Springboard for Invasion: Yomitan Airfield and Its Comfort Stations

Chapter 4 Springboard for Invasion: Yomitan Airfield and Its Comfort Stations

I don’t know what time they came, but [suddenly] red flags were planted where the edges of our fields met. Red flags! So all of the farmers were mii-guru-guruu, mii-guru-guruu, just rolling their eyes and staring and saying, nuguwayaa, nuguwayaa—what on earth’s going on, what’s hap- pening? And when you went home, everyone kept repeating, “Someone put up red flags, they put up red flags.” Afterward, when we all went to the fields, we just stood around holding hands and twisting our necks to get a look and wondering, nuguwayaa—what in the world? At every cross- roads as far as you could see, people working in the fields would gather, light a cigarette, and start talking. Then after a while, when we heard they were going to build an airfield here, just imagine—du-mangwitii!—big uproar. Everywhere you went, district meetings, weddings, memorial services, all anyone could talk about was red flags, red flags. Some would say, “I get to keep half of this field or that field,” or “All my land’s safe.” If your farm was exempted, you felt really lucky. And then, before you knew it, they’d started building the airfield. […] Abé! Women, men, every last one of them! And then the trollies. Do you know what a trolley is? You fill it up with dirt and push it [on rails]. The women, they all had to haul baaki baskets filled with dirt. The scary thing—behind all this was the National Mobilization Law.1 The law meant that children, grownups, and women had to present themselves [for labor and military services]—they were mobilized. Just think of it! Our wives were given the job of stripping bark off pine trees. They had to rip the bark off!2

1 The National General Mobilization Law (Kokka Sōdōinhō), enacted in April 1938, authorized the state to impose controls over labor, production, prices, and transport by imperial decree. Adopted about one year after Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937, the law’s emergency provisions were invoked from the summer of 1938 to mobilize the populations of Japan and its colonial possessions in support of war-related activities. 2 Ryūkyūko o Kiroku suru Kai, Shima kutuba de kataru sensei, pp. 109–10. The Association for Recording the Voices of the Ryukyu Arc (Ryūkyūko o Kiroku suru Kai) published this testimonial in the local Yomitan idiom (shima-kutuba) but also provided a Japanese transla- tion for the general reader. The Japanese version of my book followed that example in its di- rect citations of survivor testimonies. Since Okinawa’s annexation and incorporation into the

Springboard for Invasion 137

1 Farmers, Airfields, and Militarization

The eyewitness account above describes the imperial Japanese army’s use of red survey markers, which were attached to thin bamboo poles, to stake out the site of a military airfield in the fertile heartland of Yomitan village. For local residents, the Battle of Okinawa began in April 1943 with the survey and sur- render of their land to the state.

1.1 Yomitan Village Before the war, the village was known as Yuntanja or Yuntanza (the Japanese and US militaries shortened that to “Yontan”). In 1946, it was renamed Yomitan, the modern appellation, which I will use here. Yomitan is located on the west coast of central Okinawa and marks the approximate dividing line between the northern Kunigami district and the south-central Nakagami district (map 2.1, p. 82). In the north, Yomitan is bordered by Onna village; in the south, by the town of Kadena. The eastern half of the village now straddles the US military’s Kade- na Ammunition Storage Area and abuts the city of Okinawa. Yomitan begins in the northwest with Cape Zanpa, a craggy promontory that juts into the East China Sea. Running southward from Cape Zanpa’s sheer rock face is a long coral strand that includes the Hagushi beaches, where US assault forces established their beachhead on April 1, 1945. The eastern half of the village is covered with rolling hills capped by Mount Yomitan (183 meters) in the low-lying Yomitan range, the village’s namesake, which is aligned on a north-south axis and follows the coastline at a distance of several kilometers. Dominating the center of the village are the ruins of the 15th-century Zakimi Castle, now a World Heritage site, which sits 127 meters above sea level.

Japanese state in the late 1870s, the central government has compelled Okinawans to speak standard Japanese and strongly discouraged—and during the Pacific War outlawed—the use of shima-kutuba and Uchinaaguchi (the Okinawan language in general). The Okinawan and Japanese languages are historically related, sharing a large number of cognates, but remain mutually unintelligible. Despite a policy of linguistic and cultural assimilation, the Japanese government could not prevent Okinawans from using their native tongue in everyday life. During and after the Pacific War, Japanese and American military occupations marginalized the Okinawan language almost to the point of extinction, and yet many islanders have defied the taboos that surround it and continue to use it in everyday life as an assertion of ethnic and cultural iden- tity. This anomalous situation, where speaking one’s birth language becomes an act of cultural resistance, is familiar to many older Okinawans, who were forced to use standard Japa- nese during the prewar era. Language use is a core historical experience that continues to unite the older generations. The English version of this book retains a large number of Oki- nawan expressions as a way of acknowledging that cultural and political fact.