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Visiting Honouliuli, the camp deep in a Kunia gulch where Japanese-­Americans were confined during World War II, isn’t easy for Wanda Fukunaga.

The 62-year-old Fukunaga’s grandfather Sam Nishimura was one of 120,000 Japanese-Americans held in U.S. interment camps during the war.

“There was kind of sad feeling, just to think of all the sadness that has gone on out there,” said Fukunaga. “It’s a piece of history that we cannot forget, the injustice that happened.”

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the opening of Honouliuli, the largest and longest-operating internment camp in Hawaii.

Fukunaga and other family members of former internees planned to visit the site today to remember the hundreds of Hawaii residents of Japanese descent who were unjustly incarcerated there.

Relatives will take part in a special pilgrimage organized by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii where they will visit the few remnants of the former internment camp, including a rock wall as well an aqueduct internees used to cross to get to the mess hall.

The private event will conclude with a blessing ceremony to be held at a concrete foundation where the mess hall once stood.

Koichi Ito, consul general of Japan in Hawaii, Jacqueline Ashwell, superintendent of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, and volunteers of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii are among the guests expected to attend today’s ceremony.

In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to relocate and intern Japanese-Americans.

On March 2, 1943, dozens of Japanese internees were relocated to Honouliuli from a detention center at Sand Island. Barbed wire surrounded the 155-acre site manned by armed guards in watchtowers.

Internees called the camp “jigoku dani,” or “hell valley,” due to the sweltering heat and hordes of mosquitoes.

Nishimura, a nisei born and raised on Oahu, helped run the family tailor shop in Haleiwa at the time authorities detained him. His wife, Hisae, cared for their six children and worked at the shop while Nishimura was confined at Honouliuli for 2-1/2 years.

Over the course of the war, about 400 internees and 4,000 prisoners of war were confined there.

German-Americans as well as Americans and immigrants of Italian, Russia, Scandinavian and Irish descent were also held at the camp. Women and children also made up the population.

The camp closed in 1946.

In February 2015 President Barack Obama designated Honouliuli as a national monument. The proclamation states the camp “serves as a powerful reminder of the need to protect civil liberties in times of conflict, and the effects of martial law on civil society.”

Fukunaga said she and her family members share their stories because it’s important to remember what happened “because we don’t want it to happen again.”

In years past the Japanese Cultural Center as well as other organizations nationwide have received federal grants from the Japanese-American Confinement Site grants program that support the preservation of the history of internment camps such as Honouliuli.

This year, however, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2019 doesn’t include funding for the confinement site grants program.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz is leading an effort to push for $2.8 million for the program. Schatz is also seeking the same amount of funding for the program for the current fiscal year.

“I’m confident but not overconfident that we will maintain funding for the program,” Schatz said during a phone interview Thursday.

The National Park Service, Monsanto Co., which donated land to the park service for the national monument, and the University of Hawaii at West Oahu will oversee Honouliuli.

Ashwell said opening the national monument to the public is expected to take a while. “We’re committed to doing it right,” she said, adding it could be about five to 10 years.

The park service is collecting data on natural and cultural resources at Honouliuli, a prerequisite to developing a management plan.

The top priorities of the management plan, Ashwell said, include establishing long-term management guidance for resource protection; creating a site plan to guide development, including roads, trails, interpretive and operational facilities, and access corridors to the site; and creating a vision for visitor use and accessibility.

In an emailed statement she added, “We should never forget our history here in Hawaii, and it is critical to share it with the rest of our country and with the world as a reminder of what we are unfortunately capable of doing during times of war. In the words of President Reagan, what occurred was motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”