Emperor prays for peace - and for the victims of Suicide Cliff

June 28, 2005
By Richard Lloyd Parry

Descendants of Koreans killed 61 years ago are demanding royal homage at their memorial

The words mean, literally, “May His Majesty the Emperor live 10,000 years”, and they were heard repeatedly during the vicious three-week battle for Saipan in 1944. Japanese soldiers shouted them as they charged into combat, armed with daggers and sharpened bamboos in suicide raids.

Miss Sato herself heard a young soldier scream them as he joined hundreds of others in jumping to his death from Suicide Cliff. Last night Emperor Akihito — the son of the late Hirohito, in whose name so many people died — and Empress Michiko arrived in Saipan to pray for peace on a foreign battlefield for the first time.

Courtiers are presenting the Emperor’s visit as an important step forward in Tokyo’s efforts to lay at rest its brutal occupation of foreign lands. But already the visit has aroused controversy. Yesterday representatives of Saipan’s sizeable Korean community demanded that he pay his respects at a memorial to Koreans who were brought forcibly to the island by Japan to perish in the battle.

Local people, fearful that demonstrations against the Emperor will scare off the Japanese tourists on whom the island depends, have threatened to boycott Korean businesses.

Japanese nationalists accompanying a group of elderly veterans of the battle conducted Shinto ceremonies yesterday celebrating Japan’s martial achievements. Japanese diplomats expressed private concerns that the trip could be misrepresented as an effort to glorify the war, and further damage tense relations with China and South Korea.

“This time on soil beyond our shores, we will once again mourn and pay tribute to all those who lost their lives in the war,” Emperor Akihito said yesterday. “We will remember the difficult path the bereaved families had to follow, and we wish to pray for world peace.”

Saipan is a sleepy tropical island 1,260 miles (2,028km) from Japan, just 13 miles long and 6 miles wide. It passed from Spanish to German control, and was acquired by Japan after the First World War. Poor farmers from Japan migrated there to grow sugar cane and lived there alongside the indigenous Chamorros.

“We were taught that the Emperor was descended from the Sun Goddess and that we have to treat him like a god,” Juan B. Blanco, a Chamorro who was educated in a Japanese school, said. “We were learning how to become Japanese.”

This relaxed way of life continued until very shortly before the US invasion in June 1944, as the Allies rolled back early Japanese successes in the Pacific. When the battle began it was devastating.

The story of Miss Sato’s family is typical. Trapped between the US and Japanese forces beneath a naval and air bombardment, they zig-zagged across the island, sheltering in forests and a huge cave. “The cave took a direct hit, with one bomb coming right in,” she said. “It was a living hell. There was blood and body parts everywhere.”

Her mother was shot dead by American soldiers. At one stage she found herself at Suicide Cliff close to Banzai Cliff, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soldiers, civilians and Chamorros leapt to their deaths. “I saw a young soldier jumping,” she says, “but I didn’t have the courage to do the same. I started sliding down the cliff feet first, clutching on to trees and grass. I plunged down but came to stop in the root of a large tree. Her father climbed down and rescued her. He was killed soon afterwards. Miss Sato was saved and returned to Japan after the war.

The suicide cliffs are now tourist attractions, marked with memorial stones. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko will visit both and lay wreaths at memorials to the dead of all sides. The visit marks the culmination of the pilgrimage that the Emperor began ten years ago with visits to the great war sites within Japan: the atom-bombed cities and the islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

Today he may repeat the words of conciliation and regret that he first used in 1995, and they will be accepted gratefully by most people in Saipan. But the countries that most crave an apology are ones that it would be diplomatically impossible for him to visit: China and the two Koreas.

“If it were me I would apologise,” Sister Antonieta Ada, a Japanese orphaned by the war and who stayed in Saipan to become a nun, said. “But if he’s going to apologise, he has to apologise to the whole world.”

BATTLE OF SAIPAN 1944

Tragedy or greed? Row over forced suicides of Okinawa

From Richard Lloyd Parry and Kyoko Onoki in Tokyo
June 24, 2005

WHEN the moment came, the Rev Shigeaki Kinjo remembers, there was no hesitation among the villagers of Tokashiki island. The village chief was the first to start with a heavy branch broken off a tree. There were no guns and the grenades had been used up, so other men made do with clubs or rocks.

The Protestant clergyman said: “Our father was not there, so my elder brother and I had to do my father’s job,” Mr Kinjo said. “We were boys of 16 and 18 years old. We had to kill my mother and my younger brother and sister.”

It was 60 years ago, and all across the islands of Okinawa ordinary civilians were doing the same. As the US Marines made their slow advance in the bloody 2½-month battle, tens of thousands of people killed their wives, sons, daughters, parents and grandparents, and themselves, rather than face capture.

They did so in the belief, inculcated by military propaganda, that those who survived would be raped and killed by the American and British devils. The weapons they used were provided by the Japanese military and often, according to survivors, they were forced by soldiers to participate in so-called group death.

But as the nation marked the anniversary of the end of the battle with a ceremony in Okinawa yesterday, controversy was raging about the deaths.

Right-wing academics, who have already stirred up a row with a book playing down Japanese atrocities in Asia, say that the forced suicides are a myth, invented by survivors greedy for postwar compensation.

The claims have provoked fury in Okinawa, a culturally distinct region of Japan, where at least 94,000 civilians died.

Tokashiki, 15 miles from the main island of Okinawa, fell in March 1945 and, well before the American invasion, its small Japanese garrison was preparing for defeat. Mr Kinjo, now 76, said: “An NCO summoned village officials and young men, and gave them two grenades each. They said, ‘Use one against the enemy and the other for yourself.’ This was nothing other than direct pressure from the military.”

On the night before the invasion the villagers were ordered towards the battlefield rather than away from it. “This was the outstanding characteristic of the battle,” Mr Kinjo said. “The idea of one destiny shared by the military, the administration and civilians. They were to live together and to die together.”

After the village chief began clubbing his wife and children with a branch, the others did the same. “I didn’t exchange a word with my elder brother. We just did it. My mother said nothing, she just cried, and we were crying. My only clear memory was at the last moment we used a rock. By the time I killed my younger brother and sister, the details of what I did or how I did it became so vague with the shock.”

The campaign to prove that forced suicides were a myth is led by Nobukatsu Fujioka, a right-wing academic who visited Tokashiki last month. He said that survivors of the battle were concocted to secure compensation from the Government. Among present-day Okinawans there is widespread resentment of their treatment by the mainland, not least because of the continued presence of 47,000 US military personnel on the island.

Nobuyoshi Takashima, a professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, said: “Okinawans were part of the military defence of the island, and they had no choice but to follow.”

THE CAMPAIGN

* April 1, 1945: Invasion begins; April — June 170,000 US troops and 1,213 warships plus British forces engaged
* June 21: Japanese resistance ceases
* US military deaths: 12,520; 36 warships, 763 aircraft lost
* Japanese military deaths: 94,136; 7,400 taken prisoner
* Civilian deaths: 94,000—150,000
* Okinawa: 161 islands spanning 800 miles

Japanese have wide perception gap about US military in Okinawa

Mainichi Shimbun
June 22, 2005

There is a wide perception gap over the necessity of U.S. bases in Okinawa between residents of the southernmost prefecture and those living on mainland Japan, according to a survey conducted jointly by the Mainichi Shimbun and the Ryukyu Shimpo. The Mainichi surveyed people randomly selected throughout Japan -- including Okinawa -- over the weekend, while the Ryukyu Shimpo, an local Okinawan newspaper conducted the poll on local residents from Friday to Sunday, prior to the 60th anniversary of the end of the Okinawa battle on June 23, 1945. Of the respondents, 47 percent nationwide pointed to the necessity of U.S. bases in Okinawa Prefecture while only 30 percent of Okinawa residents said U.S. bases in the prefecture are needed.

On the other hand, 45 percent of the pollees throughout Japan said U.S. bases in Okinawa are unnecessary while 70 percent of Okinawans said such military facilities are not needed. The results illustrated the perception gap between mainland residents and residents of Okinawa Prefecture, where 75 percent of U.S. bases are concentrated in terms of land areas, over the burden of hosting U.S. bases. Of those in the national survey who responded that U.S. bases in Okinawa are necessary, 67 percent cited the need to defend Japan and surrounding areas.

Among Okinawa residents who support U.S. bases in the prefecture, 50 percent answered they are effective in vitalizing the local economy while 40 percent cited security reasons. This suggests that a large number of Okinawans think they have no choice but to accept U.S. bases for economic reasons to secure jobs for local residents rather than for the defense of Japan. Of the pollees opposing U.S. bases in Okinawa, 49 percent of the respondents in the national survey and 70 percent of Okinawans pointed out that Okinawa bears an overly heavy burden of hosting such military facilities. Over half -- 55 percent -- of those in the national survey said they would voice opposition if U.S. bases were moved to their neighborhoods.

Mainichi Shimbun

Okinawa Suicides and Japan's Army: Burying the Truth?

New York Times
June 20, 2005
By JAMES BROOKE

ITOMAN, Okinawa, June 17 - Clutching a hand grenade issued by the Japanese Imperial Army and driven by tales of what American soldiers would do with a pretty young woman, Sumie Oshiro recalled recently, she fled into the forests of Okinawa during the World War II battle known here as the "typhoon of steel."

"At one place, we sat together and hit the grenade on the ground, but it did not explode," she recalled of her flight with friends after Japanese soldiers told them to kill themselves rather than be taken captive. "We tried to kill ourselves many times, trying to explode the grenade we were given from Japanese Army."

The three-month battle for Okinawa took more than 200,000 lives - 12,520 Americans, 94,136 Japanese soldiers, and 94,000 Okinawan civilians, about one-quarter of the prewar population. Lt. Gen. Robert Blackman, commander of the United States Marines in Japan, led a low-profile memorial ceremony on Friday, attended largely by American war veterans and relatives.

This Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the battle here, the last major one of World War II, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is to attend Japan's tribute here. [On Sunday he led a memorial service in Iwo Jima, a Japanese island where fighting ended in March 1945, just as the invasion here began.]

Okinawa's trauma over what happened here after 545,000 American troops attacked this small archipelago is still deep. People here on Japan's southernmost islands want more recognition from Japanese society for their sufferings. But that wish collides with a growing nationalist effort to airbrush the past.

After winning battles to play down Japan's war-era history of forcing Asian women to work in military-run brothels and Asian men to work in Japanese factories and mines, Nobukatsu Fujioka, a nationalist educator, started campaigning two weeks ago to delete from schoolbooks statements that soldiers ordered civilians here to choose suicide over surrender. But he said there were no such orders. "I confirmed this by hearing people this time," he said. "People claimed that there was an order by Japanese Army because they wanted to get pension for the bereaved."

Okinawa's anguish over the widespread civilian suicides has been sharpened by the deep belief here that soldiers from Japan's main islands encouraged Okinawan civilians to choose suicide. In a display at the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, a spotlight highlights a glinting bayonet held by a fierce looking Japanese soldier who stands over an Okinawan family huddled in a cave, the mother trying to smother her baby's cries.

"At the hands of Japanese soldiers, civilians were massacred, forced to kill themselves and each other," reads the caption. Nearby, a life-size photo shows the grisly aftermath of a family killed by a hand grenade.

Soldiers seeking refuge from the naval shelling forced civilians out of limestone caves and, during the fighting, out of the island's turtle-back shaped tombs, according to captions. About two weeks into the battle, the Japanese military commander sought to suppress spying by banning the speaking of Okinawan dialect, a version of Japanese often unintelligible to nonresidents. Armed with this order, Japanese soldiers killed about 1,000 Okinawans, according to local historians.

Two mainstream Japanese history textbooks from the 1990's that talk of Japanese soldiers "coercing" civilians to kill themselves are on display. Now, Okinawans fear that this history will be dropped from the national consciousness.

"In many cases, hand grenades, which were in extreme shortage, were distributed to residents," Masahide Ota, an Okinawan who fought here in a unit called the Blood and Iron Student Corps, said in an interview on Friday. "I heard people say they were told by the military to commit suicide using the grenades rather than becoming captives."

Mr. Ota, who surrendered four months after the fighting ended here, went on to become a leading local historian, then Okinawa's governor, from 1990 to 1998. Now, at age 80, he represents the prefecture in Japan's upper house of Parliament.

Okinawans fear that the lack of a written suicide order by Japanese commanders will prompt editors of Japanese history textbooks to drop all mention of the military indoctrination that, as a wartime slogan put it, "soldiers and civilians had to live and die together."

Photo: Takejiro Nakamura, 77, now a guide at an Okinawan historic house, says he tried to strangle himself when the Americans arrived.

On Geruma Island, Takejiro Nakamura was one such civilian, a 15-year-old student when the American invasion started.

"For a long time, the Japanese Imperial Army announced that, on other islands, the women had been raped and killed, and the men were tied at the wrists and tanks were driven over them," said Mr. Nakamura, now a guide at a museum housed in a traditional dwelling that bears bullet holes from the American attack. As Japanese defenses crumbled on the island in late March 1945, 56 of the 130 residents committed suicide, he said. Fleeing with family and neighbors, he said, he passed one cave where 10 villagers had killed themselves.

"I heard my sister calling out, 'Kill me now, hurry,' " Mr. Nakamura said, recalling how his 20-year-old sister panicked at the approach of American soldiers. His mother took a rope and strangled her.

"I tried to also strangle myself with a rope," he recalled, lifting his now weather-beaten hands to his neck. "But I kept breathing. It is really tough to kill yourself."

Minutes later, the Americans took them captive.

"The U.S. soldier touched me to check if I had any weapons," he recalled. "Then he gave us candy and cigarettes. That was my first experience on coming out of the cave."

His mother lived into her 80's.

"We talked about the war," Mr. Nakamura said. "But to the end, she never once talked about killing her daughter." [*285*]

A Pacific forces reshuffle

Posted on: Sunday, June 12, 2005
By Richard Halloran

THE RISING EAST

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed the Shangri-la Security Dialogue in Singapore last weekend, most of the attention in the meeting and later in the press focused on his candid comments about China's military strategy, spending and modernization.

The secretary barely touched on the fundamental revision in the U.S. defense posture that is intended to counter a potential threat from China or to respond swiftly to contingencies elsewhere, pointing only to "a repositioning of U.S. forces worldwide that would significantly increase our capabilities in support of our friends and allies in this region."

American defense officials in Washington, at the Pacific Command at Camp Smith and in Asia have spent many months seeking to bring Rumsfeld's policy to reality. They have fashioned a plan intended to strengthen the operational control of the Pacific Command, enhance forces in the U.S. territory of Guam, tighten the alliance with Japan and streamline the U.S. stance in South Korea.

As pieced together from American and Japanese officials, who cautioned that no firm decisions have been made, the realignment shapes up like this:

Army: The Army headquarters at Fort Shafter would become a war-fighting command to devise and execute operations rather than to train and provide troops to other commands as it does now. The U.S. four-star general's post in Korea would be transferred to Hawai'i.

I Corps at Fort Lewis, Wash., would move to Camp Zama, Japan, to forge ties with Japan's ground force. Japan would organize a similar unit, perhaps called the Central Readiness Command, to prepare and conduct operations with the U.S. Army.

Japanese officials are considering elevating the Self-Defense Agency to a ministry and renaming Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force as the Japanese Army and the same for the navy and air force. Shedding those postwar names would reflect Japan's emergence from its pacifist cocoon.

In South Korea, the U.S. plans to disband the Eighth Army that has been there since the Korean War of 1950-53, to relinquish command of South Korean troops to the South Koreans, and to minimize or eliminate the United Nations Command set up during the Korean War.

A smaller tactical command would oversee U.S. forces that remain in South Korea, which would be down to 25,000 from 37,000 in 2008. That may be cut further since Seoul has denied the U.S. the "strategic flexibility" to dispatch U.S. forces from South Korea to contingencies elsewhere.

Marine Corps: The Marines, who have a war-fighting center in Hawai'i, would move the headquarters of the III Marine Expeditionary Force, or III MEF, to Guam from Okinawa to reduce the friction caused by the U.S. "footprint" on that Japanese island. How many Marines would move was not clear, but combat battalions would continue to rotate to Okinawa from the United States.

Some U.S. officers are displeased because local politics rather than military necessity dictated the move. They asserted that the Tokyo government, despite its desire to "reduce the burden" on Okinawans, has blocked U.S. attempts to move forces to other bases in Japan.

Other officers saw an advantage to having III MEF on Guam. If a Japanese government sought to restrict the movement of U.S. forces, III MEF would be able to operate without reference to Tokyo.

Air Force: The 13th Air Force moved to Hickam Air Force Base from Guam in May to give that service a war-fighting headquarters like those of the other services. General Paul V. Hester, commander of the Pacific Air Forces, was quoted in press reports: "We're building an air operations center and war-fighting headquarters that serves the entire Pacific region."

The Air Force plans to establish a strike force on Guam that would include six bombers and 48 fighters rotating there from U.S. bases. In addition, 12 refueling aircraft, which are essential to long-range projection of air power, would be stationed at Andersen Air Force Base there.

Further, three Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance aircraft would be based on Guam. Global Hawks can range 12,000 miles, at altitudes up to 65,000 feet, for 35 hours, which means they can cover Asia from Bangkok to Beijing with sensors making images of 40,000 square miles a day.

In Japan, the Air Force is willing to share Yokota Air Force Base, west of Tokyo, with Japan's Air Self-Defense Force but has resisted opening the base to civilian aircraft, citing security concerns. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has demanded such rights.

Navy: The USS Kitty Hawk, the conventionally-powered aircraft carrier based at Yokosuka, Japan, is slated for replacement by 2008. The United States wants to station a nuclear-powered carrier there while some Japanese politicians want the last of the conventionally-powered carriers, the John F. Kennedy, to be chosen.

The Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, whose war-fighting element is Joint Task Force 519, has moved three attack submarines to Guam to put them in the western Pacific and would probably be assigned an additional carrier from the Atlantic Fleet to be based at Pearl Harbor.

All in all, these changes would take upwards of three years to complete, during which time Beijing can be expected to object in no uncertain terms.