Survivors remember commotion then calm inside Okinawa cave

Stars and Stripes
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Okinawans outraged by what they say is a cover-up of military-urged mass suicides during WWII battle
By David Allen, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Sunday, April 8, 2007

Controversy is nothing new

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — Recent outrage over Japan’s Ministry of Education’s censorship of Battle of Okinawa accounts in history textbooks is not new.

A similar controversy developed in 1999 when then-Gov. Keiichi Inamine tried to buff up the image of the Imperial Japanese Army, which, according to survivors, encouraged Okinawan civilians to commit suicide during the battle 62 years ago.

At the time, the new Peace Prayer & Memorial Exhibition Center in Mabuni had commissioned artists to design battle dioramas for the $412 million building. Some of the displays told the horror of civilians hiding in caves in Southern Okinawa in the last days of the battle.

One of the displays portrayed a Japanese soldier pointing his bayoneted rifle at a mother who fearfully clutched a baby to her bosom.

Upon learning of the display, Inamine suggested it be toned down by having the rifle removed from the soldier’s hands.

Inamine urged that the text accompanying displays also be changed. For example, the word “massacre” in the description of the massive deaths in the caves was to be changed to “sacrifice.”

But when the word got out, Okinawa Prefectural Assembly members accused Inamine of wanting to tone down history so tourists from mainland Japan would not be offended.

The original displays and written material eventually were allowed to stand. But when the gun was replaced in the soldier’s hands, it was no longer pointing at the mother and child.

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — Exactly 62 years after the start of the Battle of Okinawa, another battle is shaping up here.

Some say it’s a battle for the truth.

Last weekend the Japanese Ministry of Education instructed publishers of school textbooks to alter descriptions of the mass suicide of Okinawa civilians during the battle. The order included eliminating all references to the Japanese military’s direct role in the tragedies, erasing accounts in earlier texts that claimed the Imperial Japanese Army instructed Okinawans to kill themselves rather than submit to U.S. invaders.

“There are divergent views of whether or not the suicides were ordered by the army and no proof to say either way. So it would be misleading to say the army was responsible,” said Yumiko Tomimori, an official in the Education Ministry.

The news drew outrage from Okinawans who claim the government is bent on whitewashing history. The ministry’s decision came on the heels of denials from politicians in Tokyo that women throughout Asia were forced to serve in Japanese military brothels.

For years, Okinawa teachers have fought to prevent school textbooks from glossing over that hundreds of civilians committed suicide during the battle, many of them reportedly with grenades Japanese soldiers distributed specifically for that purpose.

University of the Ryukyus professor Nobuyuki Takashima, a member of the Association to Not Allow the Distortion of the History of the Battle of Okinawa, said the education ministry is pushing “their one-sided historic perspective that the mass suicide was beautiful death of residents who died in the love and loyalty to their nation.”

The association planned a protest rally in Naha on Friday night.

Takashima and others believe the ministry’s move was prompted by a lawsuit in which the former commander of the Japanese army garrison in the Kerama Islands, part of the Okinawa chain, is suing the publisher and author of a book charging the military was directly responsible for some of the suicides. The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, included a book by Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe, who wrote about mass suicides in the Kerama Islands, located just west of the main island of Okinawa.

It’s a charge supported by many residents of the Keramas.

Nobuaki Kinjo, 80, is one of the survivors. In 2001 he told Stars and Stripes that he was 16 years old living on Tokashiki Island when the Americans invaded the Keramas on March 26, 1945, in preparation for the April 1 landing on the main island of Okinawa.

He said that in a state of insanity fueled by the propaganda of Japanese soldiers, he killed his mother and two siblings in a mass suicide the day the Americans invaded.

“We were told the Americans were beasts,” Kinjo said in 2001. “We were told by the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army that we should commit suicide rather than be captured.”

Some 329 bodies were later counted in a valley where the villagers pulled the pins on hand grenades passed out by soldiers. He said he survived the mass suicide only because he was convinced by other teens that they should die a “more glorious death” by attacking the Americans. They were armed with sticks, but became disheartened when they came across some Japanese soldiers.

“I felt we had been betrayed,” Kinjo said. “Why were they alive and all the residents had to commit suicide?” They were soon captured by the Americans.

“Besides the issuing of hand grenades, what else do you need to prove the army was responsible for the mass suicides?” asked Kosei Yonemura, 77.

Yonemura, former chief of the Okinawa Board of Education, is from Aka Island, one of the Keramas, and fought with the Japanese Imperial Army in the Boys’ Volunteer Brigade when U.S. forces landed. He was 15 years old.

“The residents in Zamami were driven to commit mass suicide,” he said. “The cause of the tragedy was militarism and nationalistic education. In those days, the Japanese people had been indoctrinated to choose a graceful death by cutting their lives short rather than exposing themselves to humiliation by enemies.”

He called the Ministry of Education’s argument that there may have been no written or historically proven oral order to commit suicide “ridiculous.”

“Such an argument is nothing but an effort to trivialize the irrevocable fact that the mass suicides were a result of the militaristic education of the day,” he said. “We must raise our voices so that Japan today does not follow the same path it went down in the past.”

Toshiaki Shinjo, a teacher at Ginowan High School, told the Okinawa Times that the textbook changes skew the telling of the Battle of Okinawa.

By leaving out mention that the military forcefully encouraged civilians to kill themselves, “the tragedy becomes a beautiful story of people who willingly offered their lives to the nation,” he said.

“In the classrooms it will now be difficult to teach students the reality of Battle of Okinawa,” he said. “It will be more challenging for teachers to teach students true history.”

Chiyomi Sumida contributed to this report.


© 2006 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

Stars and Stripes
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Survivors remember commotion then calm inside Okinawa cave
By David Allen, and Chiyomi Sumida, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Sunday, April 8, 2007

Chiyomi Sumida / S&S
Haruo Chibana (left) and Akihiko Shinjo, Yomitan’s Namihira District Mayor, stand at the entrance of Shimuku Gama, where Namihira residents used as a bomb shelter.


Chiyomi Sumida / S&S
Chibana stands before a monument erected at the entrance of Shimuku Gama to honor two men, his grandfather and great-grand uncle, who saved about 1,000 residents from ‘mass suicide.'



YOMITAN, Okinawa — Not far from Torii Station is a cave complex where more than 1,000 civilians took shelter during the shelling that preceded the landing of U.S. forces on April 1, 1945.

It’s only by calming words from two men who had once worked in Hawaii that they all did not kill themselves with hand grenades the Imperial Japanese Army issued to them, says Haruo Chibana, 74.

During a recent tour of one of the caves in the Namihira community, Chibana spoke of being saved from the fate that struck Okinawans who cowered in nearby caves.

Chibana recalls the morning when U.S. soldiers with machine guns appeared at the entrance of the cave, called Shimuku Gama.

“People were terrified and screaming and crying voices filled the cave,” he said. “Some people prepared to drink poison and others discussed how best to kill themselves.”

It was at that time that Heiji Higa, Chibana’s great-granduncle, spoke up.

“He told people in the cave that the Americans would not kill unarmed civilians,” Chibana said.

Heiji worked in the sugarcane fields on the Big Island of Hawaii. To press his point, he called on his nephew, Heizo Higa, a former Hawaii bus driver, to back him up.

Propaganda from the Imperial Army and the government in Tokyo depicted Americans as “beasts” who mercilessly killed and mutilated their enemies and raped women.

According to several accounts of the invasion day, U.S. soldiers set up a machine gun at the mouth of the cave and shouted in English at the terrified villagers.

“There was a terrible commotion,” Chibana said. Then Higa and his nephew stepped forward. “That’s when the commotion in the cave calmed.”

The Higas spoke to the soldiers and then convinced the villagers that they would not be harmed, and ushered all the residents out, Chibana said.

Twelve years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, survivors dedicated a monument at the mouth of the cave to Higa and his nephew.

What had happened at Shimuku Gama was a stark contrast to the fate of people huddled in a cave called Chibichiri Gama, in the same village.

“Among the people in that cave was a man who was conscripted and fought in China,” Chibana said. “He brought back the military mindset with him.”

According to survivor accounts, some civilians resisted the Americans with bamboo spears and were killed. Others drank poison after stabbing their children with knives, while others killed themselves with hand grenades.

Of the 140 people in Chibichiri Gama, 84 people died.

And they died a second death in 1987 when right-wing nationalists took sledgehammers to a sculpture of writhing figures reaching toward heaven, mothers embracing their dying children and human skulls heaped near funeral urns.

“The nationalists said the memorial insulted the emperor,” said Setsuko Inafuku, a tour guide for 18th Services on Kadena Air Base. “So many people died here foolishly believing the propaganda,” she tells the Americans she takes to the hidden cave.

Inafuku has said that guides for Japanese tourists often tell her to tone down her comments to Americans.

“But I have to speak the truth,” she said. “I am not anti-Japanese. I am anti-lies.”


© 2006 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.