Niihau Incident

By Allan Beekman

Book Overview

The true story of a Japanese fighter pilot, who while trying to return to his ship after the Pearl Harbor attack, crash-landed on the American territory of Niihau, Hawaii and terrorized its residents. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0960913203
• ISBN13: 9780960913206
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Heritage Press of Pacific
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Forgotten tale which explains Japanese internment in WWII

This is a fascinating tale, almost completely forgotten now, a side story to the larger dramas of the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, it was hugely important in the decision to intern some 100,000 Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii and the West Coast. Simply put, there was a very real fear that in the event of a Japanese invasion of these two areas (which seemed very real after the attack on Pearl Harbor) the local Japanese-Americans would aid the enemy as had happened on Niihau.Time passes, and political correctness, revisionist history, and the very isolation of the island of Niiahu (which cannot be visited except by permission of the locals or from the Robinson landowners) have all caused this story to disappear into the land of forgotten memories. Nowadays, the PC thinking is that the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was a misguided result of paranoia and racism on the part of the American government, and that the US had nothing to fear.I have read a lot of WWII history and had never come across this story before. About two weeks ago, while vacationing in Hawaii, I found this book in the gift shop of the Visitor's Center of the Arizona Memorial. I was waiting for my scheduled ferry ride out to the USS Arizona Memorial, and speed-read/browsed through this book. I have since filled in some of the details that I missed on my cursory reading of this book with some Internet searches.The book is written with a chatty, semi-novelized style, typical of so much of current non-fiction history today. I still have a hard time with this style of writing, especially when the author starts to put words and thoughts into the heads of characters in the story that die later on in the story, well before they could have told anybody to record this information for posterity.Such was how Shigenori Nishikaichi was introduced in this book, wondering what to do as his A6M2 Zero fighter slowly leaked out its last bit of gas. While participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the plane's gas tanks were hit by gunfire. Nishikaichi ended up crash-landing in a rough field on Niihau. A group of native Niihauans, although unaware of the attack on Pearl Harbor (there was no radio on the island), were suspicious enough of his arrival in a shot-up combat aircraft from Japan to take him prisoner, after first confiscating his gun and his military papers.The two Japanese men on the island were then brought in by the Niihauns to translate for them. It was the Niihauns' intent to hold the pilot and deliver him to the owner of Niihau, Aylmar Robinson, when he stopped by on his weekly visit to the island In secret conversation with the two Japanese, the pilot turned them against the natives. The older Japanese, who was born in Japan and was married to a Niihaun woman, later became terribly conflicted and fled into the hills for the duration of the incident. The other Japanese, Yoshio Harada, who had been born in the Hawaiian islands and was marrie

A gripping and fascinating incident during WWII

An amazing tale about a little-known but fascinating incident directly resulting from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. One of the Japanese pilots taking part in the bombing was forced to crash land on a small Hawaiian island, survived in good condition, and was able to persuade, apparently with little trouble, an American-born couple of Japanese ancestry, the Haradas, to help him. The Haradas spoke both Japanese and English and quickly sympathized with him and his ideals. They helped him to the direct detriment and endangerment of their friends and neighbors (mostly of aboriginal Hawaiian ancestry) on the small, sparsely populated, isolated island of Niihau, an island with its own absorbing story apart from this incident. An unexpected look at the motivations and behavior of a secluded group of Americans when the chips were down and America was in mortal danger. Afterwards Mrs. Harada spoke about this tragedy out of both sides of her mouth with Japanese and Americans, appa! rently thinking that what she said in Japanese was safe from American ears.The book is well researched and the events surrounding the incident are well written and described. This is definitely the book to read for this significant episode at the very dawn of America's involvement in World War II.