American Literature on the Battle of Okinawa and the Continuing US Military Presence

Volume 15 | Issue 20 | Number 1 | Article ID 5074 | Oct 15, 2017 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus American Literature on the Battle of Okinawa and the Continuing US Military Presence Steve Rabson Introduction: American side of the battle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle accompanied The several works of American literature set in U.S. forces as a war correspondent. His Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel account in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950) narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, begins with American battleships’ shelling of fiction, drama, and musical theater Perhaps the Okinawa and ends the day he was killed by a earliest, Francis L. Hawks’s 1856 Narrative of Japanese sniper on the offshore island of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the Iejima. China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat More than 12,500 Americans died in the Battle diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his of Okinawa, which took the lives of demands on leaders of what was then the approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one- travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s informative and colorful descriptions of the population at the time. The widespread local residents, architecture, and natural devastation left most residents homeless, environment.1 destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed A century later, Okinawa commanded all of thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for America’s attention in the spring of 1945 more than a year, supplying food, shelter during the last and worst battle of the Pacific (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the War. Two Okinawan immigrants to the United wounded and ill. U.S. occupation personnel States published autobiographical accounts in supervised the distribution of relief aid and the English of mid-20th-century Okinawa, including construction of homes and public buildings; the battle and its aftermath. In “My Story: A they were also tasked with bringing Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa,” Masako “democracy”to Okinawa, which many Robbins describes her long ordeal as the Americans considered feudalistic. daughter in an impoverished family, sold by her father into prostitution, who barely survived The contradiction between American espousals the battle. Jo Nobuko Martin’s novel A Princess of democracy and policies imposed top-down Lily of the Ryukyus (1984) depicts the under U.S. military rule soon became obvious horrifying ordeal of the Princess Lily Student to Okinawans, and to at least some American Corps of high school girls, the author among military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, them, and their teachers, who were drafted as published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the combat nurses during the Battle of Okinawa. August Moon, in 1951. Later adapted into two 237 out of 240 died in the fighting, and several plays and a film starring Marlon Brando as an committed suicide, having been told by the Okinawan, it is probably the best-known work Japanese military they would be raped if of American literature set in Okinawa.Lucky captured by U.S. soldiers. Writing from the Come Hawaii (1965) by Jon Shirota depicts the 1 15 | 20 | 1 APJ | JF experience of Okinawans in Hawaii, focusing on virginity to a wealthy businessman. After U.S. the strained relations among resident ethnic firebombing in October of 1944 destroyed most groups following the Japanese attack on Pearl of Naha City, including the brothel where she Harbor. It was the first novel by an Asian worked, she felt relieved that “now [the American writer to become a bestseller. Among woman] had no power over me.”4 later postwar works, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End by Norma Six months after the bombing of Naha, U.S. Field (1993) provides retrospectives on the forces invaded Okinawa Island on April 1, 1945. Battle of Okinawa. “Memorial” by Gary Snyder Masako watched from a cave shelter as U.S. and The Yokota Officers Club (2001) by Sarah Navy ships offshore fired cannon barrages. Bird depict effects of the grossly“The American ships were so close that, as we disproportionate military presence in Okinawa lay on the ground watching, we could see which continues to this day. sailors moving about on deck, or in the distance a kamikaze attack.”5 After U.S. forces occupied My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of the central and northern regions in fighting Okinawa that caused heavy casualties on both sides and among Okinawan civilians, Masako and the Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins wroteMy other women refugees were moved from 2 Story in English, which she learned after shelter to shelter by the Japanese army in its coming to the United States from Okinawa with long, chaotic retreat under fire to the southern her first American husband in 1952. Her portion of the island in which thousands more account of life in prewar, wartime, and early soldiers and civilians died. She tells how postwar Okinawa compels the reader to Japanese soldiers seized food from Okinawan experience the history of this tumultuous era homes, killing a family who tried to hide one from the perspective of a daughter in an cup of rice, and how they killed a baby inside a impoverished family. As a child in the 1930s, cave shelter whose crying, they said, might she was sold by her father to a brothel in Naha, attract the attention of the enemy. Okinawa’s capital city. Drafted by the Japanese military as a combat medic during the Battle of In late June American soldiers captured Okinawa, she barely survived sheltering in a Masako and a friend from her school days cave that collapsed around her from shelling. hiding in a sugar cane field. “We were quickly After spending several months in a refugee surrounded by what seemed like fifty American camp at the end of the battle, her family soldiers standing in the sugar cane. All had returned to their village to find their home weapons and they were pointed at us.”6 destroyed. Her strength, resourcefulness, and resilience through these horrifying ordeals are nothing short of astounding. Of her childhood at the family home in the Imadomari section of Nakijin Village on the Motobu Peninsula of northern Okinawa, she writes, “We were so poor that we didn't have a decent door to close when we all went to bed.”3Later, she describes her life after her father sells her to a woman managing what she calls “a house, not a home,” and the fear and disgust she felt when the woman sold her 2 15 | 20 | 1 APJ | JF for the news. “We have just declared war on Britain and the United States . Our mighty bombers have wiped out an entire unit of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.”7 Soon makeshift military training was added to the school curriculum. We had no metal for weapons, but bamboo grew abundantly in backyards and in the countryside. Bamboo was light and supple, and Civilian refugees in the Battle of Okinawa made excellent spears; . straw dummies with the heads of Churchill or Roosevelt were Robbins describes the months that followed, fashioned.8 most of which she spent in refugee camps where the internees, prohibited from returning to their villages, were fed and sheltered, but Six months after the October 10, 1944, air where some American soldiers raped young attack that destroyed the capital city of Naha, women and girls. Later, she is hired to work in U.S. forces landed on the Keramas, just off the the post-exchange at the Okuma Officers Rest coast of Okinawa Main Island, in late March of Center in northern Okinawa. This was one of 1945. Thus began the last and worst battle of the many installations the U.S. military took the Pacific War, taking some 230,000 lives, over from the Japanese army, greatlymore than half of them Okinawan civilians, and expanding them and building vast new bases destroying most standing structures. for their occupation (1945–1972), which lasted twenty years longer than the Allied occupation Nobuko, as one of the Himeyuri student of mainland Japan. The grosslymedics, had made her way through an “iron disproportionate U.S. military presencetempest” of “falling . shells” to the remains to this day. underground field hospital where she’d been assigned. Princess Lily of the Ryukyus by Jo Nobuko Martin Wounded men lay on bunk beds In December, 1941, the author was a teenage lining the walls. In addition to the schoolgirl in Naha when the principal called all usual musty odors associated with students and teachers into the auditorium for cave life, there was the stench of an emergency assembly. putrefying flesh, pus, and medicines. The air was thick with fluffy soot from the many kerosene "I have an official announcement lamps on the walls . In the from Imperial Headquarters,” Mr. operating room under a naked Masaoka began . He paused electric bulb two masked doctors about five seconds to prepare us in white were bending over the 3 15 | 20 | 1 APJ | JF operating table. A nurse stood by, I turned around. Someone took holding a tray with gleaming hold of my shoulder . “Where instruments. Their patient groaned are you going?” he asked, in in pain. To eyes accustomed to the Japanese. It was bookish, heavily yellowish light from kerosene accented Japanese, but quite lamps, the white, glowing electric comprehensible. light was blinding, and the brightly illuminated operating room . I stared up at him for a contrasted harshly with its moment.

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