Okinawa struggles with its legacy from World War II

Clutching a hand grenade issued by the Japanese Imperial Army and driven by tales of what US soldiers would do with a pretty young woman, Sumie Oshiro recalled on Friday, 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.

Lieutenant General Robert Blackman, commander of the US Marine forces in Japan, led a low-profile memorial ceremony last Friday, attended largely by US war veterans and relatives.

On 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.

Okinawa's trauma over what happened here after 545,000 US troops attacked this small archipelago is still deep. People here on Japan's southernmost islands want more recognition from Japanese society for their sufferings.

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 Japanese schoolbooks the accounts of orders from Japanese soldiers to civilians here to choose suicide over surrender.

Okinawa's trauma 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 over surrender to the US.

In a display at the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, a spotlight highlights a 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 wall 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 wall 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 non-residents. Armed with this order, Japanese soldiers killed about 1,000 Okinawans, say historians.

"To prevent the leakage of secret information, civilians were ordered never to surrender to US forces," read one wall caption inspected by a large high school group on Friday. "In many places, parents, children, relatives and friends were ordered or coerced to kill each other in large groups. These killings were in the wake of years of militaristic education, which exhorted people to serve their nation by giving their lives to the emperor."

Two mainstream Japanese history textbooks from the 1990s 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 with the Japanese Army's Blood and Iron Student Corps, said.