Volunteer searching for WWII dead in Japanese caves unearths remains of hundreds of people

CBS News

06-03-2025

Takamatsu Gushiken turns on a headtorch and enters a cave buried in Okinawa's jungle. He gently runs his fingers through the gravel until two pieces of bone emerge. These are from the skulls, he says, of an infant and possibly an adult.
He carefully places them in a ceramic rice bowl and takes a moment to imagine people dying 80 years ago as they hid in this cave during one of the fiercest battles of World War II. His hope is that the dead can be reunited with their families.
The remains of some 1,400 people found on Okinawa sit in storage for possible identification with DNA testing. So far just six have been identified and returned to their families. Volunteer bone hunters and families looking for their loved ones say the government should do more to help.
Gushiken says the bones are silent witnesses to Okinawa's wartime tragedy, carrying a warning to the present generation as Japan ups its defense spending in the face of tensions with China over territorial disputes and Beijing's claim to the nearby self-governing island Taiwan.
"The best way to honor the war dead is never to allow another war," Gushiken says. "I'm worried about Okinawa's situation now. ... I'm afraid there is a growing risk that Okinawa may become a battlefield again."
Island haunted by one of World War II's deadliest battles
On April 1, 1945, U.S. troops landed on Okinawa during their push toward mainland Japan, beginning a battle that lasted until late June and killed about 12,000 Americans and more than 188,000 Japanese, half of them Okinawan civilians. That included students and victims of mass suicides ordered by the Japanese military, historians say.
The fighting ended at Itoman, where Gushiken and other volunteer cave diggers - or "gamahuya" in their native Okinawan language - have found the remains of what are likely hundreds of people.
Gushiken tries to imagine being in the cave during the fighting. Where would he hide? What would he feel? He makes a guess about the age of the victims, whether they died by gunshot or explosion, and puts details about the bones in a small red notebook.
After the war, Okinawa remained under U.S. occupation until 1972, 20 years longer than most of Japan, and it remains host to a major U.S. military presence to this day. As Japan enjoyed a postwar economic rise, Okinawa's economic, educational and social development lagged behind.
Gushiken says when he was a child growing up in Okinawa's capital, Naha, he would go out hunting bugs and find skulls still wearing helmets.
A slow search for remains
Nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, 1.2 million Japanese war dead are still unaccounted for. That's about half of the 2.4 million Japanese, mostly soldiers, who died during Japan's early 20th century wars.
Thousands of unidentified bones have been sitting in storage for years waiting for testing that could help match them with surviving families.
Gushiken says the government's DNA matching efforts have been too little and too slow.
Of the estimated 188,140 Japanese killed in the Battle of Okinawa, most of their remains had been collected and placed in the national cemetery on the island, the health ministry says. Around 1,400 remains found in recent decades sit in storage. The process of identification has been painfully slow.
It was only in 2003 that the Japanese government started DNA matching after requests from the families of the dead, but tests were limited to the remains found with teeth and manmade artifacts that could provide hints to their identities.
In 2016, Japan enacted a law launching a remains recovery initiative to promote more DNA matching and cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense. A lear later, the government expanded the work to civilians and authorized testing on limb bones.
In all, 1,280 remains of Japanese war-dead, including six on Okinawa, have been identified by DNA tests since 2003, the health ministry said. The remains of around 14,000 people are stored in the ministry mortuary for future testing.
Hundreds of American soldiers remain unaccounted for. Their remains, as well as those of the Koreans mobilized by the Japanese during the war, may yet be found, Gushiken says.
Locating and identifying decades-old remains have become increasingly difficult as families and relatives age, memories fade, artifacts and documents get lost, and the remains deteriorate, says Naoki Tezuka, a health ministry official.
"The progress has been slow everywhere," Tezuka said. "Ideally, we hope to not just collect the remains but return them to their families."
The burden of history
Japan is undertaking an accelerating military buildup, sending more troops and weapons to Okinawa and its outer islands. Many here who have bitter memories of the Japanese army's wartime brutality view the current military buildup with wariness.
Washington and Tokyo see the strong U.S. military presence as a crucial bulwark against China and North Korea, but many Okinawans have long complained about noise, pollution, aircraft accidents and crime related to American troops.
Okinawa today is home to more than half of the 50,000 American troops stationed in Japan, with the majority of U.S. military facilities on the small southern island. Tokyo has promised to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps air station that sits in a crowded town after years of friction, but Okinawans remain angry at a plan that would only move it to the island's east coast and may use the soil possibly containing the remains for construction.
Gushiken says the Itoman caves should be protected from development so that younger generations can learn about the war's history, and so searchers like him can complete their work.
Like him, some Okinawans say they fear the lessons of their wartime suffering are being forgotten.
Tomoyuki Kobashigawa's half-sister Michiko was killed soon after she got married. He wants to apply for DNA matching to help find her. "It's so sad ... If she would have lived, we could have been such good siblings."
The missing remains show the government's "lack of remorse over its responsibility in the war," Kobashigawa says. "I'm afraid the Okinawan people will be embroiled in a war again."