A March lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency has Hawaii’s Japanese Americans concerned about future visits to former incarceration camps, many of which are national historic sites managed by the National Park Service.
The Campaign Legal
Center filed a complaint March 5 in the District of Columbia’s district court against Elon Musk and DOGE on behalf of the national chapters of OCA Asian Pacific American Advocates, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Japanese Americans Citizen League — the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization in the nation — alleging that DOGE has acted “beyond their power to slash federal funding,
dismantle federal agencies and fire federal employees.”
Musk’s actions, according to the lawsuit, have specifically harmed members of JACL, many of whom are survivors of World War II, by affecting their ability to make pilgrimages to former incarceration camps, protected and operated by NPS.
It alleged that DOGE had “caused the termination of one of the three NPS staffers at the Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho and two NPS archaeologists at the Manzanar National Historic Site in California.”
“Historic site staff, including interpreters and historical experts, are critical for visitors to understand the experiences of incarcerated people and the causes of Japanese American incarceration,” according to the lawsuit.
The Manzanar and Minidoka camps are among the 10 detention centers that held over 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war.
While the Hawaii chapter of JACL is not involved in the complaint, it said in a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that it “supports JACL national’s commitment to protect vital education programs and ensure proper stewardship of public lands.”
JACL Hawaii said it has not previously organized trips to the mainland for pilgrimages, but Logan Narikawa, a
member of JACL Hawaii, personally visited Manzanar National Historic Site in college as part of a massive annual pilgrimage.
He said the experience forced him and the rest of his tour group to confront a fraught history but also presented an opportunity to also learn about the Indigenous communities affected by Japanese American
incarceration.
“It opens up the capacity for empathy,” Narikawa said. “I don’t personally know that many people whose families were incarcerated in Manzanar who are from Hawaii, but it opens up the possibility for connections beyond your personal experience.”
In his free time, Narikawa has always wanted to organize a large group pilgrimage from Hawaii to various former incarceration camps on the mainland. Earlier this year he was having brief discussions about what that could look like with other Japanese American community members from Hawaii, but the idea never got off the ground after the federal cuts started to unfold.
Narikawa said it’s a missed opportunity in
general, as many of the survivors and direct descendants of incarcerated Japanese Americans are
aging.
“There’s a sense of urgency,” Narikawa said. “It’s really a bummer that we might have to wait four years or more to get support to bring people together when there’s a real danger of people aging out.”
The alleged impacts on the sites are also of concern for Nate Gyotoku, executive director of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, which facilitates a Hawaii Internee Database on its website and has hosted private tours of the Honouliuli National Historic Site in Kunia.
The site was the largest and longest-run of any incarceration camp in Hawaii during World War II — about 2,000 Japanese American residents from Hawaii were detained across the mainland, Gyotoku said, but only about 200 were held at Honouliuli among 200 other American
civilians.
Their camp was separated by a sugar plantation-era aqueduct where prisoners of war from Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Germany and Italy were also held, according to NPS.
The national historic site is not open to the general public, and the NPS does not own any of the land that connects the park to the public roads, NPS said in a statement.
Superintendent of Honouliuli Christine Ogura told the Star-Advertiser via email that the federal cuts have not affected the park and that they are working to offer special tours later this year as part of a 10th-anniversary celebration of becoming a national historic site.
Ogura said people make pilgrimages to Honouliuli and other camps on the mainland. She said NPS is working with adjacent landowners to provide limited public tours in 2026.
While JCCH has not hosted any local tours since the COVID-19 pandemic, Gyotoku said if these sites are affected in any way, there’s a risk of American history being lost.
“This was something that happened not that long ago, in terms of history,” Gyotoku said.
In Hawaii the preservation of Japanese American detention history is sporadic across the state.
During the war, 17 sites across the state housed incarcerated people in temporary detention centers before sending people off to the mainland or to Honouliuli, according to NPS. But the exact locations of the camps — some of which held only three people at a time — are still unknown, according to the NPS website.
“These days, the sites have either been left for nature to reclaim or have been built over, leaving no trace of what had once
occurred to innocent civilians there,” according to the NPS website. “The (17 documented sites) are only the ones known so far, and for some, the location and details of (their) operation are unknown. It is very possible there have been others simply lost to time.”
That’s precisely what is at risk, JACL Hawaii said.
Many Japanese people draw wisdom from the phrase “kodomo no tame ni,” which translates to “for the sake of our children,” relating to a responsibility to the next generation, JACL Hawaii said in a
statement.
“In Hawai‘i, there is an
especially keen sense of responsibility for publicly held lands and community histories, even or perhaps especially when these histories document past injustices,” according to the statement.
Pilgrimages continue to be a way to preserve the past, Gyotoku said. Many Japanese Americans will do so to pay their respects to lost ancestors or relatives.
It’s a tradition that perpetuates a legacy, Gyotoku said.
“A lot of (pilgrimage) was at a time when the (NPS) wasn’t as involved, and a lot of these families didn’t want these places to be forgotten and wanted them to be taken care of,” Gyotoku said. “Now it’s important because we have a new generation, a younger generation of people who are descendants and know about these stories, know about their families being in these camps, so it’s a good way for them to remember and to not forget about things that happened within their own families.”
