Nagasaki high school students learn about horrific Battle of Okinawa via fieldwork

NAGASAKI — Students at a high school in this southwest Japan city recently visited Okinawa Prefecture to engage in fieldwork to learn about the local history including the Battle of Okinawa, during which around 200,000 civilians and others lost their lives.

During their visit from Oct. 10 to 13, the five Nagasaki Higashi High School students participated in volunteer activities to recover the remains of the deceased at the southernmost coast of Okinawa’s main island, the site of mass suicides by many residents who were cornered by U.S. troops at the end of World War II.

Yoko Yokomine, 15, a first-year student, said, “I couldn’t believe that even 79 years after the end of the war, bones were still being found. It made me realize that people died in this very spot.”

On Oct. 12, Yokomine and the others were digging the ground in a narrow crevice in a rocky area on the Arasaki Coast in Itoman — the southernmost city on Okinawa’s main island — when Takamatsu Gushiken, a 70-year-old member of Naha-based volunteer group “Gamafuya” collecting remains, spotted two small, yellowish fragments resembling stones. Yokomine reached in and grabbed what appeared to be bones of a human toe and part of the pelvis.

The U.S. military landed in Okinawa in March 1945, near the end of WWII. Due to the fierce attacks, known as the “storm of steel,” Okinawan residents were driven southward with nowhere to escape. In June, many civilians were forced into mass suicide in the Arasaki coastal area, including young female students who had been mobilized as nurses in the Battle of Okinawa.

Feeling the weight of the bones in her hands at the site where the female students around her age perished, Yokomine said she imagined “how scared they must have been, hiding deep between narrow rocks for to avoid being found by the enemy.”

In a crevice in a different rocky area nearby, local high school students working with the Nagasaki children found an identification tag of a Japanese soldier. The rusty, reddish-brown metal plate, measuring 5.5 centimeters in length and about 3.5 cm in width, is engraved with the numbers “12427” and “8” with the Japanese hiragana for “ni” between them — indicating the common number given to the unit, and the soldier’s personal number. According to documents owned by the National Archives of Japan’s Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, the soldier belonged to the 104th autocannon battalion, which is recorded to have been “honorably defeated” near the present-day Mabuni area in Itoman and elsewhere.

At a natural cave — called “gama” in the Okinawan language — close by, where the cornered civilians ended up fleeing inside, the students turned off their flashlights and experienced what it was like to be in complete darkness deep inside the cave. Sui Oyama, a second-year Nagasaki Higashi Highschool student, said, “I’ve studied about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, but I didn’t truly understand the terror of ground battles, where you’re in complete darkness and don’t know when you’ll be attacked.” The 17-year-old added that “it was a valuable experience.”

Gushiken, who is continuing efforts to recover the remains of those killed in the war in Okinawa, explained, “Even 79 years after the war, there is still much that can be done, such as properly laying these remains to rest.”

(Japanese original by Rika Hyakuta, Nagasaki Bureau)