Now They Call it “Group Suicide”
The American forces landed in Tokashiki Island on March 27th, 1945. We islanders were told by the Japanese forces to gather near a military camp, a place called Onnagawara. From my hamlet, Aharen, to that camp was roughly seven kilometers. A momentous decision had to be made before we started. We had caves for our shelters where we had already determined that we were going to die. Everybody knew that if we all gathered together in one spot the possibility of being discovered by the enemy would be that much greater. It was much safer to huddle in our own shelters, scattered around the island. Despite that, all the residents went to a dangerous place. That provides that an order from the military was in force.
A week prior to the “group suicide,” a sergeant gave out two hand grenades each to the village youth organizations and to the young people of the island office at an emergency meeting. They were directed to throw one at the enemy and use the other to engage in gyokusai*. The military-affairs clerk of the village testified afterwards that this was so. It meant that the soldiers and the civilians were to fight as one united body and expend their last efforts together. In short, what was planned was a gyokusai of everyone on the island. It’s often been argued that the military never actually issued orders to commit suicide, but that’s beside the point. You have to grasp here the relationship between the military and the residence as a whole or you’ll never understand what happened.
On the twenty-eighth, the American and Japanese forces squared off against each other. It was touch-and-go. The Americans seemed poised to descend on us at any moment. Residence from all the hamlets, about a thousand people in all, had gathered in that one place under the supervision of the village mayor. Women told their children there was no path for them other than death. Weeping, crying people swore that they were going to die together. Women arranged their hair neatly and prepared themselves for their own deaths. This scene remains vividly impressed on my mind. We were told we were to await orders from the military. Hours passed. Then orders seemed to have been issued. Hand grenades were distributed, and began to be used. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the number that actually exploded was very small. At this point, we were spotted by the U.S. forces. I think an air attack came first, then mortars.
The concussions knocked me half-insensate. I guess the killing had already started. I sat there quietly for a while. a strange scene began to unfold right in front of me. One of the village leaders, a middle-aged man, snapped off a sapling. I gazed at him, wondering what he was doing. Once he had that stick in his hands, he turned into a madman. Striking his wife and children over and over again, bludgeoning then to death. That was the beginning of the tragedy I saw.
As if by chain reaction, it spread from one family to the next. We all must die that way. Everyone seemed to think so. People began to raise their hands against their loved ones. I had just turned sixteen. I was with my brother, two years older than me, my mother, my younger brother, and my little sister. Five of us in all. My father had gotten separated from us on our way. He had poor night vision.
My memory tells me the first one we laid our hands on was Mother. Those who had blades, or scythes, cut their wrists or severed arteries on their necks. But we didn’t do it that way. We might have used a string. When we raised our hands against the mother who bore us, we wailed in our grief. I remember that. In the end we must have used stones. To the head. We took care of Mother that way. Then my brother and I turned against our younger brother and younger sister. Hell engulfed us there.
I don’t know how much time passed. My brother and I talked about which of us would die first. A boy about our age ran up to us. We truly believed that we were the last survivors on the island. He said if we’re going to die anyway, let’s at least kill one enemy. We knew that if we were captured we’d be chopped to pieces. They’d cut off our noses, our ears, chop off our fingers, and then run over our bodies with their tanks. Women would be raped. That’s why we were committing suicide, to avoid capture by the enemy. We determined we would choose a way of dying appropriate for subjects of the Emperor. There were some girls there too, sixth-graders. We tried to chase them away. We told them it was impossible for girls to come with us, but they followed anyway. We left the site of the group suicide, where the bodies of the victims lay piled on one another, and their blood was coloring the streams red.
We didn’t know where the enemy was. We carried sticks with which we would charge into them. We simply walked where our feet took us. The first people we encountered were Japanese soldiers. You can’t begin to imagine what a shock that was to us. Are the soldiers still alive? Ordinarily, they might have given us a sense of security, but what we felt now was anger and distrust, boiling up in us. Could it be possible that we, alone, had gone through this horror? Our sense of unity with the military-that we would be forever tied together in death, which had reached its peak in those deaths-dissolved completely afterwards. Now, the Japanese more than the Americans became the object of our fears. Those residents still alive were forbidden to go where they might come in contact with the Americans. We were forced to live in one small area, clustered together. This brought up the problem of food. In order to live I drank from the streams colored with blood. It remained that color for days.
I was later to learn that an order was issued to execute all remaining residents of Aharen because they had moved back to their hamlet without permission of the army. These were survivors of the group suicide. One hundred twenty-four of about some three hundred from my hamlet of Aharen survived the suicide. In the end, no executions were carried out, and all of us survivors were captured by American forces.
On my island, the military never engaged in combat and survived virtually intact. Only the residents engaged in gyokusai. Even members of the special-attack boat unit, the security of which had raised such concern, retreated into the mountains when there was no opportunity to attack. The residents committed suicide quite early, gathered in one place as if they were mice in a sack. On other isolated islands, where there were no soldiers, there were no group suicides.
For Okinawans, August 15, 1945 meant liberation from the Battle of Okinawa. For me, it was supposed to be a liberation from the nightmare of group suicide, but it didn’t work out that way.
The coming of peace meant a return to a normal mentality from an abnormal psychological state. But the more I recovered my normal mind, the more strongly the abnormal came back to me. I began to experience indescribable internal torment. I was still a child, remember. I didn’t have the mental strength to criticize the state ideology or really think about what group suicide was. All I had were doubts about why my family-my mother, my brother, my sister-had had to meet such violent deaths. All I had was a deep despair. By good fortune I had an encounter with a Christian. At first, I was attracted to Christianity out of desire to forget my horror. Eventually, though, I came to believe that, as a Christian, I shouldn’t forget. Survivors must testify. But it took me more than twenty years before I could speak in public about group suicide. Most of the islanders still would prefer to forget. I understand their pain.
-Kinjo Shigeaki
*gyokusai is a term that was used by the Japanese military that meant people willing gave up their lives for their country rather than be captured by the enemy.
This testimony is from Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook’s book Japan at War: An Oral History. It can be found on pages 363-366.
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