The Niihau Incident: The Zero Pilot Who Crash-Landed on Hawaii’s Forbidden Island

On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, while smoke was still rising over Pearl Harbor, a single Japanese fighter came down out of the sky over Niʻihau, the small, dry island at the western end of the main Hawaiian chain. It glided in with its engine silent, struck a fence, and plowed to a stop in a field outside a village called Puʻuwai. The people who ran to the wreck did not know there was a war on. Nobody on the island did.

What followed over the next six days, now usually written as the Niihau incident, is one of the strangest episodes of the Pacific war. It involved a 21-year-old pilot, a stolen map, a luau, a shotgun hidden in a honey warehouse, a whaleboat rowed through the night, and a sheep rancher who was shot three times and kept fighting. It ended with two men dead, a widow in prison, and a Navy report that fed a much larger and darker argument about whether Americans of Japanese descent could be trusted.

It is also a story that has been told many ways. The people involved spoke Hawaiian, Japanese and English, and the earliest accounts were written in a hurry, in wartime, by officers who arrived after it was over. Names are spelled differently from one telling to the next, and the timings do not always agree. What follows sticks to the version in the official reports and the best later histories, and says so where they part ways.

An island the planners thought was empty

Niʻihau is about 70 square miles of low scrub and cliff, lying some 17 miles off Kauaʻi. In 1864 King Kamehameha V sold it to Elizabeth Sinclair, and her descendants, the Robinson family, have run it as a private ranch ever since. By 1941 it was already known as the Forbidden Island. Outsiders needed the family’s permission to land, and almost nobody had it. As a look at the Pacific islands you really cannot visit explains, that is largely still true today.

The island had 136 inhabitants that December, nearly all of them Native Hawaiians whose first language was Hawaiian. There were no telephones and no electricity. Contact with the outside world came by boat, chiefly when the owner, Aylmer Robinson, crossed from Kauaʻi on his weekly visit. A few households had battery radios.

The Japanese planners of the Pearl Harbor raid had picked Niʻihau for a very particular job. Pilots whose aircraft were too badly damaged to reach the carriers were told to put down there and wait for a submarine to pick them up. Japanese intelligence had described the island as uninhabited. It was not, and the rescue never came. The submarine assigned to wait off the island was called away that same afternoon.

A stranger in the front yard

Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi flew a Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero, tail code B11-120, from the carrier Hiryū. In the second wave of the attack his group escorted bombers over the airfields on the windward side of Oʻahu, and he strafed targets at Kāneʻohe and Bellows Field. Somewhere along the way his fighter was hit. American P-36 fighters had made it into the air by then, and a round seems to have pierced a fuel tank. Early Zeros did not have self-sealing tanks, and with fuel draining away Nishikaichi knew he would never make the roughly 200 miles back to the fleet.

He turned for Niʻihau with another damaged Zero. That second fighter flew on past the island and was not seen again. Nishikaichi came down between one and two in the afternoon near the house of a ranch hand named Howard Kaleohano, who is called Hawila in some accounts. The aircraft caught a wire fence and slammed to a halt, and the pilot was knocked dazed in the cockpit.

Kaleohano reached him first. He saw that the markings were not American, and he had heard enough about the tension between the United States and Japan to be careful. According to the FBI memo written afterward, he found the pilot fumbling with his safety belt with a pistol in his hand. Kaleohano took the pistol, pulled the man out, and searched him and the plane. He kept everything he found, including a map of Oʻahu and what appeared to be codes or radio papers. That decision, made in a few seconds in a field, drove almost everything that happened next.

A luau, and six days without news

What the villagers did next says a great deal about Niʻihau. They treated the pilot as a guest. Kaleohano took him home and fed him. Since nobody could understand him, they sent for the island’s residents of Japanese ancestry. The first, Ishimatsu Shintani, was a Japanese-born beekeeper of about 60. He spoke briefly with the pilot, looked shaken, and walked away without explaining anything.

Then they fetched Yoshio Harada and his wife, Irene. Harada was a Nisei, born on Kauaʻi to Japanese parents and therefore an American citizen, and he worked on the ranch. In Japanese, Nishikaichi told the Haradas about the attack and demanded his papers back. The Haradas kept the news to themselves. That evening the village held a luau, as it would for any visitor, and the pilot sang a Japanese song to a borrowed guitar.

By nightfall, though, the islanders had heard on a battery radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and they understood who their guest was. The obvious plan was to hand him over to Robinson when his boat arrived. It did not arrive. After the attack the military banned all boat traffic between the islands, and Robinson, stuck on Kauaʻi, could not get permission to cross. On Monday and Tuesday the islanders took the pilot to Kiʻi, the landing on the northern end of the island, but no boat came, and the sea was too rough to launch their own whaleboat. From Wednesday the pilot was lodged at the Haradas’ house, with islanders taking turns as guards.

The papers

Those days in the Harada house are the part of the story that is hardest to know. The guards could not follow the conversations, which were in Japanese. What is clear is that Nishikaichi worked on Harada, and that Harada came over to his side. The historian William Hallstead suggests that the pilot played on Harada’s uncertain position as a Japanese-American on an island of Hawaiians, and argued that the shaky defense of Oʻahu proved Japan would win the war. Why Harada went along has been argued about ever since. He left no account.

On Thursday, Harada sent for Shintani again. On Friday, December 12, Shintani walked to Kaleohano’s house and asked for the papers. The FBI memo says he called it a "life and death matter" and offered a bribe of about $200 so that he could burn them. Kaleohano showed him the papers and refused to give them up. Shintani left and went into hiding in the woods.

That afternoon Harada and the pilot made their move. Harada had taken a shotgun and a pistol from the locked Robinson ranch house, which he had a key to, and hidden them in a warehouse used for the island’s honey. With only one guard on duty, the two men walked him over to the warehouse, seized the guns and locked him inside. Then they commandeered a passing woman’s horse-drawn wagon and went looking for Kaleohano and the papers.

Signal fires and a whaleboat

Kaleohano saw them coming and hid in his outhouse. When he broke for it, Harada fired the shotgun at him and missed. Kaleohano ran to the village and raised the alarm, and almost everyone fled to the hills and beaches. He also slipped back to his empty house to get the papers and moved them to his mother-in-law’s home, so they were not there when the pilot came back.

Nishikaichi went back to his wrecked fighter, stripped off its machine guns and ammunition, and tried to use its radio. That night he and Harada set fire to the plane and then burned Kaleohano’s house to the ground when the papers could not be found. They walked through the deserted village firing their guns and shouting for Kaleohano to give himself up.

By then the islanders were trying to reach the outside world. Men climbed Paniau, the highest point on Niʻihau, and lit fires and signaled toward Kauaʻi with kerosene lamps and reflectors. Kaleohano thought that was too uncertain. Shortly after midnight he and five other men pushed a whaleboat off at Kiʻi and began rowing for Kauaʻi, against the wind, across a channel of open ocean. The crossing took them most of the following day, ten hours or more depending on the account. They reached Waimea on Saturday afternoon and telephoned Robinson, who had seen the fires and had spent days begging the military for a boat. Now he got one.

Ben and Ella Kanahele

The fight ended before the rescuers arrived. On Saturday morning, December 13, the pilot and Harada captured Benehakaka "Ben" Kanahele, a 49-year-old sheep rancher known on the island for his strength, together with his wife, Kealoha "Ella" Kanahele. Another captive, Kaahakila Kalima, had already helped Kanahele slip the ammunition off the wagon. Nishikaichi ordered Kanahele to find Kaleohano. Kanahele knew perfectly well that Kaleohano was on his way to Kauaʻi, and he made a show of calling for him.

When the pilot threatened to shoot him and everyone else on the island, Kanahele and his wife jumped him. Nishikaichi pulled the pistol from his boot and shot Kanahele three times, in the chest, the hip and the groin. Kanahele did not stop. He picked the pilot up and threw him against a stone wall.

This is where the accounts part. The Navy report written days later by Lieutenant C. B. Baldwin says the impact against the wall killed the pilot. The later versions, including the Smithsonian’s and the National Archives’, say Ella Kanahele struck him with a rock, and that Ben Kanahele then cut his throat with a knife. Either way, Shigenori Nishikaichi was dead. Yoshio Harada turned the shotgun on himself and died as well.

Kanahele did not stop. He picked the pilot up and threw him against a stone wall.

Ben Kanahele survived. The wounds that had seemed so terrible turned out not to have hit anything vital, and he recovered at Waimea Hospital on Kauaʻi. On Sunday, December 14, the lighthouse tender Kukui brought Robinson and an Army party under Lieutenant Jack Mizuha to Niʻihau, where they found the incident already over.

What the Navy made of it

The aftermath was harsh for the two Japanese-American residents who were left. Irene Harada was arrested and held for 31 months without ever being charged, much of it at a military prison on Oʻahu. She was released in June 1944 and went back to Niʻihau. Shintani was sent to an internment camp on the mainland for the rest of the war. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1960, after the old racial bars to Japanese immigrants were repealed.

The incident also traveled far beyond the island. In January 1942 Lieutenant Baldwin’s report pointed to the actions of Shintani and the Haradas as signs of the "likelihood that Japanese residents previously believed loyal to the United States may aid Japan." It was the kind of line that suited the mood in Washington. A few weeks later, on February 19, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast being forced from their homes into camps.

How much Niʻihau had to do with that is disputed. Some writers, Hallstead among them, see the incident as a direct influence on the decision. Others note that the pressure for removal came from many directions and that Niʻihau was, at most, one talking point among many. The awkward fact for the stronger argument is Hawaiʻi itself. More than a third of the territory’s people were of Japanese descent, and the islands could not run without them. Although Hawaiʻi was placed under martial law and some individuals were detained, it never saw the mass removal ordered on the West Coast. The same martial law also handed the military a whole other island, Kahoʻolawe, which became a bombing range for half a century.

The Zero that came back

The wreck of B11-120 had a stranger afterlife than any of the people involved. In late 1941 the Zero was still something of a mystery to the United States, and inspection teams were hurried to Niʻihau to learn what they could from an almost intact example. They worked fast, fearing another attack. "The inspectors actually used hacksaws and axes," Syd Jones, director of restoration at the Pacific Aviation Museum (now the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum), told the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine. The landing gear, the hydraulics and nearly all the wiring came off. A Presbyterian minister from Kauaʻi, the Reverend Paul Denise, came along and took more than 500 photographs, which the Navy kept.

What was left was dragged a few hundred yards to sit under a stand of trees, so Japanese reconnaissance would not spot it. There it stayed for more than 60 years. The islanders made practical use of it, peeling off strips of aluminum wing skin to roll into eyelets for fishing nets. One family kept a piece of the engine.

In 2006, with the Robinson family’s permission, the museum’s team went to Niʻihau and treated the wreck like an archaeological site, mapping and tagging the pieces before carrying them away. They laid the fragments out in a grid on the museum floor and identified about 95 percent of them. The wreck joined a small club of wartime wrecks brought back from remote places decades after the war. The museum also displays a restored A6M2 Zero painted with Nishikaichi’s tail code, B11-120, to show what the fighter looked like before it fell.

The burned and battered pieces of the real B11-120, including the wing, parts of the tail and part of the engine, are on display at the museum on Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor. Jones has called them "the largest surviving collection of artifacts from any [aircraft] shot down at Pearl." The burn damage on the main spar is still visible.

How it is remembered

On August 15, 1945, Ben Kanahele received the Medal for Merit and the Purple Heart. Howard Kaleohano was given a Medal of Freedom in 1946. Ella Kanahele, who by most accounts struck one of the decisive blows, received no official recognition at all. When Kanahele was decorated in Honolulu, the band played "They Couldn’t Take Niihau, Nohow!", a song by Alex Anderson that turned the whole affair into a comic triumph. It was not that for anyone who lived through it.

In Japan the story took longer to arrive. In Nishikaichi’s hometown of Hashihama, now part of the city of Imabari, a stone memorial was put up saying he had died in battle, and according to Hallstead’s translation it reads, "His meritorious deed will live forever." His family did not learn how he had really died until 1956.

Seen from a distance, the Niihau incident is a footnote to the day that pulled the United States into the Second World War. Up close it is something more uncomfortable and more human: a young man far from home who could not give up, a man caught between two loyalties who chose wrong and then chose death, a widow who paid for it for years, and a small community of Hawaiians who fed a stranger, kept his papers, rowed for help, and in the end fought for their island with their bare hands.

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