So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  The thought is enough to make you tremble as you step off the plane, but if you stop to think about it, this is not the only place on the island where there are bones of Japanese soldiers. After all, 95 percent of the more than twenty thousand Japanese soldiers who fought on Iwo Jima died in the battle. Most of the one thousand or so who survived to become prisoners of war were seriously wounded and were taken care of by the U.S. forces.

  Methodical collecting of the remains has been conducted since 1970, but the remains of more than thirteen thousand men are still lying beneath the earth. No matter where you are, the very act of walking on the island is to walk upon the dead.

  The bones of Kuribayashi himself may be among them. It was then standard practice for the general to commit hara-kiri behind the lines during the final all-out attack that ended in death, but Kuribayashi broke this custom, too, when he led his men himself.

  Impressed by the courage of the enemy general, the Americans tried to find his corpse once the battle was over, but could not since the Japanese had all removed the insignia from their uniforms. Kuribayashi chose the anonymous sleep of death somewhere in the depths of the island—just like the men he commanded.

  IT WAS DECEMBER 2004 when I accompanied the families on their one-day memorial pilgrimage.

  Proper memorial visits for the families of the dead started in the early 1970s. Different commemorative rites are conducted on Iwo Jima, but the organizer of the pilgrimage in which I took part was the Association of Iwo Jima, while a representative from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (the government department with oversight for such matters) came with us, and the Self-Defense Force provided assistance. Battle survivors and families of the dead established the Association of Iwo Jima in 1953, and this nongovernmental group has been diligently collecting the remains of the dead and organizing memorial activities ever since.

  Present-day Iwo Jima has no real inhabitants. There are around 350 people from the Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces permanently stationed there, plus a handful of staff from the Defense Facilities Administration Agency and construction company employees on the island for building projects.

  The population was compulsorily evacuated in the summer of 1944, the year before the Americans invaded, to protect them from the horrors of war, and they were not permitted to return to the island even after it was returned to Japan. It was decided that a permanent settlement would be too difficult to maintain, given that the island has no industry of its own, and that fresh food and most other necessities have to be imported.

  In consequence, there are no private houses on present-day Iwo Jima, nor, aside from a little kiosk inside the Self-Defense Force facility, is there a single shop. Families and people with a special connection to the dead are allowed to visit the island on memorial pilgrimages, and the former inhabitants are allowed to visit family graves. Otherwise ordinary people are technically not permitted to set foot on the place. The whole island really is a military base now.

  The Japanese military ordered that Iwo Jima be defended to the death because it was an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” on the Pacific Ocean. That designation may be even more appropriate now when there is nothing there apart from the airfield and the facilities that go with it.

  After disembarking from the plane, the families climbed into a number of cars and headed to the northeast corner of the island, where the Tenzan Memorial stands.

  The paved road that runs around the island is surrounded by greenery, but maybe because Iwo Jima is a volcanic island where the smell of sulfur always hangs in the air—or maybe because of the strong salt breeze that blows nonstop from the sea—there is none of the luxuriant jungle one associates with South Sea islands, just masses of stunted, shrublike trees.

  The Americans are supposed to have fired so many shells and bombs into the island that the total volume of metal would cover the island in a steel sheet one meter thick. All of the island’s animal and plant life was incinerated, and now the most flourishing plant on the island is the lead tree, a kind of arborescent shrub.

  The lead tree is not indigenous to Iwo Jima. After the Americans had captured the island, they spread great quantities of seeds from airplanes. It is suggested that they deliberately chose a plant that takes root and grows quickly in order to wipe out the stench from the exposed corpses of the Japanese soldiers.

  A memorial service was held on Tenzan, a small hill exposed to the strong winds that blow in from the sea. One after another, the family members walked up to the memorial stone to douse it with water that they had brought with them from their hometowns in canteens or plastic bottles.

  Fifty family members took part. The widows were from their late seventies to their eighties; the youngest of the children of the dead was a woman of fifty-nine who had still been in her mother’s womb when her father went off to war.

  The participants also included people who were not strictly family.

  “My husband died ten years ago. He was transferred from here back to the mainland before the Americans invaded, and right up until he died he was tortured by the fact that he survived while almost all the men under him were killed. My husband always said that he wanted to come here to pay his respects, but was unable to fulfill his wish. That’s why my daughter and I are here today.”

  The wife was seventy-seven years old, the daughter fifty-two. They had brought a photograph of their husband/father with them and they spent a long time in prayer in front of the memorial.

  We then climbed back into the station wagons and microbuses and headed for the interior of the island. In advance, the Association of Iwo Jima had checked the whereabouts on the island of the men who had died based on which part of Japan they came from and the names of their units.

  The family members all asked if they could visit the places where their relatives had died to offer incense and prayer, but time was limited as our return plane was due to leave a little after 4:00 p.m.

  Covered in shrubs and weeds, Iwo Jima appears flat at first glance, but as it is a volcanic island the terrain is extremely uneven. A single misstep can mean a nasty fall—the bunkers themselves are often concealed. In some rocky areas, steam spewing out at high temperatures means that venturing off the paved road is dangerous.

  Even if you knew that the unit to which your husband, father, or brother belonged was stationed just a little way away, getting in closer was forbidden; only paying homage from the roadside or from inside the car was permitted.

  “Please, let me get closer. Thirty seconds is all I need. Let me get out of the car to offer incense.”

  I could hear voices imploring the driver, an older man dressed in a very proper suit despite the beating sun. The voices contained sixty years’ worth of grief—the grief of people who had at long last made it to the place where their relatives had died.

  KURIBAYASHI’S COMMAND BUNKER was situated in the north of the island.

  He chose this place as the site of his final resistance on the assumption that the Americans would work their way up the island from south to north, which was precisely what happened. The bunker is at the extreme tip of the island: to the north there is only the shore running from Onsen Hama to Kita no Hana.

  Surrounded by higher ground, the bunker nestles within a horseshoe-shaped rise. The entrance is visible at the base of the low bluff of light brown rock. You would need to stoop a little to go inside. At the time, of course, it would have been thoroughly camouflaged.

  I peered in, but couldn’t see far into the dark cave; a few rusty steel rods stuck out of the cement still framing the doorway in places. The ground underfoot was slippery and sloped downward, leading to a flight of stairs. After going down them a while, the passageway suddenly grew much smaller. I was walking hunched and with my knees bent but my back was still scraping on the roof. No light from outside reached this far inside, and moving forward without a flashlight was out of the question.

  After I had walked a few meters, the passage made a sharp turn
to the left and led to a small room with a floor area equivalent to about six tatami mats. Sturdily built and reinforced with concrete, this was Kuribayashi’s private room.

  Kuribayashi had commanded from here, right from the start of the softening-up campaign of naval barrages and air raids that preceded the invasion. It was here that he refined his strategy, listened to the reports from the units on different parts of the island, issued his orders, and drafted the reports and telegrams that were sent to the Imperial General Headquarters. There was nothing in the room now and it was bleak and empty, but in those days there must have been a desk for Kuribayashi to work at.

  There is a story that an American soldier armed with a flamethrower penetrated as far as the door of this room when the Americans were bearing down on the Command Center in early March 1945.

  Kuribayashi, however, was so focused on his work that he didn’t notice and just continued poring over the documents on his desk. The sentry quickly unfurled a military-issue blanket to act as a screen between the American soldier and his commander in chief. “Oh, thanks,” said Kuribayashi, rising to his feet and calmly walking farther into the cave. Overawed by this display of nerve, the American soldier turned on his heel and fled.

  The Japanese soldiers recounted this story to one another as an example of Kuribayashi’s courage. It is not clear whether the episode really occurred, but the fact that the story spread by word of mouth in the midst of combat reveals how Kuribayashi was seen by his men: as a splendid commanding officer for whom they were willing to die. The boost such feelings gave them must have gone some way to help them accept the inevitability of death.

  Leaving Kuribayashi’s room and proceeding farther down the passageway I suddenly emerged into a big space. The roof was probably around 3 meters high and had half crumbled away to expose the rock beneath. A natural cave that had been enlarged, it felt more like an enormous cellar than a room; supposedly it was used for strategy meetings.

  Leading off from the cave in all four directions were passages. Niches just big enough for a single person to lie down had been carved into the walls. You can no longer go down these passages—some are impassable and others have been blocked off with iron bars—but they crisscrossed like a veritable maze and were connected to nine separate entrances and exits.

  Kuribayashi’s letters to his family before the American invasion were probably written aboveground rather than down here, but the farewell telegram, the last thing he ever wrote, must have been written here in the Command Center. In the same small and precisely drawn characters and with the same writing paper and pencil that he used for the letters to his family, Kuribayashi composed that telegram here deep underground where the sun could not reach.

  After the guide had left, I stood in the center of Kuribayashi’s private room and turned off my flashlight. Suddenly the air felt thick, and the darkness seemed to press heavily down on me from the roof of the cave. Had Kuribayashi ever left the cave to feel the sun on his skin in the thirty-six days between the American landing and the defeat of the Japanese? It is believed that it was early on March 26 that Kuribayashi led the final all-out attack. Had it still been dark then?

  Even after the Japanese had been defeated and the Americans had occupied the island, many Japanese soldiers continued hiding out in the defenses and waged a guerrilla war against the Americans. Under cover of night, they would strike at American defenses or forage for food and water. In the daylight hours, they would hide underground, so they were not exposed to the sun for many days, even months.

  Survivors told me how, their minds blurred and their bodies no more than skin and bone, as food and water started to run out, they would suddenly get the urge to see the sun before they died, even though it meant that they would be captured as they crawled out of their shelters and so become prisoners of war. Many, however, were trapped belowground and either suffocated or starved to death after the Americans blasted the entrances of the caves they were in.

  If you go deep into one of the caves, it doesn’t take long before the oppressive darkness and the heavy, stagnant air make you feel panicky.

  I remembered the telegram sent by Rear Admiral Ichimaru Ri-nosuke, commander of the navy forces: “The enemy are aboveground and friendly troops belowground: that is what is unusual about the battle on Iwo Jima.” And once again I felt keenly just how pitiless a strategy Kuribayashi had chosen.

  NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY underground bunkers were built on Iwo Jima: the number is thought to exceed one thousand, with some historians putting the figure as high as five thousand. Many of the bunkers still remain undiscovered—along with the bones inside them. During the battle, and directly after the capture of the island, the Americans blasted shut the cave entrances or buried entire positions with bulldozers. By the time Iwo Jima was returned to the Japanese it was therefore difficult to pinpoint where things were, and the search is now further complicated by the vegetation that covers the island.

  When they started collecting the remains of the dead, the survivors relied partly on memory to find the bunkers in which they had hidden, and partly on the meager extant documentation. The present method involves hacking out a path through the branches of the lead trees and the creeping plants entwined around them, and crawling on hands and knees to find the bunker entrances. Sometimes bulldozers are used to push the upper layer of earth aside and dig out the bunker below. Occasionally, if they find one of the blasting fuses the Americans used to pay out when blowing the bunkers shut, they can follow these until they find the bunker entrance.

  The bunkers themselves are often half full of earth. This earth is carefully extracted and sieved to check for remains. Sometimes the dead are almost perfectly preserved.

  On the pilgrimage I went on, there was a man who had been orphaned in the war and was visiting the island for the third time. His name was Yamagiwa Yoshikazu, and he and his wife had traveled from Oita Prefecture. His father had died on Iwo Jima. Called up at the age of thirty-nine, he had three children, of whom Yamagiwa, then at elementary school, was the eldest. His widowed mother went through great hardship after the war bringing up three children all by herself, he told me.

  In 1984, Yamagiwa had taken part in a visit to collect the remains of the dead. This was in the early days when the practice of families going out and gathering first began in earnest. In the course of about four weeks, they collected the remains of 135 people.

  “The caves had been sealed tightly shut for forty years, so there was no oxygen in them. The first thing we did was use a machine to pump in oxygen. Then we roped ourselves up and were lowered down, dangling from the surface. The first cave I went into was 20 meters deep.”

  No one is allowed to work inside a cave for more than twenty minutes, Yamagiwa told me, as there are places where the temperature can be as high as 176 degrees Fahrenheit—not to mention the danger of being poisoned by sulfur gas.

  Sometimes they could see the bones of the dead, but extreme heat or lack of oxygen prevented them from collecting them, and the sense of guilt made them weep long and hard. The families do not distinguish between the bones of relations and nonrelations. For them, everyone is equal.

  When he first started, Yamagiwa told me that he used to wear army-issue cotton gloves for the work, but it was not long before he began to pick up the bones with his bare hands.

  “If you’ve got army-issue cotton gloves on, any bones you pick up stick to your hands.”

  The bones of someone who has been cremated are smooth, but the bones of a corpse that’s been abandoned and has gone through the process of natural decay are sticky. That is the reason the bones stick fast to gloves. For Yamagiwa, it felt as though the bones were stubbornly refusing to let go of the hand of the person who had at long last come from the homeland to collect them.

  Yamagiwa explained to me that there are white bones and black bones in the caves. The white bones belong either to men who were killed by bombs and bullets, or to those who got progressively weaker and die
d. The black bones belong to the men who were burned to death by flamethrowers.

  Contemporary newsreels and photographs convey the awesome power of the American flamethrowers, which were able to turn a broad swath of ground into a sea of fire. The Americans also poured a mixture of gasoline and seawater into the bunkers, lit it, and roasted the soldiers within to death.

  On the beach at the northern tip of the island, Yamagiwa and the rest of the group cremated the 135 sets of remains they had collected.

  “They died out here so far to the south. We thought that cremating them even that much closer to the homeland was the least we could do.”

  All of the participants had watched the fire burn throughout the night. Any bones that were left were placed in plain wood boxes and taken back to the homeland, while the remaining ashes were carefully hand-collected before being scattered into the sea.

  “We tried to find a current that was flowing to the north for them. We stood on the beach for a long time, all of us shouting: ‘Go on now. Go on back to your homeland.’ ”

  AFTER VISITING SEVERAL PLACES where engagements had occurred and a number of bunkers, we headed for Mount Suribachi, on the southern tip of the island. The road that leads to the summit follows the path the Americans took when they climbed up, clearing the way with their flamethrowers.

  Mount Suribachi stands only 169 meters above sea level, but since there are no other mountains or uplands, you can take in the entire island from its summit. I use the word “summit,” but as the mountain is a dormant volcano I’m actually talking about the lip of the north side of the deep crater, an area only about the size of a soccer pitch.