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By Root 988 0

towards the innocent and impotent that it is easy to understand the rage which filled Allied hearts in 1945, when all was revealed. The ambivalence of post-war Japan about its treatment of captives is exemplified in the 1952 memoirs of wartime foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, one of the more rational of the country’s leaders. He wrote: “After the war many instances were recorded of kindly treatment by Japanese in individual cases, and a number of letters of thanks were received from ex–prisoners of war and persons who had been in concentration camps.” Shigemitsu tarnished his own reputation by penning such pitiful stuff. War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practiced extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy.

SIXTEEN

Okinawa

1. Love Day

THE U.S. ARMED FORCES’ Guide to the Pacific briefed visitors to the Ryukyus, of which Okinawa is the main island, with unfailing facetiousness: “Those who wish a good memento of a stay in Nansei Shoto should get a piece of the lacquerware for which the islanders are famous.” In the spring of 1945 some 12,000 Americans and up to 150,000 Japanese found death rather than porcelain amid Okinawa’s sixty-mile length of fields and mountains, or in the waters offshore. The island was home to 450,000 people, who possessed Japanese nationality while remaining culturally distinct. Before an invasion of Japan’s main islands could be attempted, it was evident to both sides that this southern outpost was likely to be contested. Its airfields, rather more than midway between Luzon and Kyushu, would have to be denied to the Japanese, secured by the Americans. At the time Operation Iceberg was launched in the spring of 1945, it was perceived in Washington only as a preliminary to the decisive battle that must follow, for Japan’s home islands. Likewise in Tokyo, the defence of Okinawa was deemed vital to Japan’s strategy for achieving a negotiated peace. If the U.S. could be made to pay dearly enough for winning a single offshore island, reasoned the nation’s leaders and indeed its emperor, Washington would conclude that the price of invading Kyushu and Honshu was too great to be borne. They were correct in their analysis, but utterly deluded about its implications.

Twenty-five-year-old Captain Kouichi Ito was the son of a naval officer, brought up at the great Yokosuka naval base. Ito passionately wanted to be a warrior. He was embarrassed to find himself disqualified from service as a pilot or sailor, because he was prone to both air-and seasickness. Instead, he became a soldier, and passed out near the top of his 1940 military academy class. Anticlimax followed, however. For almost four years this fiercely ambitious young man found himself fulfilling garrison duties in Manchuria. While Japanese legions stormed triumphantly across Asia and locked themselves in combat with the Americans and British, Ito sat in his quarters reading endless books on the history of conflict—above all, about the First World War. Not until August 1944 did his unit, the 32nd Infantry, at last sail for an undisclosed destination. Only on their arrival did he and his comrades discover that they had joined the garrison of Okinawa.

The regiment, composed mostly of Hokkaidans, found the island strange and somewhat exotic, with its fields of sugarcane, unknown back home, its people’s unfamiliar dialect. Okinawa is celebrated for a powerful local rice brew, awamori, which proved most acceptable to tens of thousands of soldiers who now began to fortify themselves there. Likewise, when cigarette rations ran short, it proved useful that Okinawan farmers grew illegal tobacco. Month after month the garrison laboured, enlarging and exploiting a great network of natural caves, preparing slit trenches and bunkers. The work was done with their bare hands. “We had no machines,” said Kouichi Ito laconically. He himself, having walked the length of the coast, was sure that no invader would land on his regiment’s rocky coastal sector in the south-west; and that entrenching this