Havelock News May 12, 2010
Noting changes on Okinawa
By Barry Fetzer
It is 3 o’clock in the morning as I type this column. I am suffering from jet lag incumbent in traveling the 8,000 miles in 30 hours from Okinawa, Japan, back home to eastern North Carolina.
I was in Okinawa on business for two weeks and had just gotten fully accustomed to the 13-hour/one-day-ahead time difference in Okinawa when it was time to come home. It will take me about two weeks to fully acclimate to eastern daylight time.
It goes without saying that my "suffering" (as I put it) from jet lag is nothing compared to the suffering of Okinawa’s recent past. As it turned out, I was in Okinawa exactly 65 years to the month — a matter of nearly three generations — since an epic World War II battle raged there, a battle that virtually destroyed the small island.
Yet, due to the industry of the Okinawan people, their desire to forget the horror, and (likely) the desire of the Japanese to bury the atrocities they inflicted, unless one searches intently for it on the small island of Okinawa itself, evidence of the battle is scant … even nonexistent.
Moreover, after three generations, unless we make an effort to remember, even memories of the battle become scarce. Then doomed we are to bear similar horrors that the Battle of Okinawa represents.
The Battle of Okinawa had the most casualties of any single battle in World War II. It was a "typhoon of steel" in April through June of 1945 that killed 100,000 Japanese soldiers and 100,000 civilians.
Total American casualties in the battle numbered more than 12,000 killed, including nearly 5,000 sailors and almost 8,000 Marines and soldiers. More than 36,000 Americans were wounded.
It is estimated that about one-quarter of the civilian population died.
Although the battle was horrific, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August just a few weeks after the island was declared secure in July superseded news of the battle, one of the last major engagements of World War II. In fact, it was the horror of the Battle of Okinawa and the fanatical defense of their homeland (the Japanese then and now consider Okinawa a part of their homeland) that some historians believe convinced President Harry Truman to use the atomic bomb on Japan instead of executing the planned assault of the Japanese mainland.
Merely fanatical? Some would say the Japanese defense of their homeland was maniacle … desparate. In the nearly three-month long battle, the Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of Allied ships. Land-based motorboats were also used in Japanese suicide attacks.
Even its largest battleship, the Yamato, was ordered to Okinawa on a one-way "suicide" mission. Before it could beach itself on Okinawa as ordered and use its world’s largest 18-inch main batteries as shore defense weapons, it was sunk by American carrier air forces in April, losing an estimated 3,055 of her 3,332-man crew.
Today, lush, green hills jut beautifully from densely populated cities in the southern part of the island, the region of most of the fighting. One may eat Okinawan Soba (thick, piping hot noodle soup garnished with a thick slice of pork and seaweed eaten with chopsticks — a traditional Okinawan dish) in a different restaurant every day of the year and still not visit every soba-serving restaurant here.
At one of the many restaurants I visited during my two-week stay, I ate donburi (a pork cutlet on a bed of rice in a bowl mixed with donburi sauce, greens, onions and egg and served with barley tea). I paid for dinner at a machine, receiving a ticket that I presented to the waitress. She then delivered the homemade dinner to the table at which I sat cross-legged on a tatami mat.
It was a funny mix of the modern (machines you pay to get dinner) and the very traditional (the waitress politely bows as she takes off her sandals to kneel on the tatami mat to serve dinner.)
Sixty-five years ago, it was a far different scene than the polite, bowing, mechanized, tropical paradise I experienced last week on Okinawa. According to the defense website Globalsecurity.org, by the end of May 1945, "… monsoon rains, which turned contested slopes and roads into a morass, exacerbated (the battle’s horror). Troops lived on a field sodden by rain, part garbage dump and part graveyard. Unburied Japanese bodies decayed, sank in the mud, and became part of a noxious stew. Sliding down the greasy slopes, troops could easily find their pockets full of maggots at the end of their journey."
It’s no wonder we tend to forget — and then repeat — history.
In 2010, the maggots are nowhere to be seen. Today, palm trees sway in the sweet, ocean breezes on those greasy killing grounds.
Eating donburi on the same ground dyed red by the blood of Japanese and American alike in 1945, it became apparent to me that fact is, in fact, stranger than fiction.
In a matter of only three generations, once mortal enemies fighting to the death on a hellish island swept bare by a typhoon of steel may now dine together in a cosmopolitan, tropical paradise.
© Copyright 2010, Freedom Communications, Inc.
