 2019, the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act redesignated it Honouliuli National Historic Site. The Japanese Cultural Center opened a free Honouliuli Education Center in its Mōʻiliʻili gallery in October 2016.
For eleven years after that there was still one problem: you could not get in. The Park Service owns the gulch but not a single foot of land connecting it to a public road, so the park stayed closed while staff cleared brush and worked out an access route across University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu land. That finally came together in 2026, the 80th anniversary of the camp’s closing, and the first public tour went in on July 18.
Visiting Honouliuli Today
Tour check-in: Hawaii’s Plantation Village, 94-695 Waipahu St, Waipahu, HI 96797. Mailing address for the park: 1 Arizona Memorial Place, Honolulu, HI 96818.
You still cannot drive to Honouliuli, and there is no visitor center in the gulch. The only way in is a free guided tour led by park staff and trained volunteers, about once a month on a Saturday. Check-in starts at 8:15 a.m. at Hawaii’s Plantation Village in Waipahu, a shuttle sponsored by Pacific Historic Parks takes you to the trailhead, and you are back at the village between 11:30 a.m. and noon. Each tour is capped at 26 people, and the demand is real: as we write this, every remaining 2026 date is full with a waitlist of more than 300 names, and 2027 dates will be posted at the end of this year. Get on the list the day they drop.
Reservations are by email. Send a note to hono_superintendent@nps.gov (the park’s tour page spells out the exact format) with the tour date and party size in the subject line, a phone and email in the body, and whether you want the waitlist. The park replies with a confirmation listing the physical requirements, and you have to answer it or your spot is not held. Reservations close the Thursday before each tour. Life happens and plans change, and that is fine, but somebody on that waitlist wants your seat, so if you need to cancel, email by the Wednesday before so the park can hand it off.
Now, about the walk itself. The trail into the park is about a half mile (0.8 km) each way, unpaved, steep in places, and muddy when it rains. The way in is downhill; the way out is not, and there is no shade. Figure on 1 to 1.5 miles (1.6 to 2.4 km) of walking and standing, with no seating, no water, and one portable toilet. The park requires closed-toe shoes with real traction, and slippers, sandals, and Crocs will get you turned around at check-in, so do not test them on it. Bring at least a liter of water per person, more in summer, plus a hat, sunscreen, light long sleeves and pants, and insect repellent, because the mosquitoes, bees, wasps, and stinging ants that bothered the internees are still down there. Hiking poles are welcome, strollers are not, and keiki need an adult with them the whole time.
One warning we want to say plainly: stay on the trail. The gulch has hidden sinkholes about six feet (1.8 m) deep, and the brush hides them well, so do not go wandering off to find a better photo! You can take pictures freely inside the park, but not of the university lands you cross on the shuttle, so keep the phone in your pocket until the guide says go. The park can change the rules at any time, so reread the confirmation email the week before.
While you are standing on that mess hall slab, remember that neighbors were held here without charges. Treat it the way you would treat Pūowaina or the Arizona Memorial: lower voices, no souvenirs, nothing moved or stacked. The concrete slabs and footings are about all that is left of the camp itself, so leave every piece where it sits.
Cannot make a tour? The Honouliuli Education Center at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi, 2454 S. Beretania St, Honolulu, is a free exhibit with camp artifacts, photographs, and oral histories, open Wednesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; the center’s garage charges $4 for four validated hours, credit card only. The park’s passport stamp is also kept at the information desk of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial visitor center, so you can collect it while you are there for the Arizona Memorial.
What Honouliuli Means Now
The gulch spent 56 years as a secret nobody meant to keep, and the community spent another 24 turning it into a place the public can stand in. When you walk down that trail, you are walking into a chapter our own grandparents did not talk about, on an island where a third of the population lived under suspicion for three years. Go, bring water, and listen to the guides. Then come home and tell somebody the word.
More from Wanderlustyle
ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom
Punchbowl Cemetery: What to Know Before You Visit Pūowaina
USS Missouri Battleship Memorial: Tickets, Tours, and the Deck Where World War II Ended
Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum: Is the $30 Ticket Worth It?
Honolulu Skyline Rail: How to Ride It From the Airport for $3
Comments are closed.