Limbs Amputated Without Anesthetic
As fighting got heavier, the Internal Medicine Unit was abolished and it was renamed Second Surgery Unit. Our job was to hold down the arms and legs to be amputated. For pain-killing, a patient was given just a sniff of ether. I pressed down the arm of a patient the doctor was going to cut off, and encouraged him to endure. That was really frightening. The amputated hand was still holding my hand.
“Akisamiyo!” I shouted, and desperately tore it off my hand. Those arms and legs were still warm even after being cut off, and we would wrap then in rags and hurriedly throw them into waste containers.
For an operation on the shoulder, a solider was told to sit in a chair. He was a sergeant, and he’d been shot through his shoulder. He was operated on without any anesthesia. His muscles were cut about 3 centimeters deeps and 10 centimeters long with a special pair of scissors, in about 10 cuts. He didn’t scream, but he was sweating on his face. I tried to hold his hand but he wouldn’t let me and instead held his own breath to bear it. I bet it hurt him to death.
-Hisa Kishimoto (now Hisa Tsuhako), then 17 years old
First Year, Regular Course, Normal School
Assigned to Second Surgery Unit
Obtained from the Himeyuri Peace Museum (Personal Communications, April 18,2016)
My Classmates Died One After Another
Before I knew it, I was lying in the innermost section of the cave they called No.2 Cave. Perhaps they’d brought me there after I got wounded. Anyway, when I came to it the noise and confusion after the order was issued to demobolize the student nurse corps, I found myself laying there. Next to me were Kiyoki Ishikawa, Haruko Hamamoto, Yoshi Chinen, Sachiko Kadena, Yoshi Higa, Katsuko Higa and Sadako Teruya. Hiroko Uezu, who was suffering from a severe case of beriberi and couldn’t walk, was there too.
Chinen-san clung to soldiers and nurses, imploring them to take her with the, “Please, take me with you.” she begged repeatedly, but she became quiet after everybody went out. She seemed to be affected by brain fever already.
Since all of us left behind were in serious condition, we were just laying there silent in the dark cave. I don’t remember how many days had passed since the others left the cave. The only sound you heard in the dark, empty cave was the occasional groaning of the wounded. Soon I no longer heard Chinen-san’s voice. So I thought she had finally died. Both Kanada-san and Ishikawa-san died after that.
It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. So when you no longer heard someone’s voice, you knew she was dead. One voice after another disappeared. First, Chinen-san, then Hamamoto-san, Ishikawa-san, Kanda-san and Higa (Yoshiko)-san. Of course I couldn’t tell exactly who died and when they died. Because Hamamoto-san and Chinen-san had been wounded in the face and couldn’t speak, I didn’t know when they died.
It was summer. So the odor of rotting flesh was unbearable. I said to soldiers laying around me, “Couldn’t you do something about these dead people?” But they wouldn’t do anything. It was pitch dark inside and I couldn’t tel whether the soldiers themselves could actually move or not. Perhaps they were also seriously wounded and couldn’t move. Nobody would help us, so Uezu-san and I tried to remove the corpses. But Uezu-san had beriberi and I had been wounded in my leg, so we couldn’t do anything, no matter how hard we tried. Perhaps the soldier felt he couldn’t just lie there and let us do the whole thing, so he helped us drag the bodies toward the entrance, we now could see out dead friends’ faces. Their faces were literally covered black with flies.
We felt sorry for them so we covered their faces with handkerchiefs, but the widn blew them away. Since we couldn’t move around very much ourselves, we just let them lie there without any cover.
(Yoshi) Higa-san, who had been wounded in the abdomen said to me one day “If you survive, please tell my mother in Yomitan I was here and died in this cave.” But she soon disappeared. I didn’t know when, but I suppose she couldn’t stand the pain and crawled out somewhere. (Katsuko) Higa-san had a big wound on her [t]high, and Teruya-san also had injuries on her leg, but they’d somehow managed to crawl out of the cave and disappear. The day Ishikawa-san died, we heard an American Nisei soldier call out to us from the entrance, yelling “Detekoi. Detekoi. Come out, come out!” The soldiers went out to surrender but Uezu-san and I were so scared we fled further into the cave called No.3 Cave that branched out from the main chamber.
We were terribly afraid the Americans might hurl a gas bomb (grenade) but we held on. When the evening came, we groped our way to the entrance, stumbling over bodies in the darkness. At the entrance, we found a seriously wounded soldier lying there, gasping for breath and about to die. Pitiful it was really, but there was nothing we could do for him. Both of us had been sleeping for days in the depth of the cave and hadn’t eaten anything.
We returned to where we’d been hiding.
-Setsuko Ishikawa (now Setsuko Iha), then 16 years old
Second Year, Preparatory Course, Normal School
Assigned to Itokazu Detachment Hospital
Obtained from the Himeyuri Peace Museum (Personal Communications, April 18,2016)
I Could Hear Maggots Eating Rotting Flesh
“We are going to launch a sneak attack on the enemy,” declared our teacher, Mr. Arakaki. “We must kill as many of the enemy as possible.” And he asked each of us third-year students sitting in a circle, “Would you come with me or not?”
Each of us had a hand grenade, so we all said yes. He instructed us to prepare for the attack. He said we would go out after sunset the next day. But at the dawn of June 19th, all of a sudden, there were people talking near the entrance of our cave.
“The enemy is here!” someone said.
The cave was dead quiet. We cringed, held our breath, and waited. Moments passed in a terrifying silence. I hid my face behind the back of my classmate, and at that very moment, something was thrown into the cave. It hit a rock and exploded in bluish sparks. A soldier in front of me had shining sparks all over his coat.
“White phosphorus! Take off the coat. You’ll get burnt to the skin” somebody shouted.
The soldier hurriedly took off the coat and threw it away, and then a second bomb was thrown in, and a bluish firework it spread all over the place. For the third time, there was a big clang and a metal canister rolled into the cave, spewing out white smoke. In a moment, the cave was filled with thick smoke and I couldn’t see anything.
“Gas!” a soldier shouted. The word threw the cave into utter confusion.
“Wet your handkerchief with water from the canteen and mask your face with it,” instructed someone, and many people desperately scrambled for a single canteen. But as I was gasping for breath, I left the group, trying to grope my way out. Suddenly someone cried “Tsune-chan!” and clutched my foot. I struggled to get myself free, but my arms and feet were getting numb, and my whole body seemed to be losing its senses.
In my hazy consciousness, I heard Kochinda-sensei singing and my classmates calling each other and their parents for help. I heard them shouting as if in a dream and I fell down. That’s as far as I can remember.
I don’t know how many days had passed since then. I felt something warm on my cheeks and I came to my senses. I felt as though I had awaken from a deep, sound sleep. There was a shaft of sunlight streaming into the cave, and it was utterly silent inside. I think I was just lying there dazed for many hours. But when I became conscious, I noticed many bodies lying to my left and to my right. At my feet a Womens’ Normal School student was sitting completely dazed like a soulless person. I tried to to say something to her, but my throat was sore and I couldn’t speak. When I gestured to her for water, she gathered water drops falling from the ceiling with a piece of cotton and squeezed water out of it into my mouth, and so I could finally speak. Somehow I managed to raise my body and sit. Now I tried to raise myself on my feet and walk, but I couldn’t. My whole body ached. I found a big bruise swollen black on my left thigh. Perhaps I got this injury when I lost my consciousness and fell down.
I picked my way through piles of bodies, dragged my sore foot and supporting myself with my arms, to where some survivors were gathered. The survivors included three of my classmates and a wounded soldier. The bodies were black and swollen and they were covered with swarms of large, wriggling maggots. The stench of rotting flesh was unbearable. At night, when it was quiet, I could actually hear the maggots wriggling out of the bodies.
In the darkness of night, the bodies sometimes emitted a strange sound, a kind of sound you hear when something is simmering in a pot.
-Tsuneko Kinjo (now Tsuneko Shiroma), then 15 years old
Third Year, First Girls’ High School
Assigned to Ichinichibashi Detachment
Obtained from the Himeyuri Peace Museum (Personal Communications, April 18,2016)
Executed as a Spy
It was around midnight. There were many people, civilians and soldiers, hiding in the pandanus grove, but nobody made any sound. All of a sudden, I heard a young woman screaming, “Father, Father!”
I asked a soldier next to me about what was going on. He told me that a soldier had overheard the women’s father talking about the deployment of the Japanese troops, so the soldiers caught him as a spy and was taking him away for execution on charges of leaking classified military information. I heard some people hustling away somebody, and the young woman was screaming, “Father, Father!” I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear voices and the noise. From what I heard, I gathered that the man was being executed. By then, the Japanese forces had been completely routed by the enemy and there was little discipline among them, but they carried out such executions.
“Never talk about the military. Absolutely no!” we two whispered to each other and we never said a word about the military. Everybody else also kept their mouths shut. Indeed, it was a terribly frightening time for us. Two weeks we spent in that cave at Kyan Point seemed terribly long and were filled with many painful experiences, At night the only sound we heard was the monotonous sound of the waves and that nearly drove me out of my mind. And I was so lonely that the only hope I had was to see my family before I died.
About that time, there was this seriously wounded soldier who’d somehow managed to come to Kyan. “I’m wounded like this and can’t even walk any more and I can’t go out to look for food. I want to die but I don’t have the guts to kill myself, so please kill me,” he was saying to his fellow soldiers. I later heard that one of the soldiers shot him in the temple and put him to rest. Days later, winds carried the sickening odor of rotting flesh to us. The soldier’s body was rotting out there, I thought, and the thought made me feel miserable.
And there was an old couple. The old man died, and the old woman wouldn’t leave him, saying she wanted to die beside him. Really pitiful it was.
There were countless corpses lying around at Kyan Point, and the Americans were burning them with flame throwers.
-Hiroko Ginoza (now Hiroko Shinzato), then 16 years old
Fourth Year, First Girls’ High School
Assigned to Tama Unit Accounting Office
Obtained from the Himeyuri Peace Museum (Personal Communications, April 18,2016)
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