Battle of Okinawa 1945: Memories of fire, flight and loss

Japan Times

2 days ago

The town of Nishihara, at the center of Okinawa Island, lost half of its residents in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.
Yoshiko Goya, 88, who was born in the town's Kohatsu area — the site of fierce fighting between Japanese and U.S. forces during World War II — has never forgotten the days when she desperately tried to flee the ravages of war with her family and relatives.
Then age 8, Goya saw her younger sister killed by the bombings right before her. Her other sister, who was a baby, died in her mother's arms while they were trying to get away from the carnage.
Nishihara, which was then a village, was at that time an important base that aimed to prevent the U.S. forces from invading Shuri, where the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army's 32nd Army was located.
Japanese soldiers were stationed in the village from around August 1944, and many of the residents' homes were used as their living quarters. They included the house of Goya's male relative, Kame Kohatsu, who was then 48.
Five or six soldiers stayed in each of the small houses with thatched roofs. They also set up tents under the trees.
Due to her young age at the time, Goya is not sure exactly when the soldiers took Kohatsu's house, but she remembers fleeing along with the Kohatsu family around the end of March 1945 when the U.S. military's prelanding air raids grew fierce. They moved south in April when bombings from U.S. warships at Nakagusuku Bay increased.
Goya's great-grandmother — Kohatsu's mother — did not go with them.
'Some older people couldn't walk so we had to leave them behind,' Goya said. 'There was nothing we could do about it.'
She barely remembers how they got away during the night.
They arrived at the Yonagusuku area of the village of Kochinda — currently the town of Yaese — in the southern part of the island, which had been bombed but had suffered less damage than elsewhere.
They spent nights in a large house provided by a resident and stayed in a trench in the garden during the daytime.
Around late May that year when Japanese soldiers started to arrive, they moved to a small thatched-roof house nearby.
Soon after, the large house in which they initially stayed in, which the Japanese soldiers went on to occupy, was bombed and completely destroyed.
Goya's 4-year-old sister Fumiko was struck by a log during the explosion, which killed her.
It also caused the trench where the family took refuge in to collapse, resulting in Goya's grandmother and Kohatsu's wife, Yoshiko, suffering serious wounds to their legs. Because they could not walk, the rest of the family was forced to leave them behind in a nearby house as they rushed for safety.
When they reached the village of Makabe — currently the city of Itoman — in the southernmost part of the island, they saw evacuees everywhere.
When they tried to seek refuge at a large house, they found it was already overcrowded, so Goya, her mother, her 3-month-old sister Kazuko and Kohatsu's eldest daughter decided to take shelter in a nearby livestock shed instead.
Then a bomb directly hit the house.
They never saw Kohatsu again. They thought he was in the house when it was bombed but they couldn't find any trace of him in the aftermath of the explosion.
In the ensuing firefight, they gave up on looking for a place to flee to, and, a few days later, they were captured by the U.S. forces.
By then, of the seven family members and relatives who fled together to the southern part of the island, only three were still alive — Goya, her mother and Kohatsu's eldest daughter. Kazuko was found dead in her mother's arms.
The remains of Goya's grandmother and Kohatsu's wife were discovered lying side-by-side at a house in Yonagusuku, where the family had left them. The house had been burned down to ruins.
'I don't know if they had been burned alive or caught in a fire after they died,' Goya said, with a lump in her throat.
The members of the family could not find the remains of Fumiko, whom they had buried at the back of the house.
'She was a bit chubby,' Goya said, fondly recalling her sister. 'She always frolicked in the trench and made everyone laugh.'
Her father, who had been called into the local defense corps comprising reservists, survived, but her mother died following the end of the war, after giving birth to another daughter. The baby girl also died soon after.
A stone wall that Kohatsu had built around the family home in Nishihara still stands. Every time Goya sees the bullet holes on the wall, she is reminded of the horrors of the war.
'I can't believe we lived through such suffering,' Goya said. 'I don't want my children and grandchildren to go through such an experience.'
This section features topics and issues from Okinawa covered by The Okinawa Times, a major newspaper in the prefecture. The original article was published May 30.