Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation’s Preservation Honor Awards are Hawaiʻi’s highest recognition of preservation projects that perpetuate, rehabilitate, restore, or interpret the state’s architectural and/or cultural heritage.  “Voices Behind Barbed Wire: Stories of Hawaiʻi” is honored with an Achievement in Interpretive Award, recognizing advocacy, educational, programmatic, or other activity that promotes preservation efforts.

“Voices Behind Barbed Wire: Stories of Hawaiʻi” is a documentary about Japanese Americans from Hawaiʻi interned during WWII, and includes updates on local internment sites, including Honouliuli National Monument.  The film explores personal accounts of Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans from their initial arrest and internment in places like Kilauea Military Camp (Hawaiʻi Island), Sand Island and Honouliuli (Oʻahu), as well as their incarceration in New Mexico, Arkansas, and Arizona.

The film draws from archaeologists Mary Farrell and Jeff Burton’s 2017 research and archaeological survey to document the locations of former World War II incarceration sites across Hawai‘i, including Sand Island Detention Center and the U.S. Immigration Station, Kalaheo Stockade (Kauaʻi), Haʻikū Camp (Maui) and Kilauea Military Camp (Hawaiʻi Island). Information on all 17 of Hawai‘i’s known sites is supplemented with updates about the former Honouliuli Internment Camp and the grassroots efforts led by volunteers of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i that resulted in the site being designated a National Historic Site, under stewardship of the National Park Service.

While the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II has been well documented on the U.S. Mainland, in Hawai‘i, previously untold stories from this dark chapter in history and new information about the sites continue to emerge.  The main goal of this film is to create awareness about the Japanese American incarceration experience in Hawaiʻi and to highlight the former prison sites around the state that once held community, business, and religious leaders and others of Japanese ancestry.  Through interviews with family members, the documentary poignantly portrays the impact of incarceration on individual families, an impact often felt for generations.

The documentary was produced in 2018 and distributed by DVD in 2019.  Through a program of community screenings and distribution in Hawaiʻi high schools, the film has been viewed by several thousand Hawaiʻi residents, students, and non-residents.  It has sparked interest to learn about the past while fostering dialogue around historic and contemporary issues of racial discrimination and prejudice.  The film also highlights the need to preserve these former internment sites and documents the location, significance, and current physical state of the sites.

“Voices Behind Barbed Wire: Stories of Hawaiʻi” was written and directed by Ryan Kawamoto and was produced by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi.  It was funded, in part, by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program.  Please contact the gift shop at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi to learn more about viewing or purchasing the documentary. A trailer of the Hawaii Island video is available on Vimeo.

For more information on the Honouliuli National Monument, please visit https://www.nps.gov/hono/index.htm.

 

The 46th Annual Preservation Honor Awards Ceremony will be held as an online event on Wednesday, July 22nd from 5:00 p.m. Please visit the Preservation Awards page to register.