Zero

      More Letters From Paradise
                Zero
One of the little-known stories about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is the following.

A Zero fighter plane piloted by Naval Airman 1st Class Shigenori Nishikaichi, crash landed on the island of Niihau. He had been told that in case of an emergency, one of the attack submarines was assigned to rescue downed pilots. It  never arrived.

He had already shot down an American plane,  and he had six holes in his plane and was leaking gas.

The island he chose to land on is privately owned by the Robinson family. An ancestor had purchased the island in 1863,from King Kamehameha IV for $10,000 in gold.The island is eighteen miles long and six miles wide.   Sheep and cattle had been brought to the island from New Zealand. At the time of purchase there were only 600 natives on the island. None of whom knew English. The Robinson family guarded their fief from the rest of the Hawaiian Islands then, and do so to this day. The only way to visit the island is by invitation only. All the tourists know about the island is that it is private, and that beautiful very tiny expensive shell leis come from Niihau.

Nishikaichi's plane struck a fence and landed on its nose. He was pulled from the plane by Howard Kaleohano, who  managed the island, as the Robinson family had moved to the nearby island of Kauai. The pilot was given food, and the inhabitants learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese.

Another person in the story is Yoshio Harada, whose family had been brought to the island keep bees. The story now becomes too complicated to cite here, but simply put, Harada and the pilot as Japanese, and thinking that the Japanese would invade, began to terrorize the natives. Another important figure enters the picture. He is Ben Kanahele. When the pilot pulled his pistol from his boot and fired three times at Ben, and though wounded, Ben picked the pilot up and dashed him against a stone wall. The pilot was dazed, Ben's wife beat in his head with a rock, and Ben drew his hunting knife, and cut Ishikaichi's throat. Harada, seeing that all was lost, shot himself in the stomach. And so ended the affair which had begun when the Zero landed.

To make a long story short, the bodies were later removed from their graves and cremated. It was some time before the pilot's fate was known. In Japan a memorial in his name had been erected. His parents later learned of his fate. Ben Kanahele survived his wounds, and received two citations by President  Roosevelt.

The national press picked up the story and was printed in Reader's Digest and a book  "Remember Pearl Harbor" by Blake Clark. Life magazine also wrote the story but it remained unpublished as the war ran on. There was also a song "They Couldn't Take Niihau Nohow."

What I have written here is a poor account of what happend on the island. There is so much more to the story. The information I used is from the excellent book "The Niihau Incident" by Allan Beekman.

     Aloha
     Grant