Dude, who even knows.
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Shit so this was supposed to be a tumblr about history and kontext, right? What’s all this happy hardcore crap?
Q: What is the Nihau Incident?
A: It’s what your American history books don’t tell you about when they get to Japanese internment in WWII and you’re all invited to have a sad.
Q: Aight, what was the Nihau Incident?
A: Aight. So Hawaii, yeah? And Pearl Harbor, yeah? Okay, so a Mitsubishi Zero coming off that all shot up. Can’t make it back, so he crashes on the tiny, westernmost Hawaiian island, called Nihau. (The official Japanese crashing island. Truefax.)
Which was entirely owned by this one sugar fortune heir, and administered as a cultural reserve for native Hawaiian ways of life, because that’s what happens when WASPs go native. (Basically all the real estate in Hawaii was owned by sugar and fruit barons or Hawaiian royal descendants until reforms in I think like the mid-90s?)
Anyway so the pilot crashes in a field, like, next to this Hawaiian dude and while he’s still dazed the Hawaiian dude takes his papers and gun. The dude doesn’t know about the attack but knows Japan and the US are tense so he’s still like “WTF is this?”
So he gets all his Hawaiian buddies together to deal with this, except the only language they have in common with the pilot is “terrible English” and they’re like “what did he say?”
So they send for one of the Japanese guys on the island. Once Captain Cook discovered Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, basically everyone settled it.
So they track down this Japanese guy and bring him in, and the pilot and him have words and he goes white and walks out.
And the Hawaiians are like “WHAT DID HE SAY?”
So they go to get the other Japanese guy. (There are only like 150 people on this island.)
And the other Japanese guy shows up, and him and the pilot talk. And the Japanese guy turns to the Hawaiians and doesn’t mention Pearl Harbor, but he’s like “hmm, I really think you should give this guy his stuff back”. And the Hawaiians are like “pf no”.
So later the Hawaiians are listening to the radio and they hear news of the attack and they’re like “Oh, ok. Better guard this dude.” Because they’re expecting the island’s owner to show up on his regular route and they can ship him back, only the Navy has boats on lockdown while it tries to figure out how and why and where there was a war all of a sudden.
So they’re guarding him, in the house of one of the Japanese dudes from before. Except I guess they’re not guarding him very well, because the Japanese dudes (helped by the one dude’s Japanese wife) get together and get all the guns (actually both the guns, a shotgun and a pistol) and take over.
It’s kind of a comedy of errors, though, because when they come for the original Hawaiian dude with the papers he’s in the outhouse and manages to run away and secure them. He’s like “I gotta go get help!” But Nihau to Kauai, the closest island, is like 20 miles at the narrowest, and this was a Hawaiian traditional culture preserve, so there were no motorboats on the island.
The thing is, the one thing traditional Hawaiians are super especially good at is open-sea rowing. So just after midnight he gets his Hawaiian friends in a boat and they row
FOR TEN HOURS
to get help.
Meanwhile on Nihau the pilot really wants to find the Hawaiian dude, so he gets this other Hawaiian bro and is like “go find the dude”. And the bro knows the dude’s rowing for help, so he’s like “alright, whatever, pf”. And then the pilot’s like “no seriously, find this dude right now or I’ll kill you all”. And he’s there with one of the other Japanese guys, and they have both the guns.
So at one point the pilot hands the shotgun to the other Japanese guy, and the Hawaiian bro charges him. The pilot pulls out his pistol and shoots the Hawaiian bro three times, and then the Hawaiian bro picks him up
and throws him
INTO A WALL
(and then his wife bashes the pilot’s head in with a rock)
((and then he cuts the pilot’s throat))
(((overkill kinda, but the pilot had really been a dick)))
The other Japanese guy got the shotgun and killed himself with it, which wasn’t particularly useful, but the Japanese were hardcore like that back then.
This is of course entirely on the word of the survivors of that room, so.
And when the rowing dude came back with backup the next day, all that was waiting for them were two corpses, one Japanese guy, and the other guy’s widow. (The pilot torched the plane when he got free.)
And so going into World War II, that’s what was on the minds of all the American defense planners, that the very first time Japanese on American territory - two nisei and a long-term resident issei - had a chance, every single one of them acted - violently and to the death when challenged - for the Japanese empire, against the United States.
So there’s that.