Old Japanaese School House
The Old Japanese School House in Volcano Village was far from the first of its kind in Hawaiʻi. But it is now one of the last one-room school houses still standing in the state.
By the time it was was opened in 1928, there were almost 170 Japanese-language schools from Kauaʻi to Kona, started by families who wanted their children to learn traditional culture and language.
The idea for the Volcano Japanese Language school began to take hold in 1927 when local residents formed the Volcano House Japanese School House Association (Kazan Nihon Gi Chicho Kumiai) spearheaded by residents Giichi Okano, James Tsuchiya and Tsunesaku Honma, and began to approach businesses and individuals in Hilo and Olaʻa for support. Using land on Kalanihonua Road donated by businessman Garret Honda, the group commissioned contractor xx Miyando to build the single-story, wood-frame 818-square foot, one-room school house at a cost of about $2,000. The school house was officially dedicated and opened on Feb 11, 1928.
Architecturally the building features steep front steps leading to double-wide entry doors with porch areas on either side, all set on a post and pier construction with shed roofs over the entry areas.
When it opened, students could study Japanese language, writing, mathematics and customs after regular school hours — all in the same room. “It didn’t matter how old you were or what your skill level was, everyone was together,” said Meleana Manuel, who attended from the second to sixth grade in the 1960s.
“You’d go up these steep, slim steps and sit at the these old, old desks — the oldest I’ve ever seen — and the teacher would be at the big blackboard, pointing at different characters and everyone had to call out what it was.”
A Hawaiian adopted by parents from the U.S. Mainland, Manuel said she often felt out of place with all the other second- and third-generation Japanese students in the school house. My parents had the grand idea that I should learn two things: Japanese and hula. It was the hardest thing but I stuck with it and I’m glad I did.”
The school also became a popular community center, serving as home to weddings, parties, film showings, and other gatherings. In the years since it has been used as a classroom, movie house, church, community meeting place, boy scout den and a dance studio. A schoolmasterʻs residence and teachersʻ cottage were added on the site in the 1930s.
But almost from the beginning it operated against a larger background of public argument, discussion and tensions about the way school children of Japanese descent and other immigrant families should be taught in the state.
The schools originally received widespread support from plantation owners and others, but increasingly in the first decades of the 20th century there was a movement to limit their scope. By 1920 lawmakers in Honolulu, responding to arguments that the schools were move divisive than helpful, moved, at first, to shut them down, and when that failed, continued to restrict their scope, limiting classes to after public school for no more than one hour per day, six times a week. Teachers in the Japanese language schools also were required to be licensed by the territory.
School leaders fought back against the move to close them, taking their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1927 — just as the Volcano School was coming into existence — ruled that language school control laws were unconstitutional. "The Japanese parent has the right to direct his own child without unreasonable restrictions,” the court ruling said. “The Constitution protects him as well as those who speak another tongue.”
Records identify the first principal in the Volcano school only as a Mr. Fujimoto who taught from 1928 to 1931. After his death, Motoi Shiotani was hired in 1931 to be the principal and moved into the right half school house building with his wife and children. Sometime in the 1930s, Shiotani supervised the building of a four-room teachers quarters behind the school house building. .
Foreign-language schools like the one in Volcano thrived in the 1930s, with enrollment growing everywhere, but all that came to a sudden halt with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 when all the schools across the state were shut and ordered to liquidate their assets, and many of the Japanese school masters across the state, including Shiotani (and later his wife and children) were taken to an internment facility at Kilauea Military Camp. They were held in detention for the remainder of the war.
With the school closed, founders donated their funds to a Cub Scout troop and allowed them use the property.In following years, the school was transferred to the Volcano Vegetable Growers Association, and in 1947, to another community group.
The Volcano Japanese School reopened in the 1950s, with Motok Shiotani teaching there until he retired in the 1970s, and it was again used for Japanese education and cultural functions, but enrollment dwindled, perhaps falling victim to a lingering war-time resentment against Japanese ways and new desire to meld into American culture..
“Mister Shiotani was there until the 80s, not teaching, but gardening and doing odd jobs. He and his wife were still the go-to people for any kind of Japanese recipes or customs,” Manuel said. In 1989, the property was leased to the Volcano Art Center, which used it for classes and dance performances. “Gosh darn it, that building withstood all those students, some quakes, some dancing, some aerobicizing — all kinds of stuff. They built it strong back then,” said David Manuel, who remembers attending Boy Scout meetings in the school in the 1970s.
In 2009, the property was purchased by Satoshi Yabuki, owner of the neighboring Holoholo Inn. It remains a cherished part of Volcanoʻs communal history.
In their own words:
In a 1983 interview with Mary Miho Finley, Teruko Shiotani recalled the isolation and stigma that she and her family had to endure when the school was ordered closed and her husband interred:
“As soon as the school stopped, he was taken away and everybody was scared. They figure that if they hang around my place they gonna be picked up too. Yes, human beings are like that Yeah, they donʻt understand why itʻs happening. They can only guess. We better not stay by the Shiotaniʻs. They stay away, yes. Not all… Mr Takaki was one …he was the only one who give us a ride and take us to Hilo when we have to do some things, you know, shopping and what not. But otherwise all the rest of the parents so scared of coming close to our house because they figure if they come around my place…think they gonna be picked up. Weʻre the only family that was taken in Volcano.”