The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War 戦時中日本に於ける沖縄県民の離散

Steve Rabson

brought temporary improvement, and the market expanded all of a sudden in wartime for When the Japanese government abolished the locally woven Panama hats, the prefecture’s Ryukyu Kingdom, absorbing it into Japan as one “manufactured” export. But the United Okinawa Prefecture in 1879, most Okinawans States and European countries imposed a ban on the mainland were merchants of locally on their importation in 1919 that sent the grown and handcrafted goods. Large-scale market tumbling. Two years later, the collapse migration began around 1900 with theof world sugar prices in 1921 devastated the development of Japan’s modern textile industry, poorest prefecture’s economy, compelling more centered in Greater Osaka. Thousands came Okinawans to leave for South America, Hawaii, from the nation’s poorest prefecture, mostly and the Philippines, but with the largest young women and teenage girls from farming number, a recorded 10,300, going to mainland villages, to work under contract in factories. Japan, 7,419 of them to Greater Osaka, By Most stayed temporarily, typically for three 1925, approximately 20,000 lived there, about years, often working and living in oppressive half in Greater Osaka. Responding to conditions, and sending a portion of their discrimination and the need for networks of wages back to help support their families. mutual support, they had begun forming residential communities in the industrial Okinawan migration to the mainland increased sections of Osaka and other manufacturing rapidly with the outbreak of World War I which cities. boosted demand for Japanese products, enormously benefiting the economy. What was The largest migration in history of Okinawans known as the “World War I boom” shook the to the mainland occurred during another labor nation’s industries out of their recession shortage after Japan’s military incursions in doldrums. With Japan on their side in that war, China escalated to full-scale war in 1937. The the Allies deluged Japanese manufacturers with war brought thousands to the mainland for orders for munitions and supplies.military-related jobs. In its final years, however, Furthermore, with industries in America and it wrought death and devastation on their Europe on wartime production regimens, communities that were mostly located in urban Japanese manufacturers were able to displace industrial areas. By 1940, a recorded 88,319 them in large sectors of the consumer market Okinawans—about 15 percent of the total in Japan and in other Asian countries. population of Okinawa Prefecture itself—lived on the mainland. The number of Okinawans Yet, while industrial areas of the mainland residing in greater Osaka more than tripled boomed during World War I, few benefits between 1935 and 1940, from 18,774 to resonated in mostly rural Okinawa from where 56,828, after having declined by 4,565 over the outward migration accelerated rapidly.previous five years.1 During the second half of Wartime demand for Okinawan sugar, the most Japan’s turbulent 1930s, more Okinawans than important product in the local economy, ever left home for work on the mainland, where

1 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF war-related production, planned and subsidized residential communities were located, leaving by the Japanese government, was fueling rapid them in ashes and rubble.2 Meanwhile, the industrial expansion. Meanwhile, theinvasion of Okinawa, launched in late March, construction of new factories in Osaka’s 1945, bogged down into a devastating war of environs accelerated a “secondary migration” attrition that dragged on for three months, to other cities in Osaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga taking a recorded total of 237,318 lives, more Prefectures. than half of them Okinawan civilians.3 In the aftermath of massive human, material, and As for the war, by mid-1942, after a decade of environmental destruction, entire families were invasions and offensives, Japan controlled not missing, and whole villages destroyed. Many only much of northeastern China, including the Okinawans in mainland cities who hoped to capital of Nanking (now Nanjing), but also the escape the burnt-out ruins and return to their Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, homeland after the war had nothing left to go French Indochina (now Vietnam), and the back to. Furthermore, the U.S. military that Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). But, in June, now occupied and governed Okinawa not only 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl made travel to and from the Japanese mainland Harbor, the Japanese navy suffered a major difficult, requiring documents that were often defeat near Midway Island in the Central unobtainable, but also seized local farmlands, Pacific. Seizing the strategic advantage, the including some owned by mainland residents or Allies pressed a broad counteroffensive,their families, for a major expansion of military capturing territory in battles that often inflicted bases. heavy casualties on both sides and local civilian populations. With the capture of Saipan in July, Wartime labor shortage opens more jobs at 1944, U.S. forces were closing in on Japan higher pay itself, now within range of American B-29 bombers. This tumultuous period began in 1937, after Japan had invaded and occupied Manchuria As the prospect of air attacks loomed,some six years earlier. The skirmish between evacuations began of civilians deemedJapanese and Chinese forces near Peking (now unessential to the war effort. Individuals, Beijing) on July 7, 1937, known as the “Marco families, and organized evacuee groups left Polo Bridge Incident,” quickly escalated into industrial centers for suburban and rural areas, full-scale war. Responding to the “emergency where large numbers, especially children, situation” (Japan never officially declared its suffered from dislocation and severe food war against China.), the Japanese government shortages. By this time, many Okinawans who implemented laws regulating capital had earlier moved to the mainland for jobs and investment along with imports and exports, and hadn’t been drafted into the military were mobilized industry with large government conscripted for labor in local factoriessubsidies for military production. Two years producing munitions and other war supplies. later, in 1939, with indications that the war would be prolonged, the government passed They were among the recorded 10,388 killed the National Mobilization Act that tightened and 29,807 injured in massive fire bombings controls on labor, imposing strict requirements that devastated greater Osaka in the spring and on workers to register that would later summer of 1945. From March to mid-August expedite mandatory job assignments. Civilian more than 2,200 Allied bombers flew eight industries predictably declined, while those major air raids, especially targeting the kind of serving military needs expanded rapidly. In factory districts where most OkinawanOsaka, once called “the Manchester of the

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East” for its many cloth factories, the textile industry shrunk by half after 1937, along with chemical and heavy industries not related to the war effort. That meant layoffs for some Okinawans, especially those working in textiles and lumber.4 However, many more found jobs in factories switching to war-related production, which received lucrative government contracts.

Official policy to convert small and medium enterprises for military production stimulated their growth in greater Osaka, where they have long formed a key sector in the local economy, Factories in Taishō Ward, Osaka especially as subcontractors for larger firms. In 1939, Nakayama Steelworks added a new blast The government’s wartime designation of an furnace with a 430-ton capacity at its main “Osaka-Kobe Industrial Zone” for building and factory in Taishō Ward. Kubota Steelworks enlarging factories beyond Osaka City into its expanded its product line to include metals for surrounding municipalities had profound and making firearms and containers for storing lasting effects on the location and size of gunpowder and explosives. SumitomoOkinawan communities. The newly created jobs Metalworks enlarged its plant in neighboring attracted Okinawan workers mostly from Osaka Konohana Ward during the same year, then City, but also from Okinawa itself. In 1937, a purchased the Japan General Motors Plant in Tōyō Ball-Bearing plant opened in Takarazuka, Taishō Ward in 1940 to build a subsidiary Hyōgo Prefecture, where an Okinawa factory there.5 Nakayama, Kubota, and other Prefectural Association is still active today, companies that enlarged their existing factories holding regular gatherings and publishing a newsletter. In 1939, Kubota Steelworks built a or built new ones during the war are still major 468,000-square-foot factory in Sakai City, employers in Osaka’s Okinawan community Osaka Prefecture, where another Okinawa today. association remains active today.7 Sumitomo Metalworks enlarged its metal tube factory in Eighteen-year-old Uezu Seishō left Okinawa in Amagasaki City, Hyōgo Prefecture, to 1940 at age 18 for Osaka where he stayed with manufacture airplane parts. Other new and his uncle. “I remember my excitement at seeing enlarged plants in Amagasaki made propellers, an industrial area on the mainland for the first electrical equipment for military time. In May, I started a job at Kubota communications, rubber-covered wire, and Steelworks as an overhead crane operator. At torpedoes. Okinawans also worked at the first, the schedule of alternating twelve-hour Osaka Machinery plant that produced training shifts was hard on me, but I got used to it and models for the Imperial Army’s “dragon fly” to interacting with the people there. I was reconnaissance airplanes. Construction of determined to succeed.”6 factories, workers’ dormitories, and other war- related facilities also created jobs for Okinawans.8

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In the resulting “secondary migration” on the efforts to hire workers, offering optimal mainland, the largest population of Okinawans opportunities to both the educated and to moved from Osaka to Amagasaki, just across factory workers.”12 A 1939 editorial expressed the Kanzaki River, where their numbers “our hope in this third year of the sacred war increased nearly tenfold between 1935 and that we can take advantage of the present labor 1940, from 1,281 to 11,462.9 As in Osaka a shortage to make gains in all areas of decade earlier, they began organizing, at first employment. Since in normal times we have in friendship societies of people from the same encountered barriers to employment, we must Okinawan locality. These merged in 1940 into not lose this opportunity for jobs that are stable the Amagasaki League of Okinawa Prefectural and secure.”13 Born on rural Ishigaki Island, Associations, which consolidated after the war Kuroshima Anto recalled his decision in 1939, to become the present Hyōgo Okinawaat age twenty-six, to leave for Osaka. Association, with a membership of approximately 5,000, according to a recent survey.10 During and after the war, it provided I wanted to go because I had a counseling free of charge to Okinawans seeking yearning for the big city, but employment, negotiating with employers, circumstances at home were also a applying for government permits or benefits, factor. I got help resettling in starting businesses, or trying to earn a living Osaka from my older sister and a after their family breadwinner had died in the childhood friend living there. It war.11 was great meeting them again, and at first I traveled around sight- seeing to enjoy the thriving urban culture. My friend used his connections with someone he knew in Amagasaki to arrange a job for me at the city’s Ōtani Heavy Industries plant, and I moved there in October. It was wartime, so hiring procedures were simple, and the next day I got a license as a lathe operator trainee. My Okinawan folk music performance at supervisors showed me around the Osaka restaurant factory. Seeing the eight-foot-long ingots at the lathe where I would be assigned, I looked forward to As the conflict widened in China and more men starting work. Thanks to my boss’s were drafted, not only were new jobs opening kind and careful training, I up, but accelerated production schedules qualified quickly as a full-fledged brought overtime pay and higher incomes., 14 lathe operator. Ōsaka Kyūyō Shimpō, the newspaper of the Kansai Okinawa Prefectural Association, began publishing barely two weeks after the 1937 Escalating war brings heightened Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937. It pressures to assimilate reported the following year that “under the present circumstances, businesses areYet Okinawans’ wartime movement into the competing as never before in unprecedented mainland work force was hardly

4 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF problem-free. In a January, 1939 roundtable Far from excluding them, some factory discussion in the Ōsaka Kyūyō Shimpō, a managers were so impressed with the work of participant noted that “there is still theOkinawans that they actively recruited them. tendency to exclude Okinawans and Koreans.” Honjō Hiroo, President of Honjō Zinc Works in “Yes,” responded Hokama Chōki of theOsaka’s Konohana Ward, publicly praised the newspaper’s industrial labor section, “but “diligence” of Okinawans Iha Mansei and things have gotten much better.” WhileShimabukuro Keisuke, employed at his acknowledging that the war had created many company for more than a decade since 1924. more jobs, other roundtable participants were “They have changed our perception of people less certain that Okinawans’ status among from Okinawa Prefecture,” he proclaimed. workers had greatly improved. Goya Hirotsugu, “Taking recommendations from these two men, counselor at the Osaka Employment Agency, I plan to hire many more of them.” True to his reported that “Just the other day we had a word, he increased the number of Okinawan complaint about an employer who refused to employees to 150 when he opened two new hire an Okinawan, claiming there would be factories in Osaka after 1937. He subsequently language problems.” And Medoruma Kōshin, promoted two of them to foreman and manager counselor at the agency’s Ichioka branch, noted at Honjō Factory Number Three, where that “Nissan Automobile refused to hire an virtually all the workers were from Okinawa, Okinawan recently because the company and recruited others to form the core of work 18 claimed that, although Okinawans worked forces at two affiliated factories in Amagasaki. hard, they were slow to respond and tended to Still, if hiring bans abated during the war, change jobs even for a small raise in wages.”15 discrimination didn’t end. Kinjō Tomiko left Okinawa for the mainland a second time in Goya suggested, in the same roundtable 1943, at age nineteen. “I took a job at a discussion, that Okinawans were perceived as munitions factory in Shiga Prefecture that slow to respond because their nonverbal made coil connectors for airplanes. . . . One of signals were sometimes misinterpreted. my coworkers was being harassed by someone Hokama explained that “Okinawans tend to in the accounting department who kept making reply in the affirmative by nodding and smiling, disparaging remarks about Okinawans. When rather than in words. This causes them to be another woman came to us in tears, the seen by some on the mainland as somehow supervisor of our dormitory floor, who was also vacillating, or to raise doubts as to whether from Okinawa, and I organized all the they understand what has been said to them.” Okinawan workers for a strike. The next The participants agreed that employers should morning, we refused to go to work, causing a be informed that Okinawans are good workers big uproar among the company managers. . . . and that differences in interpersonal styles do After two hours they agreed to meet with us, not affect their job performances. Medoruma and when we told them about the person in added that Okinawans faced discrimination accounting, the harassment stopped more often in small, privately owned businesses immediately.”19 than in large enterprises.16 Hired for wartime work at Osaka Machinery, Shimabukuro The problems often started with how Takehiko recalled in 1995 that “there were Okinawans were referred to on the mainland. fewer exclusions of Okinawans and Koreans Many objected strongly to the term“Ryūkyū- during the war when the factories needed our jin” (Ryukyuan), which identified them with the labor. It was a time when they would have former Ryukyu Kingdom and implied “foreign,” hired a cat and put its paws to work.”17 therefore inferior, status.“Ryūkyū-jin” (also

5 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF pronounced “Riki-jin”) was used derisively Okinawans have been annoyed since the early when factory supervisors scolded Okinawan decades of the twentieth century by popular workers, or when notices posted at employment depictions in the mainland media of Okinawa’s offices and rooming houses announced“rich” culture and “leisurely” lifestyle. For “Chōsen-jin, Ryūkyū-jin o-kotowari” (Koreans them, these two words carry stigmatizing and Ryukyuans prohibited). In formal contexts, double-meanings of exotic and indolent. “It’s people from Okinawa preferred to calleasy,” Nakama Keiko notes, “to see through themselves “Okinawa-kenjin” (people of this ‘Okinawa’ created by mainlanders that 21 Okinawa Prefecture) or“Okinawa-ken reveals their superiority complex toward us.” shusshin-sha” (people from Okinawa Prefecture), and to refer to mainlanders as To defend against exoticization and stereotyping, many Okinawans did what they “tafuken-jin” (people of other prefectures, could to assimilate, reaching out to their municipalities, and districts). Informally, they nighbors and co-workers. In his novel Michi no have often referred to themselves as shima (Island Paths, 1976), Shimota Seiji tells “Uchinaan-chu” (Okinawans), and to of a young Okinawan who moved in 1940 to mainlanders as “Yamatun-chu” (people of Osaka, where he found work as an apprentice Yamato) or “nai-chaa” (mainlanders), terms in cutting-machine operator. Okinawa dialect that can carry ironic or derisive overtones depending on context. In a sense, calling mainlanders Yamatun-chu, which Tokubei wasn’t dissatisfied with identifies them with an ancient clan predating his job. . . . It was better than the formation of a Japanese state, is Okinawans’ hard labor in the cane fields he’d response to being associated with the former done in Okinawa. . . . But things Ryukyu Kingdom. In the August 1, 1939 edition weren’t going well with the family of Ōsaka Kyūyō Shimpō, physician Tamaki who owned the shop and his senior Tetsuya explained why the term “Ryūkyū-jin” coworkers. . . . The first night after was problematic: work he went back to the room where the workers stayed.

Unlike the old provincial names for “What was your name?” asked the prefectures on the mainland, like oldest among them. . . . They’d all Shinshū for Nagano and Kōshū for been introduced by the shop owner Yamagata, Ryukyu refers to a place that morning and Tokubei had with much greater differences in made a special effort to remember language and customs that their names, so he was mainlanders find very strange. . . . disappointed that they’d forgotten Poets and even ordinary folks call his. . . . Ryukyu “poetry country,” “dream country,” or “picturesque country.” “Yonamine Tokubei.” . . . He made . . . But, considering how sure to pronounce it clearly. mainlanders treat us, such praise “Yo-na-mi-ne? Wow, that sure is a hardly expresses love and respect 22 weird name.” for the people of our prefecture. In fact, it is nothing more than a romanticization with heavily Despite such experiences, Tokubei never disparaging overtones.20 changes his name, even though the official

6 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF procedures were relatively simple, usually standard Japanese.”26 Okinawans both at home requiring only one trip to the city, ward, or and on the mainland saw the folklore scholars village office to rewrite it in a household as seeking to exploit Okinawa’s “rich” culture, register. Most of those who made changes as material for their research, at the expense of revised only their surnames.23 its far-from-rich people.

The trend to “mainlandize” personal names Wartime pressures to assimilate from within accelerated during the war, when pressures the greater Osaka community culminated in heightened to demonstrate loyalty to the leaders’ calls for a thoroughgoing Japanese state. The government’s policy of “nationalization” (kokuminka) to eliminate or encouraging people in Korea, under Japanese minimize differences between resident colonial annexation, to adopt Japanese names Okinawans and mainland Japanese. Like became mandatory there after 1939. Although Tamaki, an author writing under the name Okinawans were under no such government “Yoshitake” in theŌsaka Kyūyō Shimpō order, they were subject to social pressures at advocated the use of unaccented standard home and on the mainland. The Okinawa Japanese as one way to eradicate prejudice. He Prefectural Board of Education’s wartime described his own encounters on the mainland advice to “change the readings of ourwith discrimination in marriage and surnames” coincided with the Kansai Okinawa employment in an article published on New Prefectural Association’s campaign on the Year’s Day, 1941. mainland for “lifestyle reform.”24

With the Japanese government exhorting This is something people to use “standard” Japanese as a show of incomprehensible for those of us unity in wartime, mainland community leaders who have never set foot outside launched a campaign to “eliminate Okinawan Okinawa Prefecture, or even for accents.” Tamaki Tetsuya wrote that “Because those who have traveled to the our language and customs are somewhat mainland for a month or two. But different, there is a feeling that we don’t people in other prefectures know completely fit in. . . . As Japanese citizens, we Okinawa only as “Ryukyu.” When are, of course, loyal subjects of the emperor. we apply for a job, they ask us if So, under the circumstances, we should vow to we understand Japanese, remark get rid of extraneous sounds in our speech.”25 on how “odd” our names sound, and want to know if we are true This was also the time of the notorious (and Ryukyu natives. In short, they today much-studied) “dialect controversy” think of us as strange people from (hōgen ronsō) in Okinawa, where a group of a second-rate place. Because of mainland folklorists visiting in 1940 criticized this, we experience many local policies to enforce the use of standard disappointments in job-hunting, Japanese in the schools as endangering the promotions, marriage, and survival of the Ryukyuan language. The relations with our neighbors. indignant response of educators there was During my years on the mainland, I echoed by Okinawans on the mainland. They have known two cases in which conceded that “promoting the use of standard marriage plans had progressed to Japanese and preserving Okinawa dialects are the point of wedding both important,” but insisted that, for economic arrangements. Then, as soon as a survival, “emphasis must be put on mastering prospective spouse was discovered

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to be from “Ryukyu,” negotiations if members of the dominant ethnicity.”31 were immediately broken off. I realize that such prejudice arises Yet, even when community leaders were for many reasons, not only vigorously advocating wholesale adoption of language differences. But we must the majority culture and lifestyles, at least emphasize language since it is the some Okinawans on the mainland questioned first thing mainlanders notice the desireability of becoming “the same in all about us that is different.27 ways” as mainlanders. A resident of Osaka wrote in the October, 17, 1940 edition of the Ryūkyū Shimpō that “it is difficult for Yoshitake went beyond advocating the use of Okinawans to become like people of other “standard” Japanese, echoing calls for total prefectures because, although we are honest, conformity in Okinawan newspaper editorials they are inconsiderate and hostile. . . . They during the “human pavilion incident” in 1903. complain that we lack assertiveness and tend to He wrote, “If at the earliest possible date we withdraw, but we have many virtues to be could show we have become the same in all admired.” ways as the people of other prefectures, with no remaining differences, we would sweep away all their prejudices. This is the most We almost never see them line up advantageous path to our advancement.”28 to take their turn. Some bull their Okinawans today view campaigns for way through a waiting crowd like assimilation on the mainland as much as rugby fullbacks, crashing into rejections of an Okinawan identity and its others, stepping on feet, and cultural manifestations as adoptions of kicking people in their thighs. mainland lifestyles.29 “Rather than questioning That’s the outrageous way the assumptions of the ‘majority,’” notes mainlanders behave. On crowded Nakama Keiko in retrospect, “they took trains, they blithely take up two mainland prejudice as a given and felt they had seats and cross their legs so that no choice but to ‘reform’ [i.e., assimilate] if their muddy shoes rub against the they hoped to end discrimination.”30 clothing of people standing around them. Even when passengers are Okinawans are hardly alone in turning to packed together shoulder to assimilation as a strategy for economic and shoulder with no space between psychological survival. “All known societies them, some mainlanders thrust out have been stratified,” notes Terrence Cook, their elbows to hold open their “and as long as systematic inequities remain, newspapers, knocking aside the one can expect some recourse to assimilation. . people next to them. The same . . [G]iven the importance of the choice in kind of unconscionable behavior question, it is quite plausible that an can be seen at the public bath. instrumental but boundedly rational reasoning Many never bother to wash may explain the choice . . . [I]ndividuals of an themselves first, jumping right into ethnic minority most likely [choose] the tub as soon as they tear off assimilation [because] they perceive clear their clothes. Then they wash their rewards in assimilating, whether for self- hair, rinse out their washcloths by protection or for self-advancement in their squeezing them against the inside careers. . . . [S]ome of them are enough alike in tile, and pour water over appearance or speech that they could ‘pass’ as themselves with no regard for the

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filth they’re spreading among the widespread retelling of “The Five Brave other bathers.32 Warriors of Hisamatsu” sparked admiration among mainland Japanese. It was even reported to have led to pay raises for some The author insisted that “No Okinawan is so Okinawans working in small factories, where lacking in a sense of public morality.” And he their wages had been 15% lower than those of considered it “truly regrettable” that, “because 35 mainlanders. The purpose of its dissemination of our difficulties with language, we are often 33 in schools and in the media was to promote misunderstood.” dedication and sacrifice among all Japanese, adults and children alike, in the war effort. Although Okinawans may have questioned the extent to which they should assimilate, most “The Five Brave Warriors” was classified in maintained the emphasis on their Japanese Japan as one of several “honored tales of nationality. This article’s harsh criticism is loyalty and bravery.” Perhaps the best-known directed at “naichaa” (mainlanders) and was “Human Bombs: The Three Brave “tafuken-jin” (people of other prefectures, Warriors,” which told of a 1932 incident in municipalities, and districts), not at “Nihon-jin” which three Japanese soldiers carried fused (Japanese). Okinawans often emphasized their explosives into a Chinese fortification near Japanese nationality during this period when Shanghai. A premature detonation killed them, “language and custom reform” (to mainland but opened the way for a successful assault.36 norms) was a popular slogan, and “being The Hisamatsu episode occurred on Miyako Japanese” meant being a citizen of a modern Island in May, 1905, at a critical stage in the nation that had already won two wars (the Russo-Japanese War. Islanders were said to Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and Sino- have sighted a large formation of warships Japanese War of 1894–95), and been on the steaming north, which they recognized as a winning side in World War I. Despite Russian fleet heading for the war zone. They continuing encounters with prejudice and immediately notified the Miyako local reservations about abandoning their culture, many Okinawans on the mainland, especially government office. But the nearest telegraph association leaders, viewed this “time of transmitter was on Ishigaki Island, about 100 emergency” as an opportunity to affirm their miles away. Five sturdily-built fishermen from identity as “the same Japanese” (onaji Nihon- the Hisamatsu section of Hirara City were jin). Tomiyama Ichirō judges this effort in chosen to row their small fishing boat there. retrospect as futile and self-destructiveThe information would be crucial because the because firmly entrenched popular attitides Japanese Navy had been unable to locate and government policies in mainland Japan did Russia’s Baltic Fleet. not recognize Okinawans as members of the 34 They set out on May 25 and arrived at dawn the “imagined community” of nation. next day. Their message was transmitted to the Responses to “spritual mobilization” Japanese fleet which, however, had received a similar report an hour earlier from one of its A history textbook used in Japanese primary patrolling cruisers. The resulting victory was schools, which were renamed “nationaldecisive to the war’s outcome. And, although schools” in 1941, included an episode from their message arrived later than the cruiser’s, Okinawa during the Russo-Japanese War of the heroic status of the five fishermen 1904–5. Osaka’s newspapers had featured it in remained undiminished.37 The Navy Ministry 1935 during the thirtieth anniversaryhonored them in 1935, during the thirtieth celebration of Japan’s victory in that war. The anniversary victory celebration. Mainland

9 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF patriotic organizations and veterans groups Okinawan attorney whose address and sent commendations and trophies to Miyako. telephone number were provided.40 Failure to register their new addresses at the local ward Public commemoration in 1935 of the “Five office was one way Osaka’s Okinawans, and Brave Warriors of Hisamatsu” came during the other Japanese men, sought to avoid, or at least fourth year of fighting in China. With the delay, military conscription, indicating that not outbreak of full-scale war in 1937, Okinawan everyone was cooperating enthusiastically in journalists in Osaka joined their mainland the war effort.41 counterparts in public expressions of patriotism. An editorial in theOsaka Kyūyō Along with journalists, Okinawan composers Shimpō marking the first anniversary of the and playwrights began infusing their work with newspaper’s founding noted that “its birth just patriotic exhortations. Taihei Marufuku after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident closely Records, founded by composer andsanshin links our newspaper with the nation’s destiny . . performer Fukuhara Chōki, released wartime . To report the arduous battles of the Imperial recordings of Okinawan songs with such titles Army is our patriotic mission. . . . The future of as “Wives on the Home front,” “Women, Be the struggle against the enemy in China is also Strong,” and “A Toast to the Departing Enlisted our newspaper’s future.” True to its pledge, the Man.”42 Yet, even as he composed music newspaper published detailed accounts of supporting the war, Fukuhara came under sacrifices made by Osaka’s Okinawans on the official pressures that had the effect of battlefront and the home front.38 It printed the devaluing Okinawan culture. Government names and brief biographies of men departing censors ordered him to change the title of a for and returning from the war, and listed the song he had written with his wife Shizuko, names of Okinawan dead. Headlines extolled originally issued in 1934 as “Ballad of the “deaths with honor in battle” and “the silent Warrior” (Gunjin-bushi). “It is entirely return of heroes.”39 inappropriate,” the censors declared, “that the term honoring soldiers of the Greater Japanese The Kyūyō Shimpō also printed exhortations for Empire should be used as the title of a Okinawans to support the war. A lead article in Ryukyuan folk song.”43 The incident acutely 1939, for example, urged Okinawan men in demonstrated the paradoxical position of Osaka to “be especially cognizant of their Okinawans, who drew criticism for expressing military obligation, ready to serve with honor their distinctive (“Ryukyuan”) culture even in as Imperial Army soldiers in this time of crisis, the context of supporting Japan’s war against and to shoulder their rifles at a moment’s China. Government censors might have deemed notice if summoned by his Majesty.” The the title inappropriate because the text of the article’s headline, however, suggested that not song was in a dialect thought by many to all those eligible for conscription were eager to represent an inferior subculture in Japan. Or, seve. “Are there men among us who have perhaps they objected because giving a neglected to notify the military of their change “Ryukyuan folk song” that title seemed in address? . . . We call upon you to register.” inconsistent with contemporary ideals of unity The article included the names of men listed and uniformity. In any case, it was renamed with their hometowns in Okinawa, where “Port of Embarkment” (Debune no Minato), orders had arrived from the local regimental although the original title has been restored in headquarters to report for duty but whose recently published collections of Okinawan current addresses could not be determined. It songs.44 urged “Anyone with information about these men to immediately notify Mr. Toyokawa,” an The authors of Okinawan plays that drew

10 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF overflow audiences in greater Osaka also material, actors would improvise prolonged turned to war themes. Since the 1920s, plays interludes of music and dance until the police were performed daily at a small, converted got bored and left, then perform the proscribed Kabuki theater located in a section of Konohana scenes that were often the audience’s Ward where many Okinawans lived. Theater favorites.46 groups from Okinawa also performed at other venues in Taishō Ward, and in the nearby cities Such expedients suggest that Okinawans of Sakai and Amagasaki. Touring greater Osaka sought some temporary relief from what in 1939, actors from Okinawa staged aOkinawan poet and longtime mainland resident dramatic sketch entitled “National Spiritual Yamanokuchi Baku called, in his 1943 poem Mobilization.” The following year, another “Ōshō” (Drafted), “this khaki colored world” of troupe from Okinawa performed a play entitled mobilized Japan. “A Drama Chronicling Troubled Times Between Japan and China.” An advertisement summarized the plot. In the middle of the night,

who could it be, Chō Shitetsu is the son of Nakamoto Matsuru, an Okinawan knocking at my door? woman, and Chō Rinkun, a Chinese man who is pro-Japanese. After his He had turned the color of this father is assassinated by the world, Nationalist Kuomintang)( khaki from head to toe. government, Shitetsu, vowing revenge, forms an alliance for “I must leave at once,” he said. justice in China. He searches for his mother, who, appealing for “At once.” peace in Asia, had disappeared twenty years before. In this quest, It is the way of this khaki-colored he fights bravely for the Japanese world. 47 Army, falling heroically in battle to become a divine warrior spirit of Japanese-Chinese amity. This Okinawans living on the mainland today recall masterpiece of drama will bring their efforts as children during the war to find tears to your eyes. (Admission some humor in the daily cacophony of charge: 40 sen. Discounts for militaristic propaganda and endless exhortation soldiers in uniform returning from for greater toil and sacrifice. Yamashiro Kenkō, the front.)45 originally from Ie Island, Okinawa, remembers the changes in his elementary school during the war. Like published songs, plays had to pass government censorship. Translations in standard Japanese were required for scripts in In April of 1941, I entered what Okinawa dialect. Even after their approval, had previously been called a police in plain clothes came to theaters, higher elementary school, but was synopses in hand, to check on performances. renamed a national school a few With stern wartime prohibitions against love months earlier. The content of scenes and what was considered “effeminate” textbooks had changed too,

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glorifying war and exalting Japan started the war against national prestige. In those days, America. I knew there was no way government leaders’ strategy of Japan could win, and felt overcome brainwashing people and with fear and helplessness.49 inculcating absolute obedience began in elementary school. We were taught that Japan had a If Okinawans on the mainland had doubts about single line of emperors that would official claims that Japan was fighting a “sacred continue forever and that, as the war” in which “victory was certain,” they could country of the gods, it would never hardly have expressed them openly. People lose a war. The emperor was an suspected only of having ”dangerous thoughts” all-knowing, all-powerful living god (kiken na shisō)could be arrested and who controlled everything, so we imprisoned. Nakamura Chijun, an Okinawan were told that when we died, we who joined the Yokohama police force in 1942, had to raise both arms and yell remembers how busy officers were from the “Tennō Heika banzai!” (Long live Special Higher Police Unit(tokkō). “They the Emperor). Jokesters among us brought people in every day for interrogations. would practice dying on the way to Even those said to harbor thoughts inconsistent and from school, falling down by with national policy were jailed for more than a 50 the side of the road while yelling year.” “Tennō Heika banzai!” Some students even said the emperor’s At least some of the war’s survivors among shit must taste sweeter than Okinawans on the mainland still argue that the sugar.48 Pacific War was unavoidable, forced on Japan by other nations. Interviewed in November, 2000, six men in their 80’s living in Taishō Besides playful takes as children on stern Ward agreed that the nation had decided to wartime admonitions and ideology, other fight because it found itself surrounded by the Okinawans on the mainland recall doubts they “ABCD” powers. That wartime acronym, much had about the campaign for “spiritualpublicized by the government shortly before mobilization.” In her account of the war years, the Pearl Harbor attack, identified the Takada Hatsu writes Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch as thwarting Japan’s legitimate interests in Asia and threatening the country’s very survival by I first learned the meaning of war imposing hostile measures such as embargoes as a second-grader when I had to 51 on essential raw materials, especially oil. join a funeral procession to the shrine for a man who died at the Other Okinawans recall the early war years as front in China. Seeing his bereaved exciting and inspiring. When eighteen-year-old family made me feel hatred for Fujioka Hiroshige heard about the start of the war. Later, I found the increasingly Pacific War, he wanted to become a soldier militaristic curriculum at school immediately, dissatisfied with his status as a unbearable and would read short “home front youth” (gunkoku shōnen). stories during class. I didn’t really want to go on to the next grade and didn’t have to, since I was sick My blood had been stirred by the in the hospital the day of entrance string of victories in the exams. . . . I was sixteen when Manchurian, Shanghai, and China

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Incidents.52 I firmly believed, as did always successfully, to reduce friction among most Japanese, that Japan, the competing institutions and organizations by eternal land of the gods, was sure concentrating even more authority in the to win the Pacific War. The factory national government. With the creation of what where I worked put up recruiting was called a “new order” (shin-taisei), many posters for the army, air force, and civilian organizations were abolished or the navy youth corps, but young absorbed into others hastily formed to support men my age weren’t being the war effort. Labor unions, for example, were inducted because of the labor merged into the “Patriotic Production shortage. . . . . Our plant produced Association.” On the local level, Okinawa rifle bullets, which made me want prefectural and village associations in greater to be a soldier even more. . . . I Osaka, which had become increasingly active vowed to die in battle, and might as the fighting escalated in China, declined even have volunteered to be a abruptly after the outbreak of the Pacific War, human torpedo if I’d had the to the extent that little record of their activities chance. . . . But today, when I during this period remains today.55 remember proclamations like “victory is certain,” they sound like Turning tide of war brings labor slogans for some fanatical new conscription and food shortages religion or lines from a kyōgen comedy.53 Although discrimination as companies’ policy had abated, Okinawans, like others in Japan, faced much harsher working conditions as the Organizations were also expected to do their “quagmire” in China widened into the Pacific part for “spiritual mobilization.” The Taishō War. Teruya Shūshin quickly found a job at the Ward League of Okinawa PrefecturalKawanishi Aircraft Factory in Amagasaki City Associations, with its reported membership of where he moved from Okinawa in November, 7,000, held rallies for soldiers departing for the 1940, at age 23. Thirteen months later, front, received the remains of war dead, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he began conducted public funerals for them, and made working long overtime hours on an accelerated consolation visits to bereaved families. An schedule to produce transport planes for the article in the May 15, 1939 edition of the Osaka Imperial Navy.56 Iha Zen’yū, originally from Kyūyō Shimpō praised the dedication of Okinawa’s Ishikawa City, had failed his draft Washino Asako, who headed a local chapter of physical due to a heart condition. He was the Greater Japan Women’s League forrunning an awamori (Okinawan rice brandy) National Defense. “She is gallantly providing bar in Osaka until restrictions imposed on encouragement and comfort in devoted service civilian enterprises in August, 1941, forced him on the home front not confined to her family. out of business by limiting the operation of bars ‘This has nothing to do with any special to two evening hours. After hearing that men circumstances of people from Okinawanot serving in the military whose jobs did not Prefecture,’ she explains. ‘I am only doing my support the war effort were being conscripted part to fulfill my natural obligation as a citizen for work in the mines, “I decided to close the of the nation.’”54 bar and take a job making cannon parts at a munitions plant where I got hurt operating a To reinforce conformity and cooperation, lathe.”57 Japan’s leaders established the Imperial Rule Assistance League in 1940. It sought, not Kinjō Tomiko left Okinawa for the second time

13 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF in 1943 because her mother said she’d be safer After Pearl Harbor, the navy took control of the on the mainland if war came. “I’d worked a Ōtani Heavy Industries plant in Amagasaki couple of years earlier at a spinning factory in where Kuroshima Anto was working. Wakayama, and could see right away that the munitions plant I was assigned to in Shiga All employees were designated Prefecture had also been a spinning factory. conscripted workers and, starting The work I did two years earlier had also been that day, we could no longer come grueling, but now, under the nation’s stepped and go freely, our movements up production regimen, we had to work even restricted by a permit system. when we got sick. Besides that, meal portions Until then, we’d thought the war at the dormitory were tiny and the food was was something happening in a awful. At home in Okinawa at least I’d been foreign country. But now, with 58 able to eat my fill of decent food.” news that it wasn’t going so well, people with no experience as Miyagi Masao also worked at a munitions plant soldiers were ordered to do in Shiga Prefecture. “We made the human military training after the work day torpedoes that men climbed inside and crashed was over. Privates first class, into enemy warships, giving their lives for the corporals, and sergeants just back emperor. In the company dormitory where we from the front drilled us in had to stay there was never enough food. They stabbing straw dummies with gave us meal tickets every ten days, but we’d bamboo bayonets. They made use them up in five. After that, we only got those of us who seemed to lack breakfast in the mornings.”59 enthusiasm, or failed to yell loud enough for them, run around the Uehara Kiyo left Okinawa for Osaka in 1943, at factory grounds several times after age twenty-one. “I was so happy to land a job at bayonet drills. This daily training the Osaka Artillery Arsenal that paid high was much worse than anything wages. They hired only thirty out of the eighty we’d ever had to do on the job.62 people who took their entrance exam. But I’d expected to do office work. Instead, I was assigned to operate a lathe that spilled oil all In 1941, fifteen-year-old Agena Hiroshi had just over my arms and shoulders, giving me a bad graduated from higher elementary school in rash.” She wrote her mother in Okinawa who Okinawa and was working on his parents’ farm. told her to return immediately. “I quit after 60 working there six months.” We were shocked when I received a draft notice for conscripted labor While Uehara was able to leave her job, many at the Kōkura Army Arsenal [in couldn’t. Long hours and wretched food made Fukuoka Prefecture]. I’d never Kinjō Tomiko want to quit her munitions factory even visited the mainland before. job, but, this being prohibited, she was forced They worked us like animals there, to adopt the tactics of Okinawan women from early morning until late at confined to spinning mill dormitories before the night, with double shifts Mondays war. “Finally, planning my escape, I sent a and Fridays, and always under the friend a letter telling her to meet me one watchful eyes of an army captain Sunday. I got permission to go out for the day, or M.P. Like many others who then left for good.”61 couldn’t stand it any longer and

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just wanted to get the hell out of battlefield. there, I volunteered for the army. I felt so relieved when, in January, 1944, I finally got my orders for a I’d come from Kumejima to Taishō unit in Korea. Only later did I Ward planning to study sewing for realize what a fool I’d been.63 a while, then return to Okinawa. But after the Pacific War broke out, no boats were leaving for Eighteen-year-old Machida Munetaka arrived in Okinawa. I felt I couldn’t just keep Osaka in 1935. His first job was at a company living my comparatively leisurely that made neon signs, but after full-scale war life, so I took a job collecting meal began in China, he left to work at almost tickets in the cafeteria at Nihon double the wage for a company that Steel, one of the main munitions manufactured cartridge belts and electric wire factories in Taishō Ward. . . . The under military contract. plant was on two twelve-hour shifts, and the workers had to be ready to go there immediately in After turning twenty-one in 1938, I emergencies, so they all lived in a moved to Amagasaki. I’d already nearby dormitory. Many came to passed my draft physical and was pick up their meals in the assigned as a soldier to work in a cafeteria, but went right back to local factory. The job itself was eat at their workplaces. . . . They from eight to five, but I pulled poured smoldering clumps of red- guard duty and had to stay hot metal slag through high-speed overnight there four or five times a roller machines for flattening, then month. I also had to go on pushed it through huge scissor-like nighttime marches after work. clamps for slicing into steel panels Although we were all dead tired after a hard day on the job, they and rails. One slip meant serious made us march all the way from injury or worse. And the heat was the factory at Nishi-Yodogawa so bad they had to keep pouring Ward in Osaka to Minatogawa water over themselves. Just Shrine in Kobe [a distance of about watching them terrified me. Some twenty-five miles]. . . . Labor soldiers who returned from the brigades were also mobilized. They front after the war told me they’d were made up of students from been more afraid working there Ichioka Middle School and local than on the battlefield. merchants from tempura and sushi With the war going badly, more restaurants, rice stores, and other men were drafted from the factory, small shops. None had ever operated dangerous factory leaving it short of workers, so machinery before, and I was about a hundred teen-age trainees always worried that the were brought from Korea. I felt schoolchildren might get hurt.64 especially sorry for them during air raids because they couldn’t understand the directions to bomb Job risks weren’t limited to machine operators. shelters, and would run through Nishihira Tsuruko compared her factory to a the halls sobbing. Caucasian

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prisoners of war [probably support of the war effort, printing stories daily captured in the Philippines] were about the joys of group evacuation. Our parents also brought in by the military must have worried a lot about us leaving home police (kempei) to work. There without them, but we were in high spirits at were several dozen of them, all first, as though we were taking off on a school with fine physiques and some with excursion.” The mood changed abruptly after handsome faces like movie stars. they boarded a boat for Shikoku. They were all so polite when they came to the cafeteria, and some bowed to us. But the military I vomited constantly during the police would beat them if they trip. . . . We finally arrived at our tried to talk to us, so even if they destination, about fifteen miles just said hello, we’d walk away south of Tokushima City, where the fast. . . . The military police treated rice farms stretched out as far as them so brutally I had to avert my the eye could see. We began life as eyes.65 evacuees billeted at a Buddhist temple. Seventy fifth-grade boys were far beyond the capacity for By 1945, Allied P.O.W.’s included American the temple’s four guest rooms, so pilots whose aircraft were raining death and they packed us together like lunch- devastation on Osaka and other cities where box sushi with two boys sleeping war-related industry was heavily concentrated. on each tatami mat. Our third day there I was hurrying across the The war’s toll on city residents and veranda of the main pavillion when evacuees my foot plunged through the bamboo lattice floor, tearing the In December, 1943, the government had begun tendons in my left leg. I was evacuating civilians deemed unessential to the carried to the nearest town in a war effort, and relocating some factories that rickshaw, where I got seven produced munitions and other military supplies. But since moving heavy equipment stitches with no anesthetic, it and machinery often proved impracticable, being unavailable due to wartime many workers remained in cities that came shortages. I endured the pain under air attacks. Meanwhile, other residents clenching my teeth because I was who, like most Okinawans, had no relatives told that “men of Japan don’t cry.” they could stay with in the countryside, were Later, when my injury healed and sent to designated rural areas where they often the stitches had to be removed, suffered extreme hardships. Some, especially two teachers took turns carrying young children, did not survive. Large numbers me over the three-mile road to and of schoolchildren in greater Osaka were from the clinic. Remembering it transported, along with their teachers, to rural now, I realize how much trouble Shikoku in Tokushima Prefecture. this must have been for them. . . . But in those days all I could think In late 1944, Isagawa Hiroshi was an about was food. . . . And because I elementary school student in Taishō Ward. was hungry and homesick most of Many of his classmates were also from Okinawa the time, my futon was often wet with no relatives in the nearby countryside. with tears. . . . I saw in the New “The newspapers hoisted their lanterns in Year of 1945 homesick, hungry,

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cold, and covered with lice and see in photographs today of countries torn by itchy scabs. war and famine.”66 Isagawa Hiroshi recalls, “I was ecstatic when my parents came to take me The second evening after New home in May, 1945. My classmates who had to Year’s Day an [Okinawan] boy who stay there until the war ended looked like was constantly bullied by the straggling soldiers when we finally saw them others apparently caught cold and again three months later. Some of the sixth was lying sick in his futon. I saw graders suffering from malnutrition weighed several boys drag him out, and less than 20 kilograms (44 pounds).67 although I felt sorry for him, I didn’t have the courage to stop Most people who left cities with their families them. I heard later that they fared better than those evacuated in groups. stuffed him into a closet. The next Even without relatives to stay with, many were morning, there was a loud uproar able to cope more easily with the dislocation, when his cold body was overcrowding, and food shortages. They also discovered. The temple gave him a escaped the harsh regimentation forced on huge funeral attended by many group evacuees that led to conflict among high-ranking priests in gaudy adults, scapegoating among schoolchildren, robes. His father, who had rushed and occasional violence. Konawa Anka recalls to be there for the ceremony, that the farm family he stayed with in Arima resembled his son, small and weak- “was very kind to us. They were especially looking. We wondered if he knew happy when my mother volunteered to baby-sit the truth about what had 68 their children. We were never short of food.” happened. After sundown, as the Shimabukuro Hisako was twenty-nine in the boy’s classmates carried his coffin spring of 1945 when she and her two children the mile or so up the mountain evacuated to Ikeda in suburban Osaka path to the crematory, all of us were afraid we might be punished Prefecture. Her husband had already moved in karmic retribution. . . . People there with the other employees from his often say children are “pure- company in Osaka City, now under heavy Allied hearted” and “innocent.” But bombardment. experiencing the hellish life of an evacuee for nearly a year, I We felt relieved, settling in at learned they can be brutal, even Honganji Temple. Some soldiers sadistic. were staying at the main building there, but we never knew what Kinjō Yūji evacuated in the third grade with a unit they were from because it was group of school children from Osaka. He a military secret. Our kids became learned at the dormitory in Nara where they friendly with them, going over for stayed that adults, too, could behave brutally. visits and happily getting snacks. I “We had a cruel house mother who badly was grateful for that because mistreated children unless they paid her bribes. snacks were something we She served others heaping portions of rice, but couldn’t provide, and my heart I got only one tiny spoonful. Afrer a few broke to think that, at any moment, months, I suffered from malnutrition and my those men could be sent to the stomach was sticking out like the children you battlefront.69

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Looking back fifty years later, Shimabukuro after a long work day at an Amagasaki factory. was still troubled by the Japanese military’s “I can still remember the taste of watery stew failure to defend Japan’s cities. “There were no sprinkled with a few carefully counted grains of bombing raids on that quiet village, but B-29s rice. . . . I got married in 1941. . . . Two years massed in formations overhead, then roared off later, when the war was closing in on Japan, into the western sky. Even as the air attacks rationing got even stricter. Sharply reduced got worse and worse, we never saw any limits on the daily staples of brown rice and Japanese planes in pursuit.”70 However, tofu imposed extreme hardships on us.”74 Shimabukuro doesn’t criticize merchants in suburban areas who were reluctant to sell food Distributing rations was one duty of the to evacuees. “With the Japanese people in the government-organized “neighborhood grips of uncertainty, it was only natural that associations” (tonari-gumi), consisting of shopkeepers should feel pressure to hold on to representatives from ten to fifteen households whatever food they had. I went to a nearby each. They also disseminated official directives, village not damaged by the bombing to buy rice conducted air raid drills, and reported on and vegetables, and barter for other things. anyone suspected of less than full cooperation Somehow we managed to avoid starvation.”71 in the war effort. Participation was compulsory. “Even when we had money,” Shinjō Seiichi Okinawans who lived through the war still recalls, “farmers wouldn’t sell us rice or remember the words they sang to “The potatoes. But they would barter, so we were Neighborhood Association Briskly Knocking at able to survive, barely, by exchanging clothing Our Door” (Tonton karari to tonari-gumi). and our sugar rations for food.”72

With the shrinking availability of daily Ton-ton karari to tonari-gumi necessities after rationing began in 1938, the koshi o akereba government sought to bolster resolve with slogans such as “Covet nothing until victory” kao najimi and “Luxury is our enemy.” Besides imposing severe shortages to supply the war, the mawashite chodai government required war bond purchases, cash contributions, and metal ware donations. After kairanban 1941, rationing was extended to rice, fresh foods, clothing, soap, cookware, and utensils. shiraseraretari People were constantly hungry, especially manual laborers. Many obtained foodstuffs on shirasetari the black market. Nakamura Chijun remembers a story widely reported in the press about a Briskly knocking at our door judge who had starved to death rather than is the neighborhood association. accept black-market goods.73 Government censors probably assumed this news would Opening the lattice, inspire Japanese to stop dealing on the black market, although it might have had the we see those familiar faces. opposite effect on people determined to avoid the judge’s fate. Please pass around the notice board Kuroshima Anto felt acute hunger pangs when he returned from mandatory bayonet practice that tells us what we need to know

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so we can tell the others.75 Nevertheless, an Okinawan community newspaper soon printed its own version, entitled “A Resolute Kinjō Leaves for the Front Wives of men sent to the war were required to Vowing to Die for his Country.”80 Other articles join the Association of Women Defending the told of “warmhearted” (onjō) mainland Nation. Its members made thousand-stitch employers who “take care of”(sewa suru) belts for soldiers who wore them to bring “good Okinawan workers and their families, bidding fortune in battle.” young draftees farewell at induction centers, attending the funerals of war dead, and helping Mandatory wartime wear were “mompe” work bereaved relatives. Although those accounts, pantaloons for women and“geetoru” fatigue too, may seem patronizing in retrospect, many pants gathered at the knees for men. Women employers gave strong support to their and schoolchildren had to undergo combat Okinawan employees bound for the front and to training with bamboo sticks as spears. Fifth their families. The October 15, 1938Ōsaka grader Kinjō Seiki lined up with his classmates Kyūyō Shimpō ran a story of a company in the school yard every morning. “They had us president who traveled all the way to an army attack two straw dummies, one of Roosevelt, hospital in Kumamoto to bring a wounded the other of Churchill.”76 soldier a record of Okinawan folk music. Other Wartime duties were hard to avoid, though articles described local community leaders some tried. Men who moved from Okinawa and visiting the homes of the bereaved. At Shinto other rural prefectures to the cities sometimes shrines, they also offered prayers to departing sought to evade or delay the draft by not soldiers for good fortune in battle and for full registering their new addresses. They soon recovery to those back from the front wounded 81 discovered, however, that, without registering, or ill. they could not receive ration passbooks. Then, when they showed up at the ward office, they Many of these stories did not have happy 77 endings, depicting the hardships and sacrifices were handed draft notices. of local Okinawans in heart-rending detail. One Joining the drumbeat of exhortation, Osaka’s tells of Yoza Tsuru, who, after her son is general circulation newspapers published drafted, must go to work as a traveling several stories of “heroes on the home front” vegetable vendor to support her son’s pregnant about mainlanders depicted as especially wife, as well as her own younger sister and her 82 supportive of Okinawan soldiers. In August, sister’s child. “Model Home Front Wives” 1938, the Ōsaka Mainichi Shimbun featured an describes a woman from Okinawa who, after article about Yoshikawa Yonesaburō, a stock her husband is drafted, can’t support her family broker from whom an Okinawan employee, on subsidies provided by his company and a Kinjō Eikichi, had stolen money. When Kinjō’s military aid association. She takes piecework at draft notice arrives, Yoshikawa vows to forgive home to make ends meet. Another Okinawan everything and “send him off to the front with woman states resolutely that “for us, the wives an unblemished record.” The piece concludes of soldiers, these circumstances are only with Kinjō, who has no family, departing for natural when we live away from our war with his boss waving flags forhometowns. I accepted them long ago.” encouragement.78 Another leaves her children with her husband’s mother after he is drafted and goes to work in a Aside from its patronizing overtones, the story Taishō Ward metallurgy shop to support the perpetuates mainland stereotypes offamily. Shortly after her husband returns from Okinawans as unreliable employees.79 the front recuperating from wounds, she dies in

19 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF a workplace accident.83 for problems in their relations with mainland Japanese. He particularly criticized those who Loaded with patriotic slogans, such accounts “isolated themselves” on the mainland by were apparently published at least in part to joining organizations such as the Okinawa inspire people to ever-greater toil and sacrifice prefectural associations. in the war effort. Accounts in retrospect of the war’s survivors suggest that, at least for some, His response echoes opinions expressed by they might have had the opposite effect. other Okinawans on the mainland who deny the existence of postwar discrimination. It Prejudice and rampant abuse in the conflicts, however, with published recollections emperor’s army of men who served in the Japanese armed A 77-year old army veteran, originally from forces, and with many accounts of Kochinda, Okinawa, was living in Taishō Ward discrimination on the mainland since 1945. when I interviewed him in November, 2000. Atrocities committed against Okinawans by Serving in China as an enlisted man in August, mainland soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa 1945, he recalled that his company commander are thoroughly documented, and Okinawans had announced Japan’s surrender as a “cease serving in the local defense corps faced harsh fire.” Proud of his military service, he eagerly and demeaning treatment from their mainland described the units he was asigned to, the comrades-in-arms who skimped on their rations places they were deployed, and what he and his and used children as shock troops.85 Of course, buddies had experienced. He explained the individual experiences vary, and there were Japanese army’s organization, weapons, and surely Okinawans in the Japanese military, equipment, drawing detailed charts on note particularly those fluent in ”standard” paper. Also knowledgeable about the U.S. Japanese, who were “treated the same” as military, he praised its technology and “know- everyone else. This interviewee had joined the how,” denouncing Japan’s “military clique” army when the Japanese military offered young (gunbatsu) for foolishly going to war with men a highly respected occupation and secure America. employment, especially during economic hard- times. Toward the end of our interview, I showed him an article from the April 4, 1945New York Military organizations in Japan and elsewhere Times reporting discrimination against enforce a paradoxical kind of “equal Okinawan soldiers in the Imperial Japanese opportunity” with a structured system of ranks Army, and asked if he himself had ever been at set salaries and quantitative criteria for treated unfairly as a soldier.84 Seeming promotion based in large part on chronological uncomfortable with the question, he responded seniority (“time in grade”). Ienaga Saburō somewhat indignantly that “everyone in the army was treated the same.” However, he also notes that, for those who had no special recalled that Okinawan soldiers had struggled privileges as civilians, an “attraction of army with language, as had mainlanders from life was a perverse equality found nowhere else northeastern Honshu (Tōhoku) where the local in Japanese society. No matter how prestigious dialects also differ significantly fromor wealthy a man’s family, all this was left “standard” Japanese. But while acknowledging behind when he entered the service. He was that there had been discrimination against just another recruit. The NCOs Okinawan civilians before 1945, he insisted it [noncommissioned officers] were catered to by had ended after the war. Since then, he said, men who would not have deigned to speak to Okinawans themselves have been responsible them in civilian life.”86

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Before Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War hardships that were exacerbated by the of 1894–95, conscription was widely resisted in relentless pressures for conformity, the the countryside as a kind of blood tax. After exhausting regimen, and the pervasive that, obligatory military service was more authoritarianism of military life. Most readily accepted, although many young men countries’ armed forces put new recruits still did what they could to avoid it. Rising through rigorous training that includes patriotic fervor after the “Manchurian Incident” psychological and physical harassment thought of 1931 heightened pressures to serve.to inculcate toughness, obedience, and a Moreover, in the 1930s, sons of poor farmers willingness to kill others and risk one’s own life often found far better livelihoods, even as low- unquestioningly. But the Imperial Japanese ranking enlisted men, than as “surplusArmy’s extreme form of “hard training” had the population” in their home villages. Free room effect of desensitizing soldiers to human and board with prospects for a career and a suffering—their own and others’. The violent pension were utterly unobtainable for most of abuse of trainees instilled callousness and their civilian compatriots, especially during the anger that led to later atrocities against depression years. After they completedsoldiers and civilians of other nations. Such training, many found their military jobs far less “hard training” for desensitization is not arduous than the work they’d done on the required for American soldiers today who more farm.87 Ienaga points to “an even greater often kill at a distance, using such high-tech inducement [in] the relative ease of military weapons as “predator” drones and “tomahawk” life, as strange as it may sound. Compared to cruise missiles. the dawn to dark backbreaking toil of the impoverished farm households where they Army veteran Shingaki Seiho recalls Okinawan grew up, many NCOs found army life ‘far soldiers’ difficulties with language. “Even when easier,’ and ‘not very hard work, a lot better we understood what noncommissioned officers than being a farmer.’ . . . It is not surprising were asking us, they would beat us because we that second and third sons with no expectation couldn’t immediately find the words to reply. of getting any land of their own should find Just among the Okinawan soldiers I knew, there military life attractive.”88 were two who, unable to endure, became mentally ill.”90 Interviewed in September, 2000, The armed forces in many countries have also a man drafted for service in Taiwan said that offered at least the propect of escapingOkinawan soldiers’ struggles with language, discrimination based on socioeconomic and/or especially their delayed responses to questions minority civilian status. Neither the Japanese from NCOs, were used as an excuse for extra nor the U.S. militaries treated minority soldiers harsh treatment. equally. Like Okinawans, Koreans encountered prejudice in the Imperial Japanese Army, and, Sadistic abuse of new recruits from all along with Taiwanese soldiers, were assigned prefectures was notoriously common. They disproportionally as “shock troops.” Yet, unlike were beaten for the slightest error or oversight, 91 the American armed forces that practiced such as a speck of dust on a pair of boots. The official segregation of all units until 1948, the violent harassment meted out to men Japanese military assigned Koreans—and of struggling with language was also imposed on course Okinawans—to serve after training with soldiers from northeastern Honshu. After their mainland soldiers, and even, occasionally, as cruelly enforced “assimilation” in training, their commanding officers.89 however, many Okinawan soldiers found things easier. Learning how to talk and act more like Nevertheless, Okinawan soldiers faced special mainlanders also served them well after their

21 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF discharges, especially if they lived on the been” to volunteer for the army in order to mainland. escape the long hours and harsh conditions of his conscripted labor at the Kyushu Army Nakama Keiko writes that, despite Okinawans’ Arsenal. Assigned to train with a parachute efforts to conform, mainlanders still tended to squadron, he wore his uniform to bed at night view them as “second class citizens”(nijū to avoid severe punishment for arriving later kokumin). Even as “citizen soldiers” (kokumin than ranking squad members for morning heishi), they were considered “inferior” (ototte formation. If any of them decided he hadn’t iru). For their part, Okinawan soldiers held the greeted them loudly enough, they’d beat him. view (called by Nakama an illusion) that they NCOs made trainees lick their own boots, after were proving themselves equal to otherclaiming to see a speck of dust on the leather. Japanese as citizens of a nation at war.92 In fact, New recruits got the smallest portions of rice Okinawan draftees on the mainland felt the without even a pickle to go with it, and were sting of prejudice even as their families and always hungry after eating. Detailed to wash neighbors were bidding them farewell for the the dishes, they would gulp down leftover rice front. During one departure ceremony,from the plates of ranking squad members, and described in the Ōsaka Kyūyō Shimpō, the many got diarrhea.95 departing soldier had just begun to speak in response to words of encouragement from the Later assigned to an equestrian unit, Oyakawa Okinawan Soldiers League when a passerby, Takayoshi seems to confirm another of Ienaga seeing the League’s flag, yelled out, “It’s just Saburo’s observations: that the Imperial some Ryukyuan.” Japanese Army treated animals better than privates.96

The League’s vice-president, who was standing beside the soldier, They beat soldiers because we yelled back. “How dare you talk were said to lack “focus” or that way about this brave soldier “concentration.” They’d ask us how on his way to the front. You many steps there were in the traitor!” Then he ran over and barracks staircase or how many punched the man in the jaw.93 watts in the bulbs in the hall. If we didn’t know, they said it was proof of our laxity. Or they’d call us one Osaka resident Oyakawa Takayoshi, drafted in by one into the shed where 1937 at the age of twenty-one, was first equestrian gear was stored and assigned to a company comprised entirely of beat us with leather harnesses, Okinawans because all training units of new saying we hadn’t been taking recruits were organized according to the proper care of the equipment. prefectures listed in their families’ household registers. “But the company commander made They told us that when one soldier fun of us, saying it was really because Okinawa had done something wrong, we is thirty years behind the mainland.”94 were all responsible, then beat everyone with wooden swords until Okinawan recruits had to endure such extra the bamboo blades sometimes insults on top of the the relentless, often broke. Medics had to carry soldiers violent, abuse visited on all privates. with bleeding heads to the infirmary. It happened once to me. Agena Hiroshi soon realized “what a fool I’d . . . Another time the squad leader

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asked me the name of a piece of maintain a strict order of march equestrian gear, which we’d never whenever the battalion was on the been taught. When I couldn’t move. But when company answer, he grabbed a glass commanders came under fire, paperweight from his desk and they’d argue with each other, hurled it at my head. Luckily, I insisting they be allowed to break wasn’t seriously hurt. . . . ranks and withdraw their units so they could flee to safe ground. This We were told that “everything in was completely at odds with what the army belongs to the emperor,” we were taught about the duties of and that soldiers had committed officers in the emperor’s forces, suicide even for losing a shoe and I was truly disgusted. 101 brush. If one slipper was missing, they’d beat us with the other and The atrocities he saw also violated tell us to “go find it,” which really regulations he’d learned in meant “steal it from another training. squad.” Honest soldiers who couldn’t bring themselves to do We were assigned guard duty at such things were the ones most Chiuchang for about a month and a often beaten.97 half. One day, five or six of us took our rifles and one of the horses to a village about eight miles away to War crimes “requisition” unhulled rice for horse feed. With no officer in Okinawan soldiers and civilian survivors of the charge, we felt at first like we were war witnessed atrocities committed by Imperial off on a pleasure trip. But Japanese forces, including rape, torture, searching for the village along “weapons training” using human targets, and 98 unfamiliar roads, and not knowing mass killings of civilians and prisoners-of-war. where the enemy might be, we new Oyakawa’s account of his 1938–1940 service in recruits got scared. I later learned China includes graphic descriptions of crimes that soldiers who’d been in China committed by Japanese soldiers against 99 for a while used these trips as an Chinese civilians. excuse to hunt for girls. Two days after his troopship steamed up the After we’d walked about eight Yangtze River and arrived at Chiuchiang, he miles, we came to a house in the saw corpses being burned by the side of a road. woods. Inside were a woman about “I couldn’t get the stench out of my nose for 100 seventy and a girl about fourteen several days.” After that, Oyakawa’s battalion or fifteen. We searched the house repeatedly came under fire. An ambush caught and found unhulled rice. As we the troops resting after a long-distance march, killing and wounding many, and throwing the were loading it onto the horse and battalion into disarray. Pressed into service as getting ready to leave, one of the a stretcher carrier, he saw soldiers dying of soldiers grabbed the girl, obviously maggot-infested wounds. intending to rape her. The older woman yelled something we couldn’t understand, and put All companies were supposed to herself in front of the soldier,

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weeping as she pleaded. She must “tried out” his sword to kill a Chinese accused have been the grandmother as a spy. That incident grimly foreshadowed the because, even with a gun muzzle Battle of Okinawa, during which mainland pointed at her, she kept tearfully soldiers killed Okinawan civilians wrongly shielding the girl. The other accused as “spies” because they’d uttered a soldiers pulled the girl away and few words in their local dialect. Many more dragged her inside the house. I civilians than soldiers died in the battles and was afraid the enemy might hear their aftermath in China described by Oyakawa. the child’s screams and attack us, Among the hundreds of civilian corpses left in so I climbed a nearby hill to keep a the wake of the fighting at Kaoan, Oyawaka lookout.102 . . . saw “people with their heads cut off and naked women with cigarettes stuck in their vaginas.” I’d been at the front a little more When a civilian didn’t immediately hand over than a year when about ten of us his rice to Japanese soldiers in Oyakawa’s went out in An’i Province to unit—probably because he couldn’t understand commandeer rice again. When we what they were saying to him—the company arrived at a village, all hundred or commander ordered his troops to shoot him so villagers were clustered and his family. Oyakawa heard an infant crying 104 together, probably as protection among the tangle of corpses. against Japanese soldiers. We looked around the village, then Oyakawa does not claim to have done anything came back to where they’d to prevent or protest these atrocities, or deny gathered. One soldier scanned that, in remaining silent, he was involuntarily their frightened faces, picked out a complicit. He writes only that joining workers’ man and woman at random, and organizations in his late teens influenced his ordered them to come with him. feelings toward people vulnerable and powerless. When we asked what he was going to do with them, he just grinned, so we figured it was something bad I learned in the labor movement and reminded him that he was a about socioeconomic class and Japanese soldier. Later he told us, capitalism. I understood why wars laughing, that he’d forced them to happen and who benefits from copulate. Japanese military them. It awakened enough of a regulations forbid rape and the conscience in me so that I never commandeering of goods, but even demanded anything from Chinese the officers would threaten people during the war. I helped farmers with their pistols and seize several women, who were hiding unhulled rice, sometimes handing from Japanese soldiers, to escape. out small amounts of money so But I was probably lucky that I they could say they’d bought it.103 wasn’t assigned to a combat unit, and never had to fire a bullet.105

When some salt was missing from storage in Oyakawa’s unit, the company commander The prewar hardships of Okinawans living on decapitated the Chinese civilians believed the mainland might have made some especially responsible in full view of the other villagers as sensitive to the treatment of Chinese civilians, a lesson to them. Another company commander and more willing to talk and write about it

24 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF later. Other China veterans among Osaka’s Deployed from Shanghai to Hsiaoshan in 1938, Okinawans also recounted war crimes.Nakamura Chijun recalled that it was Yasuzato Shōtarō described Japanese soldiers “extremely dangerous” to venture beyond the shooting Chinese prisoners-of-war captured company perimeter. “If you were wounded, you after a battle in Su Province late in 1938.106 could be captured. And, even if you later Matayoshi Kōei told how, in 1940, his senior escaped and returned to your unit, you’d be NCOs walked into a village in the mountains of executed according to the Japanese military central China and took three or four middle- code of conduct for having become a prisoner aged men from a house at gunpoint. After of the enemy [instead of committing mandatory forcing them to carry heavy equipment over suicide].”113 mountains for the unit’s redeployment, the NCOs “decided the men were no longer of any use, and shot them point blank with rifles.”107 I had no idea why, with intelligence reports of the enemy Although I have not located eye-witness massing nearby, Warrant Officer accounts by Okinawans who lived on the Sudō took about ten of us out on a mainland, it must be noted here that American search-and-destroy patrol. And, soldiers and sailors also committed atrocities. sure enough, we were totally In recorded incidents, they killed Japanese unprepared when they started prisoners of war, destroyed hospitals, and firing at us from across the river. gunned down survivors in lifeboats from P.F.C. Kiyonaga from Kagoshima Japanese transport ships sunk by U.S. Navy was wounded in the head and submarines.108 George Feifer estimates that P.F.C. Yamaguchi from Niigata in American soldiers committed thousands of the chest. I took out the cravats rapes in Okinawa during and shortly after the that were wrapped inside our battle there.109 fatigue shirts, and applied compression bandages as a Those who barely survived stopgap measure, but we were pinned down there and couldn’t Several Okinawan war veterans in greater move. Osaka said they felt lucky to be alive. Yasuzato Shōtarō’s company was “mopping up” in a We waited four hours until the sun dense forest after defeating a Chinese unit near went down. Luckily for the rest of the Soviet border in northern Manchuria when us, the river was wide and deep, “straggling enemy soldiers surrounded us, and and the enemy apparently had no I barely escaped with my life.”110 Kaneshiro mortars. But those two soldiers Kenji heard the “eerie sound of bullets died without ever uttering another whistling pyun-pyun” over his head, sometimes word. Help never arrived because grazing his helmet, during fire fights in central headquarters had decided that, if China where he caught malaria.111 Near Hunan anyone were sent out to rescue us, in September, 1942, Matayoshi Shigeo was they would only be killed. . . . We wounded in the arm and chest. Carried on a used to say we were all “soldiers of stretcher to a field hospital, he lost fortune.” Some men with long consciousness for two days. “I woke up itching combat records were never so unbearably from maggots that crawled all over much as grazed while others died me because the clean bandages had run out.”112 in their first fire fight.114

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The army assigned Ujihara Usei to a surrender was probably a false construction battalion building an airfield on a rumor. But, a little while later, the small island off Saipan. On one of his weekly official directive came down for us off-duty trips to town, he happened to meet his to follow the orders of Soviet cousin at the restaurant she managed. She was forces. Right then and there, our one of approximately 20,000 Japanese battalion and brigade commanders emigrants in Saipan, the vast majority from both shot themselves dead with Okinawa. She warned him that work on the their pistols. The Soviet soldiers airfield was extremely dangerous, and that seized all our weapons and several local residents had already died. declared us demobilized.117 “You’ve got to get out of there,” she told him.

Kina’s ordeal was far from over. He barely As an only son, I was worried survived a long forced march during which about my family if something fellow soldiers died of exhaustion. Like tens of happened to me. So she contacted thousands of other captured Japanese soldiers, them in Okinawa and had them he was then sent to a Siberian labor camp. send me a telegram. “Father in Many more of his comrades died during years critical condition. Return home at of imprisonment under its slave-like conditions. once.” We knew it had to look real because the military read all our They put us on a freight train at mail. Later, I heard that this Buragoe, and we all thought we’d cousin, to whom I owe my life, was soon be back in Japan. . . . Curtains one of the many Japanese civilians covered the train windows, so we in Saipan to die during the fighting couldn’t tell which direction we there [in June and July of 1944].115 were going, although some men said we seemed to be heading Along with some 10,000 noncombatants, the south. But after ten days of a battle for Saipan took the lives of bumping, lurching ride, the train approximately 30,000 Japanese soldiers, stopped at a place called virtually the entire defending garrison.116 One Simonoska, and about 300 of us year after its fall, Kina Seiso was “saved by the were ordered off. They marched us bell” at the end of the war in August, 1945, for two days to an internment when Soviet forces surrounded his unit in camp deep in the mountains. Manchuria. Except for those who had special skills, we were all assigned in two- man work teams to cut down trees They had us overpowered with for lumber. Our mandatory artillery and other heavy weapons production quota was two when all we had were small arms truckloads of logs every day. It was and machine guns. But after three hard labor at temperatures or four days of fighting, they between minus five and minus ceased fire all of a sudden and put twenty degrees Fahrenheit. If we up a white flag. Our whole failed to meet the quota, our 300- battalion was called into formation gram daily ration of black bread at 9:00 in the morning. At first we was cut to 200 grams. For meals thought the report of Japan’s they also gave us a few potatoes

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and just enough soup with pieces was one, and steamrolled through the of herring to fill half our canteen countryside. Of the approximately 300,000 covers. Japanese soldiers and civilians in the area, there were 80,000 confirmed deaths. Ienaga Several men died every day of cold Saburō wrote, “The extensive plunder, rape, and starvation. It took those of us and acts of force by Red Army personnel were on burial duty a whole day to dig clear violations of international law and their graves in the frozen earth. deserve severe condemnation.”121 Fifty percent We survivors kept ourselves going of the dead were civilians. Many, including by vowing to “eat rice once more children, were killed by Chinese taking in our lives,” and not to “die like indiscriminate reprisals for decades of dogs in this shitty place.” . . . I was Japanese occupation and colonial rule. one of the lucky ones, assigned later as an electrician and released Becoming a prisoner-of-war with the rest of his from hard labor. . . . Finally, in late unit, Ishikawa Kiyoshi managed to escape from 1947, arrangements began for the a P.O.W. camp and eventually make his way to repatriation of all soldiers in our safety and repatriation, but not before camp ranked corporal or below. witnessing the brutal final stage of the war in After six months at Nahotsuka Manchuria. “Soviet soldiers would stop people making concrete blocks, I returned on the street day or night, grabbing their by ship to Maezuru in Kyoto watches, eye glasses, and other personal Prefecture.118 belongings. They’d break into homes, and steal whatever they could lay their hands on. . . . But The final irony of his excruciating ordeal was I particularly remember what local residents Kina’s discovery, after marrying and settling in did. . . . Chinese abducted and raped Japanese Amagasaki, that his imprisonment in Siberia civilians, and led the Soviet troops to where 122 was preventing him from getting a job. During they were hiding. Japan’s large-scale “red purge,” ordered by MacArthur between 1948 and 1950, even Thus did Okinawans in China witness not only returnees from Siberian labor camps were atrocities against Chinese civilians perpetrated suspected as “Communist-sympathizers.” by Japanese soldiers on the losing side of the Finally, Kina’s wife took him to the Hyōgo war, but also rapes and looting committed Okinawa Prefectural Association, where he was against Japanese civilians by the Soviet and hired by the Okinawan owner of a large food- Chinese “victors.” Okinawans on the Japanese processing plant in Osaka.119 mainland were among the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or maimed in The long internment of P.O.W.'s in Siberian saturation bombings by the U.S. military during labor camps was only one of the disastrous the last six months of the conflict. consequences for Japan of the Soviet Union’s late entry into the war. On August 8, 1945, the Catastrophic finale: Air attacks on Red Army launched offensives in Manchuria, mainland cities northern Korea (then a Japanese colony), and the southern half of Sakhalin (JapaneseA single atomic bomb destroyed the city of territory since Japan’s victory in the Russo- Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing some Japanese War of 1904–5).120 Soviet troops 70,000 within the first few days.123 With no quickly overwhelmed outgunned Japanese response from the Japanese government to defenders in Manchuria, of whom Kina Seiso Allied conditions for surrender, President

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Truman went on the radio. “If they do not died in one firebombing of Tokyo alone.130 The accept our terms, they may expect a rain of delayed effects of burns and radiation ruin from the air, the like of which has never poisoning from the two nuclear attacks killed or been seen on this earth.”124 On August 8, the debilitated tens of thousands in the years that Soviet Union declared war on Japan and its followed, including Okinawans living on the troops advanced into Manchuria. The following mainland. Tokeshi Kōyū, classified as a day, August 9, a second atomic bomb destroyed “second-generation atomic bomb victim,” died Nagasaki,125 while massive “conventional” in 1969 at the age of 19 from leukemia bombings of Japanese cities continued. On diagnosed as resulting from radiation to which August 14, one day before Emperor Hirohito his father was exposed in Hiroshima.131 announced Japan’s surrender—also over the radio, 145 B-29s dropped 707 tons of ordnance Between dusk of March 13 and dawn of March on greater Osaka. 14, 1945, 270 B-29 bombers dropped approximately 2,000 tons of bombs in waves of Truman’s words, brimming with Old Testament attacks on Osaka City. They were followed by righteousness, were characteristic of aseven more major attacks and some thirty president celebrated for his “plain speaking.” smaller-scale raids in June, July, and August. In But his threat of “a rain of ruin” on unspecified total, they killed, injured, or left homeless a victims raises deeply troubling questions about recorded 1,305,114 persons, including 10,388 Allied saturation bombings during World War dead. Air attacks destroyed virtually every II.126 International outrage over the atomic standing structure in thirteen of Osaka’s bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has twenty-five wards,132 leaving landscapes that deflected attention from “conventional” air came to be called “plains of burnt ruins” (yake- attacks on Japanese cities which took a much nohara). higher toll in lives and homes between February and August of 1945. They caused the While B-29s dropped bombs, Grumman P-51s deaths of an estimated 800,000 men, women, strafed with their machine guns. They and children in Japan, overwhelminglyconcentrated their attacks on greater Osaka’s civilians.127 Tens of thousands more died of industrial areas, where the largest Okinawan illness and starvation in the aftermath of residential communities were located. devastation and chaos.128 Vietnam War-era Thousands of people migrating annually from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was an Okinawa had found jobs or were sent to Air Force colonel during World War II with a factories there as conscripted labor. The July key role in planning the attacks. He later 10, 1945 night raid on Sakai killed 1,860 recalled his commander, General Curtis LeMay, people in wards where many Okinawans lived. telling him at the time that they both would be Allied bombers raided Amagasaki ten times, prosecuted as war criminals if the Allies lost particularly targeting its industrial zone along the war.129 the Osaka City border, home to the largest Okinawan community in the city. Three American planes by the hundreds flew bombing hundred and four B-29s attacked Kobe, home to and strafing raids on almost every major city in another large Okinawan community, on March Japan. Air attacks killed people riding buses 17, 1945, thirty-four more than had raided and trains crushed or set aflame, walking in Osaka three days earlier. They left most of the urban business centers where walls of fire city in rubble. (Residents of Kobe who survived trapped and incinerated them, and at home in this attack were reminded of it almost exactly residential neighborhoods turned into deadly fifty years later, when the Kobe-Awajishima infernos by firebombs. An estimated 97,000 Earthquake and resulting fires again

28 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF devastated the city on January 17, 1995.)133

Aside from evacuating civilians, the Japanese government’s ineffectual efforts to defend cities against air attacks seem in retrospect more like “spiritual mobilization.”134 “Before the bombing started we saw more and more U.S. reconnaissance planes passing in the sky over Amagasaki,” recalled Kuroshima Anto. “The city was on their return route from scouting Itami Airfield, and they flew so low we could even see the faces of the crew.”135 Antiaircraft artillery had virtually no effect and fighter- interceptor planes were nowhere in sight. Aftermath of Osaka firebombing Teruya Shūshin recalled that “thousands of shells were fired from antiaircraft guns lacking the range to come anywhere near planes that Shimabukuro Masahiko, originally from the flew over ten thousand feet feet. It was small Ryukyu island of Ishigaki, witnessed how 136 pitiful.” Only the propaganda remained events were belying such cheerful stalwart. Newspapers and posters gave upbeat pronouncements. instructions withmanga -like illustrations urging city residents to cover their lamps with black cloth at night and to join volunteer Standing on Mosurin Bridge [in firefighters in bucket relay drills. Osaka City], we saw several Neighborhood associations organized Grummans [U.S. fighters named housewives to train with bamboo spears in case for the company that manufactured the enemy landed. Newspaper headlines and them, now Northrup-Grumman] poster captions proclaimed, ”Firebombs can’t and Japanese planes come scare us,” and “This is how we’ll defend our swooping in overhead. Stray cities.”137 More pointed criticism of the bullets shot a couple of holes in the Japanese government came from Osaka bridge’s siding. Then a dog fight resident Higa Hanako who, after hearing the started and one plane crashed to emperor’s surrender radio broadcast on August the ground about five or six- 8, 1945, reflected on “all the lives that could hundred yards from the factory have been saved if he’d only made it earlier.”138 where we worked. We hurried to the site and saw the scattered wreckage of a Japanese plane. There were many homes nearby, but the fire from the crash was put out in time. The military police (kempei) showed up right away so no one else would see the downed plane. But now I knew for sure that Japan was losing the war.139

As in all wars, there were moments of

29 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF consolation, relief, and even inspiration.planes into U.S. warships.143 Okinawans on the mainland describe narrow escapes from “seas of fire,” adrenalin-fueled Both sides’ enormous sacrifices in the Battle of rescues of loved ones and neighbors, tearful Okinawa, the costliest of the Pacific War for reunions with family members and relatives both Japan and the United States, seem they thought had died, and an incident that particularly outrageous in retrospect. Imperial became famous as a symbol of resilience and Headquarters in Tokyo had already withdrawn hope amidst the devastation: Three men, their the crack 9th Division from the “Okinawa homes destroyed by fire and with only the Defense Army” in December, 1944, and clothes on their backs, gathered in the burnt- redeployed it to Taiwan, mistakenly antiipating out ruins of Taishō Ward with asanshin that Taiwan would become the site of a major (Okinawan shamisen) they had managed to battle. When invasion of Okinawa was salvage from the ashes. As they began to play imminent, the high command canceled and sing the best-known Okinawan folk song anticipated force replacements there, having “Asato-ya yunta” (Ballad of the Asato Family), abandoned its planned defense on the beaches. others gathered to listen or join the singing. At Revised directives from headquarters ordered that moment, it is said, postwar recovery began soldiers and civilians alike to wage a protracted for Okinawans in Osaka.140 war of attrition that would inflict high American casualties, slowing the Allied The Battle of Okinawa advance and buying time to prepare for an anticipated invasion of the mainland.144 Although it raged hundreds of miles to the southwest, the Battle of Okinawa devastated Okinawans on the mainland followed the lives of Okinawans on the mainland who newspaper accounts of how the towns and lost family members and homes in thevillages where they had grown up were prefecture. In 1944, Osaka’s newspapers began becoming battlegrounds, one after another. reporting the events leading up to this last and Newspapers continued to publish officially worst battle of the Pacific War. What came to approved reports of the fighting, but the be known as the “ten-ten air raid” of American Japanese military had suspended all private planes on October 10 left much of Naha, correspondence between Okinawa and the Okinawa’s capital, a plain of burnt ruins. mainland after U.S. forces captured Iwo Jima in Japanese forces deployed earlier to form an February, 1945, so mainland residents could “Okinawa Defense Army” now anticipated a only worry about the fate of their families, “decisive battle” against invading American relatives, and neighbors. The headlines on June forces. In preparation, the military mobilized 26 announcing Japan’s defeat in Okinawa as local civilians, including schoolchildren, to another “shattering of jewels” (deaths with build fortifications and airfields. Evacuations to honor) must have reminded them of similar the mainland had already begun. Some of the headlines a year earlier, when a recorded 6,217 transport ships carrying women, children, the Okinawan civilians in Saipan died with the U.S. infirm, and the elderly were sunk by Allied capture of the island. 145 torpedoes, with a loss of more than 2,000 lives.141 On April 2, 1945, Osaka’s newspapers Much later they would learn that twenty times reported that American forces had landed on as many local residents lost their lives in the Okinawa and that the Japanese navy had Battle of Okinawa. Imperial Headquarters’ launched a “floating chrysanthemumstrategy of sacrificing Okinawa as a offensive”142 with “special attack [i.e., suicide] “throwaway pawn” imposed devastating losses squadrons” of “kamikaze” pilots crashing their on both armies. 146 It also resulted in massive

30 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF civilian casualties, mostly women and children want the family to get separated killed or wounded by U.S. bombings and during the war. Our boat left on shellings, and in the crossfire of ground schedule from Kobe, but couldn’t combat. Many also died because Japanese dock in Okinawa for several days soldiers, seeking cover for themselves, forced because enemy battleships and them from caves and shelters at gunpoint. submarines were lurking in the Others starved to death after the Japanese surrounding waters. Several times military seized dwindling food supplies from we approached the harbor only to farms and homes.147 The term “typhoon of stop and withdraw for safer bays steel,” initially referring to cannon barrages off Kagoshima and Miyazaki in from U.S. warships, came to denote the Battle Kyushu. The trip took two weeks. of Okinawa as a whole. Eighty-two days of what Not long after arriving in Nago, we Okinawans also call “hell on earth” took the saw the ten-ten [October 10, 1944] lives of a recorded 122, 228 local residents, air raid. Enemy planes flew in from 65,908 mainland Japanese, and 12,500 the east, targeting the airfield on Americans before organized resistance ended Ie Island [just off Okinawa’s in late June of 1945.148 As in Saipan, hundreds northwestern coastline near Nago]. of Okinawan civilians plunged to their deaths Fortunately, the pilots apparently off ocean cliffs when U.S. forces closed in. didn’t know that a brigade of Others died at their own or family members’ Japanese soldiers was billeted in hands on orders from Japanese soldiers who our village elementary school. distributed grenades, telling them that, if they were captured, the American “devil-beasts” We’d already planned to go to would torture them for information, rape the Naha before the air raid, but now women, then slaughter them all. When the the bombing cut off the roads and grenades ran out, people resorted to razors, we couldn’t travel by land. Luckily, knives, rope, rocks, and other household or the army brigade was sailing down farm implements. Their deaths, misleadingly there in landing craft, and they let referred to as “group suicides” (shūdan us ride with them. We left Nago at jiketsu), must also be understood in the context ten p.m., arriving in Naha at five of heavy indoctrination starting in elementary the next morning. Except for a few school, where children were exhorted to make houses near the wharf, the city was unquestioning sacrifices, including the giving a plain of burnt ruins as far as the of their lives without hesitation, for the sake of eye could see. 149 nation and emperor. In Naha, I signed on as a civilian Ōshiro Kiichi, born in Nago, returned to worker at the Navy Supply Depot. Okinawa from his home on the mainland the To be honest, I did this because year before the battle. His chronological there’d been a rumor before the account of the fighting provides an overview of ten-ten air raid that the brigade in events. Nago was conscripting a “hometown defense corps.” Rather than being drafted into the army, I My wife and I went back to thought it would be better to join Okinawa from Amagasaki in the navy as a civilian employee. August of 1944 because our children were there and we didn’t The Navy Supply Depot, located

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right next to Naha Port, was sent them on ahead. promising to divided into sections for fuel follow later and meet up with them transport, wharf maintenance, and at the cave shelters in Kin Village. food storage, where I was But an Okinawan assigned, mostly to inspect beef noncommissioned officer at the cattle coming in from the outer depot told the civilian workers islands. . . . Enemy planes flew that, since the Japanese army’s over constantly, but didn’t attack, machine-gun units were in Port and just hovered overhead. Most Arthur and Taiwan, we’d have to were the buzzing reconnaissance “trap the American soldiers like planes we called “dragon flies.” rats in a sack.” If we deserted our Later we learned they were posts, he warned, we’d be measuring distances and taking “sentenced to death by a court detailed aerial photographs that martial.” Now I’d lost my chance to the Americans would use for their leave, and it would be several invasion. The Japanese military years before I saw my family again. foolishly destroyed our own steel towers and bridges, claiming they Two or three days later, we were would be enemy targets. . . . told, first, that the Americans had landed in the Kerama Islands, then One morning around four a.m., that they’d come ashore on when two of us were bringing Okinawa at Yomitan. From the cattle in for inspection, the earth depot, we could hear the enemy’s began to rumble and roar like a loudspeakers blasting at Kadena,150 huge ocean wave in a typhoon. and see the huge mass of their Although we had no idea at the invading forces. “This is sure to be time, this was the start of cannon a losing battle,” said Shiraishi, my barrages from battleships that also supervising officer from strafed the coast with their Kagoshima. “No matter what machine guns. We fled into a bomb happens, Ōshiro, you mustn’t die.” shelter, and finally managed to His kind words helped sustain me make it back to our building at many times after that. dusk, after the shelling had stopped. That night around ten, Heavy fighting around Japanese the depot manager called us all military headquarters at Shuri together. Explaining that went back and forth. U.S. forces emergency wartime evacuation captured territory during the day, measures were now in effect, he Japanese forces recaptured it at handed us each three month’s night, and both suffered huge salary. casualties. At that time, our military supply unit was I went to Ōzato Village, where my transporting ammunition to the wife and children were staying, fortification at Kohagura. We’d and explained that American forces arrive there in the middle of the were landing and they would have night and return to the depot about to evacuate to northern Okinawa. I five in the morning. Hunted from hired a horse-drawn wagon and the air by Grumman planes [which

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strafed with their mounted May when I became a prisoner of machine guns], we often felt more war, but I can’t remember for sure. dead than alive. Among P.O.W.’s, the Americans Later, an order came to withdraw. separated civilian military We packed supplies of food and employees from soldiers. I was headed south. We could hear taken via Saipan to Hawaii, where wounded Japanese soldiers in cave at first I stayed in a relocation shelters begging for water, but it center. They treated me extremely was pitch dark inside and there well for two weeks there, was no way we could get it to questioning me about my job with them. This made us feel keenly the the military. I spent about two anguish of fighting a lost war. years in Hawaii as a P.O.W., and worked on the big island cleaning Southern Okinawa, thickly a sanitarium and weaving carpets overgrown with trees and out of pandamus leaves. They flowering plants, was now crowded treated us well there, too. Our with refugees from the fighting. work fatigues and shirts were We made camp under a big banyan cleaned once a month, with the tree. One day, five of us were cost deducted from our wages. sitting together eating lunch when a sudden burst of machine gun fire While I was in Hawaii, a tidal wave killed the three men on my right. A hit. Everyone else fled in a panic, few days later, I was wounded in but, familiar with tidal waves, I the arm by shrapnel from a remained calm and was allowed to battleship barrage. I asked for help with the rescue efforts. After someone to pull out the fragments, that, the Americans trusted me. I but, exhausted from many days found out that, once they trust you, outside in the oppressive heat, no Americans become very open. one had the strength. Knowing if I waited, maggots would cluster and This openness was what surprised the flesh would rot, I steeled me most. They put me in charge of myself, yanked those metal guarding the armory, and actually fragments out with my teeth, and gave me the keys. They even disinfected the wound with my offered to let me try shooting a urine. pistol. In Japan, P.O.W.’s would never be allowed to handle Now the fighting closed in on us, weapons. with flame throwers incinerating the nearby trees and plants. We Getting to know Americans, I came moved into a cave at Miyagi, but to realize that, with their efficiency before long someone poured and enormous material resources, gasoline inside, starting a fire. An there was no way Japan could have American pacification team called won the war. for us to come out. Barely conscious, I climbed out of the I returned to Japan on the last cave. It was probably sometime in repatriation ship from Hawaii.151

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Ōshiro’s description of his supervising officer village, including my aunt, also from the mainland, who kindly urged him not to volunteered for the local “Patriots sacrifice his life in a losing cause, is a notable Brigade” (giyū-tai). They dug exception to the many accounts by battle camouflaged pits called “tank survivors of mainland soldiers who brutalized traps,” where they buried land Okinawans before and during the fighting.152 mines for blowing up enemy “The navy men acted more like gentlemen than armor. the soldiers,” recalled a woman living in Osaka who had been drafted in Okinawa during the Around that time, my family dug an war to work in a Japanese military mess hall. air raid shelter under our house. “The soldiers handed me a grenade and told me For us kids, it was a great place to to kill myself if I encountered an American. play and we enjoyed going there. Luckily, I never did. Later, I threw it away in a But when enemy airplanes flew field.”153 over, we looked up to watch them and forgot to get into the shelter. Ōshiro’s enthusiastic praise of Americans after The adults scolded us severely for his capture no doubt reflected, in part, the that. relief he shared with other Okinawan and mainland prisoners of war who had heard about Later, after the Americans landed, the Imperial Japanese Army’s treatment of it got too dangerous even to stay in soldiers and civilians they captured in China. the shelter, so we moved with four His experience also clashed conspicuously with other families to the vault in our the ordeals of Japanese soldiers captured by big ancestral tomb. . . . We kids felt Soviet forces in Manchuria. Ōshiro’s praise for much too penned up inside the the American military is not shared by many tomb, and went out often to climb P.O.W.’s who remained in Okinawa, where trees and run around in the grass. some were interned for as long as a year in One day, we heard strange voices. 154 refugee camps. In the small stream just below us some American soldiers were Miyagi Masako also became a P.O.W. at the playing in the water. We stared at end of the battle. She was eight years old them, fascinated. To us, the scene when, after weeks of “playing war” with her looked so peaceful. . . . childhood friends, the real fighting drove her family from their home. For the next several It was a long way from the tomb to weeks they were constantly on the move, the nearest village where we had threatened by air attacks, illness, starvation, to go for food, and the only men and death all around them. among us who hadn’t been drafted were elderly, including my I’d been living with my grandfather. One day they left for grandmother in Misato Village the village, but none returned. We when construction began on the heard later that one died in a Yomitan and Central Airfields. Men bombing raid, and the others were and women were conscripted for captured and taken to a refugee work on the airfields, and also to camp. After that, our supply of dig underground battle shelters in food ran out, and one of my preparation for the American cousins, weak from malnutrition, invasion. Young people from our got sick and died.

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Now it was too dangerous to stay outside. It was what we called a in the tomb any longer and, with “blue sky classroom,” where the no more food, we decided to leave teachers propped up pieces of for northern Okinawa. On the way, plywood on tree stumps for my grandmother and I got blackboards and students separated from the others, and ran practiced writing characters with into some American soldiers. twigs on the ground. This was truly Luckily, they didn’t stop us, and we “education in natural were able to meet up with our surroundings,” without textbooks, group again later, as we all headed pencils, or note paper. north. What I remember most after that is stepping over dead bodies I think I was in second grade at the and drinking water full of mosquito time, but can’t remember anything larvae. I tried not to look at the they taught us. . . . However, bodies, but they lay everywhere, something happened at the swelling up grotesquely. I got so refugee camp that I’ll never forget. thirsty that I scooped up rain water One day, some American soldiers with my hands from washtubs told us a tidal wave was coming, where baby mosquitoes were and we’d all have to leave swimming. Finally, with no food or immediately for a mass evacuation water and exhausted from walking, to the nearby hills. We followed we became prisoners-of-war and them, fearing the worst, then were taken to the refugee camp at waited and waited, but there was Koza. no sign of a tidal wave. The date was April 1st [1946]. We had no way of knowing about April Fool’s Day in America. Much relieved, we walked back down from the hills.

After living in the Koza refugee camp for about a year, we finally returned to Misato Village, moving into what was called “standardized housing” [prefabricated wooden Civilian P.O.W.’s, Battle of huts with thatched roofs]. Food Okinawa was still hard to come by. Although we received some rations—mostly It turned out that my grandfather canned goods—and clothing from was in the camp at Ishikawa. After the U.S. military, we were always he pleaded to join us, they hungry. The term “postwar palm transferred him to Koza. As I fern hell”155 best describes recall, we stayed about a year. It conditions at a time when we ate was so crowded there wasn’t even anything, including wild plants, room to stretch out our arms and thought to be edible. One day, we legs when we slept. But even fried potato tempura in motor oil. under these conditions, a My uncle insisted on eating some makeshift school was set up first to be sure it wasn’t

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poisonous.156 He always did that terrible about the people who had because, he said, he was old and taken our place.158 weak, and didn’t expect to live much longer anyway. Three years later, he died. I lost many in our In anticipation of the Allied invasion, family, including my father, who evacuations of Okinawa began after the fall of died in the navy at sea near Palau Saipan in June, 1944. By late March, 1945, Island. The war left our home in besides the 60,000 Okinawans moved to the charred ruins. It’s hard to find mainland, another 20,000 were taken to words to describe what our lives Taiwan, Miyako, and Yaeyama. Gushi Kiyoko of were like just after the battle.157 Amagasaki criticized the U.S. Navy for the deaths of more than 2,000 civilian evacuees, including hundreds of schoolchildren, aboard Miyagi’s mixed evaluation of her treatment by passenger ships sunk by American torpedoes. the U.S. military was common. Okinawan “There might have been strategic value in civilians who survived the Pacific War recall targeting cargo ships sailing north from with gratitude the relief efforts of American Okinawa. But the Americans with their forces that saved their lives, but they also advanced intelligence-gathering techniques remember crimes committed by individual must have known that evacuation boats were soldiers and tactics that caused heavy civilian carrying non-combatant civilians.”159 Other casualties. Evacuating with other Okinawan Okinawans on the mainland blamed the schoolchildren to the mainland in August, 1944, Japanese government for evacuation plans that Tamaki Kiyoko describes her terror at seeing were drawn up “belatedly, hastily, and an enemy submarine fire at the transport ship carelessly,” allocating too few ships, which that carried them. were therefore overcrowded, and choosing sea routes that were heavily patrolled by American 160 Our tickets were for the second submarines. boat, but we arrived late and it was full. So the Japanese military police put us on the lead boat, which worried us at the time. On the third night after we left Naha, the warning siren began screeching loudly. We all ran out on deck and could see the periscope of an enemy submarine sliding up and down in the water. Suddenly, my blood froze as I watched a torpedo streaking right for our ship. The crew did a zigzag maneuver and the torpedo missed us, but made a American forces occupied the Japanese direct hit on the second boat military's Central Airfield during the Battle behind us. It burst into flames with of Okinawa. After the war, the U.S. a deafening roar and sank in a government seized large tracts of adjacent matter of minutes. Realizing we’d land in two towns and expanded it into now be dead if we’d boarded the today's Kadena Air Base, the largest second boat as scheduled, we felt American airfield in Asia.

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Imperial Army atrocities against civilians during the Battle of Okinawa were often Okinawans living on the mainland today also committed in the course of carrying out recall atrocities committed by Americanmilitary directives. To prevent civilians from soldiers. Battle-survivor Yamashiro Kenkō being captured, Japanese soldiers distributed recounted one of the all-too-frequent incidents hand grenades to local residents with orders to of what Okinawans called “girl-hunts”kill themselves and their families.163 Inside (musume-gari). “After I was captured and crowded cave shelters, mothers strangled brought to a shed with other refugees, one of infants at gunpoint because soldiers wanted to the American soldiers picked out a young prevent a baby’s crying from revealing their woman. Ignoring the screams of her children, location. Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of he led her away at gunpoint and raped her.”161 Okinawans civilians accused as spies simply for 164 Interviewed in July, 1999, another woman speaking in their local dialect. Long-standing recalled, “I made sure to muss my hair and prejudices surfaced in the decisions of military blacken my face with charcoal before the commanders and the acts of individual soldiers Americans took me to a refugee camp.” who viewed Okinawans as inferior, and therefore expendable. During the battle, American forces killed not only Japaese forces but also Okinawan civilians Okinawans living on the mainland today also taking shelter with Japanese soldiers in caves. remember soldiers in Okinawa forcibly seizing They also sprayed areas with phosphorous and food from civilians who were close to CS (military-issue tear gas), which arestarvation, and withholding it even from those sometimes classified as chemical weapons. who served as their comrades building military Moreover, the U.S. government seized large airfields and fortifications. “The Imperial Army tracts of privately owned farm land for its troops had plenty to eat, but they gave us Okinawan workers only one brown-rice ball military bases, claiming that this was permitted (nigiri) apiece,” recalled Kinjō Eikō, an by the “Rules of Land Warfare” under the 1914 Amagasaki resident today who, at age sixteen, Hague Convention. Yet these seizures had served in a construction battalion on the continued long after the war ended, and the Central Airfield. “Later, our rations dwindled to U.S. military still occupies these lands to this almost nothing. We had to chew sugar cane day. However, U.S. policy toward military and leaves and fill our stomachs with river civilian prisoners of war in Okinawa is said to water.”165 The food shortage was particularly have accorded generally with Geneva hard on Okinawan schoolchildren, conscripted Convention standards. American forces for the unaccustomed heavy labor of digging provided food rations, clothing, shelter, and fortifications and hauling equipment. Labor medical care for hundreds of thousands of mobilizations also took people away from their demobilized soldiers and refugees, assigning income-earning jobs, depriving their families of them to comparatively light work details. daily necessities.166 American soldiers worked devotedly in this effort, also volunteering their time off, to The Battle of Okinawa was fought because the distribute canned foods, powdered milk,Japanese government decided to sacrifice the medicine, and military fatigues. However, many prefecture even after Konoe Fumimaro, a also victimized Okinawans. Sexual assaults on former Prime Minister, influential senior young women and teenage girls during and statesman, and advisor to the emperor, had shortly after the battle are estimated to be in urged two months earlier that the war be 162 the thousands. ended.167 The battle took more than a quarter of

37 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF a million lives. Most Okinawans who survived Steve Rabson, “Being Okinawan in Japan: The were left destitute, homeless, or both.168 Many Diaspora Experience” now consider the imposition of suchGavan McCormack and Satoko Norinatsu, disproportionate losses to be the ultimate form “Ryukyu/Okinawa, From Disposal to of discrimination. Resistance”

Ota Masahide and Satoko Norimatsu, "The World is beginning to know Okinawa": Ota This article is adapted from “Chapter Four: Masahide Reflects on his Life from the Battle of Wartime” in Steve Rabson,The Okinawan Okinawa to the Struggle for Okinawa” Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within, University of Hawaii Press (2012). The Steve Rabson, “Okinawan Perspectives on book is based on the author’s two-year study in Japan’s Imperial Institution” residence (1999-2001) in Taishô Ward of Osaka City, location of the largest OkinawanNotes community (approximately 20,000) on the 1 Kaneshiro Munekazu, “Esunikku gurupu to Japanese mainland, where he conducted shite no Okinawa-jin” (“Okinawans” as an interviews, collected writings, and ethnic group), Ningen kagaku 37 (1992), 40. administered a questionnaire survey. 2According to municipal government records,

more than 13,000 tons of bombs were dropped Steve Rabson is Professor Emeritus of East on the city and its environs. Yūhi: Ōsaka no Asian Studies, Brown University, and a Japan Okinawa (Launching Forth: The Okinawans of Focus Associate. His other books are Okinawa: Osaka), Ōsaka Okinawa Kenjin Rengō-kai (1997), 84. . Two Postwar Novellas (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 3This total figure comes from the Cornerstone 1989, reprinted 1996), Righteous Cause or of Peace monument opened in Okinawa’s Peace Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Memorial Park in 1995 to commemorate the Japanese Poetry (Center for Japanese Studies, 50th anniversary of the war’s end. Among the University of Michigan, 1998), and Southern dead, this source lists 74,796 Japanese from Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from other prefectures and 14,005 Americans. Okinawa, co-edited with Michael Molasky (University of Hawaii Press, 2000). Islands of 4Yūhi, 79. Resistance: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, co-edited with Davinder Bhowmik, is5Nakama Keiko, “Nitchū sensō-ki no zai-Han forthcoming from University of Hawaii Press. Okinawa-jin” (Okinawans in

Osaka during the Sino-Japanese War [of 1937–45]), Ōsaka Jinken Recommended Citation: Steve Rabson, "The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War," The Asia- Hakubutsu-kan kiyo (Bulletin of the Osaka Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 41, No. 1, Human Rights Museum) 4 (2000), 70, n. 44. October 13, 2013. 6Okinawa Kenjin-kai Hyōgo-ken Honbu, ed., Shima o deta tami no sensō

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People Who Left the Islands), 16 Ibid.

Okinawa Kenjin-kai Hyōgo-ken Honbu (1995), 17Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 57. 160. 18Nakama, “Nitchū,” 50–51. 7Nakama, “Nitchū,” 70, n. 44 and Maeda Yoshihiro, et al., ed., Deigo: 21-seiki o hiraku 19Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 187–188. kinen-shi (Deigo flowers: volume20Quoted in Nakama, “Nitchū,” 59–60. The term commemorating the start of the 21st century), “Ryūkyū” has acquired a more positive Sakai resonance recently amidst the continuing Okinawa Ken-jin Kurabu (2001).Deigo, “Okinawa boom.” It appears in the lyrics of translated as “Indian coral bean,” is the official flower of Okinawa Prefecture. popular songs by Okinawan rock bands and was the title of the 1995 c.d. Ryukyu Magic 8Takarazuka iryō seikyō nyūsu (Newspaper of the Takarazuka Medical Services Cooperative) (Air-4001, Tokyo). 52 (January 1, 1986), 10. 22 Shimota Seiji, Michi no shima (Island paths), 9Kaneshiro, “Esunikku gurupu to shite no Shin-Nippon Shuppan-sha (1978), 302- Okinawa-jin,” 40. 303. 10Estimated figures in Okinawa Ken-jin Kai 23 Hyōgo-ken Honbu, comp., “Anketo shūkei Ryūkyū shimpō, 240–241. ichi-ran hyō” (Chart of aggregate survey totals) 24See Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial (2000). Subjects in Okinawa,” positions

11 Nakama, “Nitchū,” 44–47. east asia cultures critique 1.3 (Winter, 1993), pp. 607-639. 12October 15, 1938 edition, quoted in Nakama, “Nitchū,” 48. 607–639.

13January 15, 1939 edition, quoted in Ibid., 48. 25Quoted in Nakama, “Nitchū,”. 61.

14Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 45. 26Ibid.

15January 15, 1939 issue, quoted in Nakama, 27Ibid., 60–62. “Nitchu,”48–49. If Okinawans were more 28Ibid. likely to change jobs than mainland workers, it 29 might have been, as previously noted, a See interviews with Okinawan residents of Osaka in the series “Ōsaka to result of management policies that sought to maximize profits by discriminating against Okinawa,” Mainichi shimbun (March 9 to April 9, 1987). them in wages, benefits, and working conditions. 30Ibid.

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31 Terrence E. Cook, Separation, Assimilation, occasionally as satire of militarism. or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic 43Nakama, “Nitchū,” 57. Minority Policies, Praeger (2003). 100. 44Ibid. “Ballad of the Warrior” is included the 32 Quoted in Nakama, “Nitchū,” 63. The author collection “Okinawa no min’yō” (Okinawan folk is identified by the Okinawan surame songs) in Toma Ichirō, ed., Ryūkyū geinō jiten (Dictionary of the Ryukyuan performing arts), Aka. Naha Shuppan-sha (1992), 597. 33Ibid., 62–3. 45Quoted in Nakama, “Nitchū,” 57–59. 34 Tomiyama Ichirō, “On Becoming ‘a Japanese:’ 46Ibid., 58. The Community of Oblivion and Memories of the Battlefield,” Yoseba (March, 1993). Adapted 47Reprinted in Yamanokuchi Baku shishū, 61 and expanded in Senjō no kioku (Memories of and translated in Steve Rabson,Righteous the Battlefield), Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1995. Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War Trans. Noah McCormack and posted at Japan in Modern Japanese Poetry, Center for Focus, October 26, 2005. Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 35Yūhi, 77–78. 1998), 10.

48 36Although celebrated at the time as as a Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 263–264. suicide attack, it was later learned that the 49 soldiers had been told they would have time to Ibid., 198–199. run clear of the explosions. The fuses, ignited 50 before their advance, burned more rapidly than Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 83–84. expected, making escape impossible and their 51 bodies were blown to bits. The three soldiers Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of from Kyushu were members of Japan’s long- Modern Japan, HarperCollins oppressed Buraku minority. See Ueno (2000), 407. Hidenobu, Tennō heika banzai: bakudan san- yūshi josetsu (Long live the emperor: an 52Japanese press reports often exaggerated the explanation of human bombs: the three brave military’s successes in China. warriors; Chikuma Shobō (1989).

53 37Maeda, Deigo, 44–46. Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 178.

54 38Nakama, “Nitchū,” 41–42. Nakama, “Nitchū,” 46–47. Washino emphasizes her identity as a “citizen of Japan,” 39Ibid., 54. downplaying “any special circumstances of 40 Ibid., 45. people from Okinawa Prefecture.”

41Maeda, Deigo,,50 and Yūhi, 80. 55Yūhi, 81–83.

42 Okinawan folk music has become enormously 56Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 76. popular throughout Japan in recent years. These songs are rarely performed, but57Ibid., 91–92.

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58Ibid., 187–189. jidai” (The age of “national schools”),Keizai shicho (January, 1972) 102. 59Ibid., 208. 77 Records of the Japanese Army Ministry show 60 Ibid., 148. that, besides failing to register their new addresses, thousands of Japanese men avoided 61 Ibid., 188. the draft by lying about their ages or family circumstances, forging names, faking 62 Ibid., 45–48. adoptions, feigning illnesses, physically

63 mutilating themselves, or fleeing as far away as Ibid., 205. America. Such statistics belie the stereotype, widely purveyed during and after the war, of 64 Ibid., 73. the Japanese people as monolithically fanatical

65 militarists. See Rabson, Righteous Cause, 158 Ibid., 129–130. and Takashi Fujitani, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru 66Interviewed by Miyagi Kimiko in “Osaka kara kenryoku no tekunorojii: guntai, ‘chihô,’ Henoko e: Kinjō Yuūi-san ni kiku,” shintai,” translated by Umemori Naoyuki, Shisô 845 (November 1994). Keeshi kaji 51 (June, 2006), 58–65. 78In the August 27, 1938 edition ofŌsaka 67Isagawa Hiroshi, “’Jigoku’ datta sokaiMainichi shimbun, quoted inNakama, “Nitchū,” seikatsu,” (Life in “hell” as an 55.

79 evacuee), in Senka to ue: Ginowan shimin ga Nakama, “Nitchū,” 55. tsuzuru sensō taiken (War ravages and 80In the September 1, 1938 edition ofŌsaka starvation: The collected writings of Ginowan Kyūyō shimpō, quoted in Ibid., 56–57. City residents on their war experiences), ed. Ginowan-shi Gajimaru no Kai, Kōbundō Insatsu 81In the October 15, 1938 edition, quoted in (1979), 305–315. Ibid, 43–44.

68 Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 29. 82 In the June 15, 1939 edition, quoted in Ibid.,

69 56. Ibid., 51–53. 83Ibid., 56. 70Ibid. 84The article summarized the history of 71Ibid. discrimination against Okinawans in Japan, but

72 asserted erroneously that Okinawans were Ibid., 32–33. assigned in the Japanese military mainly in 73Ibid., 83–84. labor battalions and as servants to mainland officers. Such misinformation might well have 74Ibid., 46–7. been publicized by the U.S. military for propaganda purposes at the start of the Battle 75 Maeda, Deigo, 45. There was also a version of of Okinawa. American officers repeatedly this song in Okinawa dialect. asserted, during and after the battle, that Okinawans’ social status in Japan proved that 76Kinjō Seikō, “Okinawa no Kokumin-gakkō they were not really Japanese. This claim was

41 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF disseminated among both Americans and Shoten (1968). Translated by Frank Baldwin as Okinawans during the fighting to separate The Pacific War, Pantheon (1978), 53–54. Okinawans from the “enemy Japanese military,” 87 though it included Okinawan soldiers. After the This was a period of extreme rural poverty in war it became an excuse for prolonging the Japan when farm families, especially in the postwar U.S. military occupation. General country’s northeastern region, sold their Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of daughters into prostitution for brothels in occupation forces in mainland Japan and Japan’s cities and abroad. Okinawa, strongly advocated that the U.S. 88 retain control of Okinawa because of its Ienaga, The Pacific War, 54. strategic location. He told George F. Kennan in 89 March of 1948 that “the people [of Okinawa] Takashi Fujitani, “Racism under Fire: Korean are not Japanese, and had never beenImperial Soldiers in Japanese World War II assimilated when they had come to theDiscourses on Nation, Empire and Ethnos,” Japanese main islands.” Quoted in Yoshida invited lecture to the Reischauer Institute for Kensei, Democracy Betrayed: Okinawa Under Japanese Studies at Harvard University, May 2, U.S. Occupations, Center for East Asian 2003. Studies, Western Washington University 90Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 184. (2001), 39. 91For a thorough account of young recruits’ 85See Oyakawa Takayoshi, Ashiato (Footprints), experiences in the Imperial Japanese Army, see Matsuei Insatsu, 26 on Okinawans singled out Edward J. Drea, “In the Army Barracks of for harassment in the Imperial Army. See also Imperial Japan,” Armed Forces and Society Hyōgo-ken Honbu,Sensô taiken-shû, 15.3 (Spring, 1989), 329-348.. 184,Ishihara Masaie, Gyakusatsu no shima:

Kōgun to 92 Nakama, “Nitchū,” 52–53. shinmin no matsuro(Island of massacres: The 93From the December 1, 1939 edition of the last days of the emperor’s army and subjects), Ōsaka Kyūyō shimpō, quoted in Nakama, “ Baneisha (1978) and Ishihara, Shōgen, Okinawa-sen: Senjō no kōkei Dai 1-kanNitchū,” 52. (Testimony: Witnesses to the Battle of Okinawa, Volume 1), Aoki Shoten (1984). Also see Tsuha, 94Oyakawa, Ashiato, 26. Heiwa Shiryōkan, 68–75; Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s 95Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 205–207. End) Vintage (1993), 56–69; and Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson, ed.,Southern 96 Ienaga, The Pacific War, 52. Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from 97 Okinawa, University of Hawaii Press (2000), 22. Oyakawa, Ashiato, 28–29.

98 Many Okinawans have described prejudice and Four of the most notorious incidents are: (1) discrimination they encountered on theThe Nanjing Massacre, previously known as the mainland after 1945. See, for example, Uda Rape of Nanking. Japanese troops went on a Shigeki, Uwa nu ukami-sama (Sacred Pigs: The rampage after occupying the city in December life of Tokeshi Kōtoku), Uda Shuppan Kikaku of 1937, raping women and girls, and killing (1999), 173–96, and Ōta, Ōsaka no Uchinanchu. large numbers of Chinese civilians and prisoners-of-war . (2) After Japanese forces 86Ienaga Saburō, Taiheiyō sensō, Iwanami captured them in the Philippines, thousands of

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Filipino and American prisoners-of-war died of Manchuria could maintain full strength and starvation or exhaustion, or were executed, readiness in case of a conflict with the Soviet during the Bataan Death March of April, 1942. Union. They were among hundreds of thousands of P.O.W.’s the Japanese military captured in the 104Oyakawa, Ashiato, 37–40. Philippines, China, and Southeast Asia who 105 became forced laborers under abominable Ibid.,, 34–35. conditions, resulting in many deaths. (3) The 106 Japanese military maintained “comfort Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 35. stations” in or near areas of conflict where 107 hundreds of thousands of women and girls, Ibid., 104. many of them captured or transported by the 108 Dower, War Without Mercy, 61–71. Japanese military, were forced to have sex daily with large numbers of Japanese soldiers. The 109 George Feifer, The Battle of Okinawa: The largest number were from Korea and China. (4) Blood and the Bomb, The Lyons Press (2001), The Japanese military carried out chemical and 372–374. biological warfare experiments on imprisoned

Chinese, including the removal of vital organs 110 Ibid., 35. and deliberate infection with fatal diseases; and conducted vivisection experiments on American 111Ibid., 78–79. air crews captured in Japan. [See John W. Dower, War Without Mercy Dower: Race and 112Ibid., 11. Power in the Pacific War, Pantheon (1986 ) in which the author also describes atrocities 113Ibid., 82–83. committed by Allied forces during in the Pacific War. 114Ibid., 82–83.

99Oyakawa, Ashiato, 31–45 115Ibid., 49–50. For an account of the fighting in Saipan and the subsequent 100Ibid. 31–33 controversy about how civilians died there, see 101 Ibid., 41–42 Haruko Taya Cook, “The Myth of the

102 Ibid., 33–4. Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s 1938 novel Saipan Suicides,” The Quarterly of Military Ikite iru heitai, based on the author’s History 7.3 (Spring, 1995), 12–19. observations of the war in China, includes passages describing atrocities by Japanese 116Figures in Dower,War Without Mercy, soldiers against Chinese civilians. The Japanese 298–289. Also see Bix,Hirohito, 475. government banned this work and prosecuted Ishikawa who received a suspended sentence. 117 Hyōgo-ken Honbu,Sensô taiken-shû, It is translated asSoldiers Alive by Zeljko 140–142. Cipris (University of Hawai’i Press (2003). 118Ibid. 103Oyakawa, Ashiato, 34. These seizures observed by Oyakawa were part of a military 119Ibid. This was one of the bizarre allocation policy that required Japanese forces consequences of Japan’s “red purge” that was a in China outside Manchuria to “live off the byproduct of McCarthy era witch-hunts in the land” so that Japan’s Kwantung Army in United States. In total, more than 27,000 were

43 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF purged from government, universities, public Chinese cities as “indiscriminate” and “using schools, and private companies. See Hirata many types of antipersonnel explosives. . . . Tetsuo and John Dower, “Japan’s Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga of Suppression of Free In the first two days of raids, they reportedly Speech and Thought,” Japan Focus website, killed more than five thousand Chinese July 9, 2007, noncombatants and caused enormous damage” 120Ienaga, The Pacific War, 150. (Bix, Hirohito, 364). In February of 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe, 121Ibid., 233–234. Allied aircraft firebombed Dresden, Germany, killing an estimated 135,000 in a city with no 122 Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 147. facilities of significant military value. This was one month before the firebombings of Tokyo 123 The estimated total doubles to approximately and Osaka in March. 140,000 when subsequent deaths from burns and radiation are included. See George Feifer, 129Interviewed in Errol Morris’s 2003 The Battle of Okinawa, 12 and 408. documentary film “The Fog of War.”

124 Quoted in David McCullough, Truman, Simon [130] Figure of 97,032 for the firebombing of and Schuster (1992), Tokyo is cited in Dower, War Without Mercy, 298. Also see Peter J. Kuznick, “The Decision to 455. Risk the Future: The Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” Japan Focus, July 23, 125Deaths from the attack and its aftereffects of 2007; and Mark Selden, A“ Forgotten burns and radiation are estimated at Holocaust: U.S. Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the 70,000. See Feifer, The Battle of Okinawa, 408. American Way of War from World War II to 126 See Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Iraq,” Japan Focus, May 2, 2007. Biography of Harry S. Truman, Berkley 131Uda, Uwa, 163–164. Publishing Corporation (1974) Truman’s popular nickname “give ‘em hell 132Figures cited in Yūhi 50, 84. Harry” carries grimly ironic overtones, 133Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 92 and considering that, as commander-in-chief, he 263. Measured at 7.2 magnitude, it destroyed gave 512,846 homes and buildings, and caused the orders to turn Japanese cities into infernos 6,433 deaths in southern Hyōgo Prefecture. of death. Here and note 85, 135, and 161 problems of spacing. Also, please eplace all circumflexes 127 Figure cited in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar e.g. here notes 14, 17, 19 and many others Japan as History, University of California Press such as 138, 159, 161, 163 with the standard (1993), 225. macron: Hyōgo.

134 128When it came to the saturation bombing of The inadequacy of Japan’s air defenses is cities, Japanese were perpetrators as well as described in Gordon Daniels, “The Great Tokyo Air Raid, 9–10 March, 1945,” in ed. W.G. victims. Bix describes the Imperial Navy’s Beasley, ed., Modern Japan: Aspects of History, bombing of Chungking and other large Literature, and Society, University of California

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Press (1975), 119. the text perhaps.

135Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 47–48. 151Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 25.

136 Ibid., p. 76. 152Eyewitness accounts of the battle also describe close camaraderie between 137 Ienaga, The Pacific War, 141, Maeda, Deigo, Okinawans and mainland soldiers. See Jo 44–51, and Hyogo-ken Honbu,Sensô taiken- Nobuko Martin, A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus, shû, 46. Shin Nippon Kyôiku Tosho (1984). Martin writes from firsthand experience as a member 138 Hyogo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 88. of the Himeyuri gakutō-tai (Princess lily student brigade) comprised of high school girls 139Ibid., 58. and their teachers conscripted to serve as battlefield medics. Many were killed in the 140Yūhi, pp. 83–86. fighting or committed suicide to avoid capture. 141 Ibid., 87 and Tsuha, Heiwa Shiryōkan, 54. 153 Interviewed in July, 1999. 142The chrysanthemum is the flower forming the 154Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 262, official crest of the Japanese imperial family. and 270. 143 Figures cited in Bix, Hirohito, 485. 155The term “palm fern hell” refers to times of 144Feifer, The Battle of Okinawa, 90–96. famine in the Ryukyu Kingdom when people ate the palm fern(sotetsu) plant to avoid 145Tsuha, Heiwa Shiryōkan, 40. starvation. The poisonous portions had to be carefully removed. 146“Sute-ishi,” literally “throwaway stone,” 156 referring to the game of go. This dish came to be known as “Mobil tempura,” and often caused diarrhia. 147Tsuha, Heiwa Shiryōkan, 56–90. 157Hyōgo-ken Honbu,Sensô taiken-shû, 148Ibid, p. 90. 276–279.

149 Feifer, The Battle of Okinawa, 341 and Tonaki 158Ibid., 244. Morita, “Okinawa shinwa no saikō” 159 (Reconsidering some myths about Okinawa), Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 222. Keeshi kaji 47 (June, 2005), 60–65. Although Gushi’s outrage is understandable, she overestimates U.S. reconnaissance 150Kadena Town in central Okinawa was the capabilities. The Navy learned the positions of location of the Japanese military’s “Central ships from decrypted Japanese messages, and Airfield,” captured by American forces during was able to track them with submarines. But the first days of the Battle of Okinawa. After these messages did not necessarily specify the the war, the American military seizedcargo, so U.S. submarines attacked merchant surrounding farmlands for a vastly expanded ships which they thought might be transporting “Kadena Air Base” which is now the largest weapons. Some they torpedoed not only carried American air installation outside the U.S., Japanese civilian evacuees, but also American occupying more than 60% of Kadena Town. and other Allied prisoners of war who died by [Anywhere! That deserves to be highlighted in the hundreds in the explosions or from

45 11 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF drowning. been reported in recent years.

160 Yōju 35, 74–75. 163The 32nd Army in Okinawa applied the Japanese military’s 1944 guideline entitled 161 Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 266. “Soldiers and Civilians Live Together and Die Also see Shinzato Keiji, et al., Okinawa-ken no Together.” See Ôe Kenzaburô, Misreading,“ rekishi (The history of Okinawa Prefecture), Espionage and ‘Beautiful Martyrdom for the Yamakawa, (1980), p. 223; and, in English, Country”: On Hearing the District Court M.D. Morris, Okinawa: A Tiger by the Tail, Verdict in the Okinawa ‘Mass Suicides’ Case,” Hawthorn (1968), 102. Violent crimesarticle in Sekai (June, 2008) translated by Scott committed by U.S. forces reached a recorded Burba in Japan Focus (October 5, 2008) at . peak of more than 400 per year during the Vietnam War. See “Introduction” in Steve 164 Molasky and Rabson, Southern Exposure, Rabson, trans., Okinawa: Two Postwar 22. Ōe writes, “The 32nd Army issued an order Novellas, Institute of East Asian Studies, stating, ‘Effective immediately: The use of any University of California, Berkeley (1989,language other than standard Japanese is reprinted 1996), 28–31 prohibited, regardless of military or army civilian employment. Anyone caught conversing 162 Rabson, Two Postwar Novellas, 2 and 29 and in the Okinawan language will be punished as a George Feifer, Tennozan: The Battle of spy.”

Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, Ticknor and 165 Hyōgo-ken Honbu, Sensô taiken-shû, 250. Fields, (1992). 372–374. Rapes 166Tsuha, Heiwa Shiryōkan, 47. and other serious crimes are still committed by individuals among the approximately 167 Bix, Hirohito, 487–490.

30,000 U.S. forces and 20,000 military168Tsuha, Heiwa Shiryōkan, 90. dependents stationed in Okinawa today. Sexual assaults by individuals among the 6,000 Japan Self Defense Force personnel have also

The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War 戦時中日本に於ける沖縄 県民の離散

The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan at War 戦時中日本に於ける沖縄県民の離散