Haruko Takahashi: A Shintō Priestess Imprisoned at Honouliuli

Haruko Takahashi was a Shintō priestess who spent part of World War II imprisoned at Honouliuli Internment Camp on Oʻahu. Her story is part of a National Park Service series on religion on the World War II home front.

A priestess from Kohala

Takahashi was born on April 19, 1910, in Kohala on Hawaiʻi Island, to parents who had immigrated from Japan. A Nisei, she held dual citizenship and grew up in Hawaiʻi when it was a U.S. territory. As a girl she had poor eyesight that surgery could not correct, and she credited Konkokyo, or Konko, a sect of Shintō, with its remarkable recovery when she was seventeen. By January 14, 1940, she had founded the Konko Mission of Wahiawa on Oʻahu, a branch of the Church of Konko Mission of Honolulu.

Arrest

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the war. Martial law was declared in Hawaiʻi almost at once, and officials began rounding up residents suspected of hostile intentions. Most of the roughly eight hundred people first detained were of Japanese descent, many of them community leaders like Takahashi. They were held in existing facilities across the six major islands, then moved to the U.S. Immigration Station and the Sand Island Detention Camp; many were sent to camps on the mainland. The opening of Honouliuli Internment Camp in 1943 offered a more permanent and isolated alternative.

Takahashi was arrested on December 14, 1941, mainly because she had traveled to Japan in 1933. Officials believed her ties to Japan made her sympathetic to its imperial policy. At her hearings, the Board of Officers and Civilians claimed she spoke little English, though she had lived in Hawaiʻi all her life, and tried without success to link Shintō with worship of the Japanese emperor. The board concluded that "in view of her activities as a Shintō priestess and her apparent loyalty to Japan," she was "dangerous to the public peace, safety, and internal security of this country."

Protest as poetry

Takahashi had no lawyer, but she wrote letters urging her release, and they read like poems. In them she described internees as dew on the ground, trampled and unable to lift their heads; days and months turning like the trade winds; nights cold in their room, dreaming of home. She insisted that a heart cannot be re-dyed the way cloth can, and that people born in America could not think only of Japan. She urged her fellow prisoners to think quickly and clearly, not to cry but to be strong, and to obey orders — but only the right ones.

Release

The Military Governor's Review Board denied her request for release in March 1944, but she was freed that July. By the end of the war, more than 2,000 people of Japanese descent from Hawaiʻi had been incarcerated; none was ever found guilty of acting against the United States.

Takahashi reopened the Konko Mission of Wahiawa on January 1, 1948, and made one more pilgrimage to Japan in 1963 to visit the Konkokyo headquarters in Okayama. She died on December 24, 1972, and the mission still holds a memorial service for her every year.

Sources

• Brittney Nareau, "Haruko Takahashi," National Park Service, series Religion on the World War II Home Front: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/haruko-takahashi.htm
• The NPS article draws on Takahashi's 1945 alien processing file at the National Archives and on Amy Nishimura's study of Japanese women interned at Honouliuli. Takahashi's own writings are paraphrased here, and the portrait on the source page, credited to a private collection, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.