The spy who watched Pearl Harbor from Alewa Heights

On March 27, 1941, a 29-year-old man came off the Japanese liner Nitta Maru at Pier 8, near Aloha Tower. His papers said he was Tadashi Morimura, a new chancellor at the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu. He was really Takeo Yoshikawa, a naval reserve ensign sent by the intelligence division of the navy’s general staff to keep track of the U.S. fleet and its anchorages, and to report to Tokyo in code.

Consul General Nagao Kita introduced him to a tea house on the slope of Alewa Heights: Shunchoro, on Makanani Drive, which Shuichi and Taneyo Fujiwara had opened in 1921. From the front windows of the second floor you could see Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor, six miles to the west, and Hickam Field beside it. The tea house had a telescope.

“Unbeknownst to us”

The family remembers it this way. “A customer named Yoshikawa used to come here during the day for tea or beer,” Laurence Fujiwara Jr., who runs Natsunoya today, has said. “When he was tired, my grandmother let him sleep in an upstairs room where we had a telescope. Unbeknownst to us, he was using it to watch the ship movements in Pearl Harbor.”

The tea house wasn’t his only lookout. Dressed as a laborer, he rode out to the cane fields at Aiea, and watched the far side of Ford Island from a pier at Pearl City. By the middle of 1941 he knew the American warships by name, and whether they were in port on a given day.

On the afternoon of December 6 he took a taxi to the Pearl City pier for one last look. Back at the consulate, his report went to Tokyo in code.

After the attack

The consulate staff stayed inside their building for more than a week, then were shipped to San Diego and interned in Arizona. Nobody outside learned who Yoshikawa really was. He went home to Japan in an exchange for American diplomats held there.

The Fujiwaras had their own war. The government took the tea house over and made it an emergency fire and first-aid station, and the Red Cross used it too. In 1958 Shuichi and Taneyo’s youngest son, Laurence Fujiwara Sr., reopened it under the name it has now: Natsunoya, Summer House.

The rooms upstairs

The two rooms upstairs, Nigo and Ichigo, are still tatami, with the best view of the city, especially at night. Nigo seats up to 60 and Ichigo up to 12. See the rooms.

Sources: “History,” natsunoyahawaii.com, from The Companies We Keep by Bob Sigall and his students at Hawaii Pacific University; Wil Deac, World War II magazine, May 1997, republished by HistoryNet as “Takeo Yoshikawa: World War II Japanese Pearl Harbor Spy.”