• The National Park Service has opened Honouliuli, Hawaiʻi’s largest wartime detention site, to public guided tours for the first time.
  • Free monthly tours began July 18 as a pilot program led by a rotating group of about a dozen docent volunteers.
  • Tours are limited to 22 visitors, run through the end of 2026, and have drawn a waiting list of more than 1,800 people.
  • Honouliuli operated from March 1943 until 1946, during wartime martial law that followed the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
  • National Park Service superintendent Christine Ogura said she does not want local children to grow up unaware that wartime detention “didn’t just happen on the mainland.”

The National Park Service opened Honouliuli, the largest and longest-operating of Hawaiʻi’s 17 known wartime detention sites, to public guided tours for the first time on July 18, launching a monthly pilot program that runs through the end of 2026. Free tours, led by a rotating group of about a dozen docent volunteers, take up to 22 visitors at a time, and more than 1,800 people are already on the waiting list.

Honouliuli opened in March 1943 in a remote, sweltering gulch in central Oʻahu and closed three years later. Prisoners who lived there gave the camp a Japanese nickname — Jigoku Dani, or “Hell Valley” — for the heat that pooled, windless, at the bottom of the ravine.

Hours after Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor and other military installations across Oʻahu on December 7, 1941, martial law fell over the Hawaiian Islands. The military took control of the territory almost overnight. The FBI, working from a list of suspects, began arresting people — including American citizens who had committed no crime.

Christine Ogura, the National Park Service superintendent in charge of Honouliuli since 2021, said: “I don’t want local kids growing up not knowing that this happened in Hawaiʻi. It didn’t just happen on the mainland.”

This year marks 80 years since Honouliuli closed in 1946. The pilot program is the first time the National Park Service has opened the site to the general public.