Ie Island: A Battered Island
Mr. Seitoku Shimabukuro
Birth year：1937
Birth place：Ie Village
Ie Island before the war Intensified
During the Battle of Okinawa, I was seven years old and a first-year student in elementary school. I don’t have a clear memory of sitting at my school desk and studying after entering elementary school. I only remember having drills where we evacuated to air-raid shelters, observing various soldier training sessions, and taking part in small operations and support activities, things of that sort. That was 1944, the year of the October 10th Air Raids. Just before the war began, many people were sent from the main island of Okinawa to Ie Island to join the Ie Island Airfield Construction Support Squad. Horses and horse wagons were brought to the island as well. From the towns of Nakijin and Motobu, which were close to Ie Island, all the horses and horse wagons in the towns were brought to Ie Island. Support squads also came from the south-central part of the main island of Okinawa. A person who joined the support squad from Nakijin began living in our house for a time. And when my family was later evacuated to Nakijin, that same person generously hosted us.
Evacuation to Nakijin Village
After the October 10th Air Raids, under the order of the army, we boarded an army landing craft, leaving from the east coast of Ie Island where a beach is currently located. We crossed the sea in the middle of the night and traveled to Hamasaki in Motobu. From Motobu, we then walked to Nakijin. We ended up arriving in Nakijin around six o’clock in the morning and I didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole time. I was seven years old so I could carry my own luggage as I walked, but my brother was only two years old at the time. He kept up walking with the adults, doing so with a small bottle around his neck full of hot water. When he cried along the way, we took a 30 minute break, and then started walking again. Our move took longer than other families, with my mother and father unable to carry my brother on their back as they were already carrying as much as they could manage. Prior to the war, my father had lost the lower part of his right arm. Because he was unable to use that arm, he was able to evacuate, instead of remaining on Ie Island. Thanks to that, his life was saved. We evacuated to Yonamine in Nakijin. We were there for a number of days, but ultimately didn’t stay for long. We woke up early in the morning to evacuate to Gogayama and returned to Yonamine after sunset. We repeated this every day. What left the biggest impression on me is that there was a large gajumaru (banyan) tree outside the house we evacuated to. When I climbed the tree and looked toward Ie Island, I saw that it was burning bright red each day. As a child, when I saw that, I figured my own house was probably burning. I figured the other houses in the neighborhood were burning as well, and wondered how many houses were left standing. Those kinds of thoughts about my homeland grew stronger. That made a lasting impression on me.
Becoming a prisoner of war & internment in Nago
On the day I was taken prisoner, as there were no notices, we were told we could stay home, so I didn’t evacuate to the mountains and I was relaxing at home. Then, around noon, an order was given to immediately evacuate to the coast instead of the mountains because the US military had landed, and everyone fled to the coast in a hurry. We hid in a sago palm forest on the coast. We were all taken prisoners by the U.S. forces there, and we were taken to the Ourazaki camp in Nago. After spending a month or two there in temporary residence, we were moved to the village of Kushi (currently Kushi, Nago), where the islanders were put in a facility by the U.S. forces. I lived in that refugee camp for about two years. Around 2,000 to 3,000 people were interned at that time.
Where the people of Ie Island were interned
The roughly 2,000 Ie Islanders who remained on the island and taken prisoner were interned on the Kerama Islands. After several months, the islanders detained on the Kerama islands were split up into those who would be detained at the Kushi camp, and others who would be taken to the Motobu camp. During my two years of being interned in Kushi, an administration formed and the Ie Village public office was established in Kushi. While interned at Kushi, there was a fire there. The place where I was living burned down, and I fled with nothing but the clothes on my back. In any case, life at the camp was difficult.
Food shortages
The hardest part was the food shortages. If anyone tried to take even a few sweet potatoes from the fields, they would soon be caught. There were many people watching over the fields. You couldn’t take kazura (sweet potato leaves) from the fields either. I was glared at just for walking down the footpath between the rice fields. So we would take whatever grasses that were growing along the road that seemed edible, and ate them. Sometimes I had to make it through three days on one box of rations provided by the U.S. forces. My mother and younger brother were on the verge of dying of malnutrition. I went to catch frogs with my father for us to eat. But even if we caught 40 or 50 in a day, it still wasn’t enough for a single meal. Everything but the edible parts, like thighs, simply had to be thrown away, so you wouldn’t be able to get your nourishment on frogs alone. An elderly woman told me to catch the yabo (mice) living in the house. She told me to catch them for my family to eat. They would be under the firewood and out in the grass and bushes, so you could quickly catch a number of them with just your bare hands. There were a lot of large yabo too. I caught enough to fill about half of a kamasu (jute bag), and the woman who told me about the yabo cooked it for us. I gave some of the yabo to the woman, and enjoyed eating it. That’s how we managed to survive.
Returning to Ie Island and reconstruction
In March 1947, after two years, we were able to return to Ie Island. The people of the island were all delighted to be able to return. Aboard the ship bound for the island, everyone was on the way home with big dreams in their hearts. However, as soon as I landed and took one step what I saw was not the place I used to live. In fact, not a single house or tree remained. Instead, what I saw there were U.S. army vehicles. I saw them coming and going in an open area lined with coral (limestone). That’s all I saw. It felt like some kind of optical illusion, as if it wasn’t our island. It was like I had arrived at a U.S. military base somewhere. I’ve also heard much about how some people were so shocked that they couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t even tell where my house had been. To the east of the present-day Ie Elementary School, there were Quonset huts (semi-cylindrical army barracks) and tents put up by the U.S. army. There, everyone had to start living together again. That cohabitation life lasted for almost a year. I searched for the land my old home was on, but none of the buildings were left. Not even a single pigsty remained. The first thing we did after returning home was build simple huts. To do this, we first had to clean up the land where houses had once stood. It would have been better if the houses had just burned down, but our house had been bulldozed by tanks or heavy machinery. Perhaps a few roof tiles remained. While searching through crushed houses for tiles and other things that we might reuse, we found things like human skulls and skeletons, and other corps, and even habu snakes. But back then, people weren’t afraid of the habus. We didn’t even try to kill them. We just wanted to clear the area as quickly as possible and build houses there. We found dead or partly burned gajumaru (banyan) or fukugi trees and we cut them down and used them to build simple huts. Thousands of people died in the war, from such a small island. There were also food shortages after the war. If you searched the fields, you’d find kazura (sweet potato leaves) growing all over. When we pushed the leaves away and began digging using a wooden stick, thinking that there might be large sweet potatoes underneath, what we found were human skulls and such. The kazura were able to flourish thanks to the nutrients provided by the corpses of those killed in the war. We would place ten oil drums in a row and place human remains in them. In villages near this bone collection site, people would just take the remains there by themselves. For faraway villages, as there were no vehicles or horse wagons, the remains were just left behind, and a person from the village office would come collect them later. A few months before all the islanders returned to the island, about 100 youth were gathered and dispatched as part of the advance party to clean up the island. I later heard that the only work they did was gathering up human remains, and how they couldn’t get anything else done.
The LCT explosion
When I was 11 years old, during summer vacation for my fifth year in elementary school, I went to Motobu with my father and returned by ship. We were planning to stay overnight at Motobu, but it was changed to a day trip, so I boarded the ship with my stomach empty as I hadn’t eaten. The ship arrived at Ie Island. As I was about to eat my boxed lunch, multiple U.S. military trucks carrying bombs were driving around, kicking up dust there at the pier, so I decided I wouldn’t be able to eat there. I was also thirsty, so I took my boxed lunch and went to drink water from the kitchen in the house closest to the port, using a ladle. Right at that very moment, there was a tremendous explosion, one that seemed like it would burst my ears. My surroundings turned pitch black. After a while, things brightened up again, and when I looked around me, I saw people racing in all directions. I heard people screaming. It was a really terrible situation. Amid all that, I just ran home. When I got home my mother was extremely surprised to see me. She asked me why we had returned that same day, and I told her about the situation. She asked me what had happened to my father. I said that I didn’t know. I actually didn’t know if he was safe. I noticed that I was still holding the ladle I’d used to drink the water. I was so scared that I couldn’t let it go. My mother unwound my fingers from the ladle. She asked me where I’d drunk the water. But I couldn’t remember anything. She thought that my father was dead. Before I’d gotten home, she’d been told that all passengers on the ferry had died there together. The ferry had come back, and her son was here safe, but his father nowhere to be seen. She was certain that her husband had died, then. She immediately asked her relatives to go look for him, and we all returned to the port to search for my father. The sight there was… How can I put this. The beach there, which usually was shining beautifully with white sand under the sunshine, had turned completely black. An LCT (landing craft tank) and bomb fragments were scattered about, and everyone was in a state of panic. It was a living hell. You could tell that there were human corpses but you couldn’t tell whose they were or anything else. My father had lost his right hand in a prewar accident. Among the five or six relatives was my aunt (my father’s older sister). As she peered over, she saw that one of the corpses was missing its right hand. As it seemed that the hand was not lost from by the explosion, but had already been missing, she noted that it was the same as her brother, and said that the corpse had to be him. Thinking my father was dead, all of my relatives wept. It hadn’t yet truly hit me that my father had died. I just stood there in a daze. After a bit, I heard a loud cry from behind me,“Seitoku! You’re alive!” When I looked back to see who had shouted, it was my father. My father, whom I thought was dead, was alive. It was like a dramatic twist in a play. But my father’s cousin, who had been on the same ship, actually did die there. The day following the explosion was awful. There were still many corpses strewn about, and more were washing up from the sea. None of the bodies could even be identified. The young men’s association and the fire brigade were all mobilized at once to search for bodies and to clean up. And alongside them were people who were calling out the names of family members who were supposed to return but had yet to do so. It was like hell, even the day after the explosion.
Ie Island’s history of suffering
In any case, during the war the people of Ie Island were badly hurt. They overcame hardships in the internment camps and refugee life. They didn’t have the time or leeway to allow their mental and physical fatigue to heal. And there, with their bodies and spirits already completely exhausted, they got back on their feet, telling themselves to stay strong, pick themselves up from the rubble and worked ceaselessly to survive. It was at such a time when the explosion occurred. This was the explosion of the LCT U.S. military ship carrying bombs. Just when we were starting to believe that we could survive through hard efforts, and were gradually regaining our dreams and our ability to smile, that tragic incident occurred, pouring salt over all our wounds. After that, there were many people, particularly those who had lost family members in the explosion, who had lost their will to live and all hope for life. That’s how it was. Still, we had to keep on living. We felt like we had to do something every day to get our lives back together, so we pulled ourselves to our feet. In 1953, only five years after the explosion, the residents of in Maja village were ordered to leave to make way for the construction of a shooting range for the U.S. military. All the members of “Tochi wo Mamoru Kai” (Association for the Protection of Land) with Mr. Shoko Ahagon at the center of it, held a “beggar’s march” across Okinawa, opposing the confiscation of land by the U.S. military. After this, they also went on a hunger strike, but despite how hard they campaigned against it, they were ultimately forcibly evicted by the U.S. military. A year or two later, U.S. military shooting exercises began, inflicting suffering on the villages of Maja and Nishizaki.
A message for young people
The history of Ie Island during and after the war is full of wounds. Villagers have endured a painful history full of wounds. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the military base issues in Ie village. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the LCT explosion. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the refugee camp issues. These are all the actual experiences of the people of the island, who witnessed a living hell. When looking back on the history of Ie Island, I want these ideas, the history, the truth of what took place there to be thoroughly conveyed to the young generations, and the young people who will lead the next generation. I also want people to find a way to live on and make efforts to forge a life here, despite the fact that this is a remote island.
Mr. Seitoku Shimabukuro worked for the Ie Village public office, and was involved in the administration of Ie Village for many years. He served as mayor for 16 years from 1989 to 2005.
Ie Island before the war Intensified
During the Battle of Okinawa, I was seven years old and a first-year student in elementary school. I don’t have a clear memory of sitting at my school desk and studying after entering elementary school. I only remember having drills where we evacuated to air-raid shelters, observing various soldier training sessions, and taking part in small operations and support activities, things of that sort. That was 1944, the year of the October 10th Air Raids. Just before the war began, many people were sent from the main island of Okinawa to Ie Island to join the Ie Island Airfield Construction Support Squad. Horses and horse wagons were brought to the island as well. From the towns of Nakijin and Motobu, which were close to Ie Island, all the horses and horse wagons in the towns were brought to Ie Island. Support squads also came from the south-central part of the main island of Okinawa. A person who joined the support squad from Nakijin began living in our house for a time. And when my family was later evacuated to Nakijin, that same person generously hosted us.
Evacuation to Nakijin Village
After the October 10th Air Raids, under the order of the army, we boarded an army landing craft, leaving from the east coast of Ie Island where a beach is currently located. We crossed the sea in the middle of the night and traveled to Hamasaki in Motobu. From Motobu, we then walked to Nakijin. We ended up arriving in Nakijin around six o’clock in the morning and I didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole time. I was seven years old so I could carry my own luggage as I walked, but my brother was only two years old at the time. He kept up walking with the adults, doing so with a small bottle around his neck full of hot water. When he cried along the way, we took a 30 minute break, and then started walking again. Our move took longer than other families, with my mother and father unable to carry my brother on their back as they were already carrying as much as they could manage. Prior to the war, my father had lost the lower part of his right arm. Because he was unable to use that arm, he was able to evacuate, instead of remaining on Ie Island. Thanks to that, his life was saved. We evacuated to Yonamine in Nakijin. We were there for a number of days, but ultimately didn’t stay for long. We woke up early in the morning to evacuate to Gogayama and returned to Yonamine after sunset. We repeated this every day. What left the biggest impression on me is that there was a large gajumaru (banyan) tree outside the house we evacuated to. When I climbed the tree and looked toward Ie Island, I saw that it was burning bright red each day. As a child, when I saw that, I figured my own house was probably burning. I figured the other houses in the neighborhood were burning as well, and wondered how many houses were left standing. Those kinds of thoughts about my homeland grew stronger. That made a lasting impression on me.
Becoming a prisoner of war & internment in Nago
On the day I was taken prisoner, as there were no notices, we were told we could stay home, so I didn’t evacuate to the mountains and I was relaxing at home. Then, around noon, an order was given to immediately evacuate to the coast instead of the mountains because the US military had landed, and everyone fled to the coast in a hurry. We hid in a sago palm forest on the coast. We were all taken prisoners by the U.S. forces there, and we were taken to the Ourazaki camp in Nago. After spending a month or two there in temporary residence, we were moved to the village of Kushi (currently Kushi, Nago), where the islanders were put in a facility by the U.S. forces. I lived in that refugee camp for about two years. Around 2,000 to 3,000 people were interned at that time.
Where the people of Ie Island were interned
The roughly 2,000 Ie Islanders who remained on the island and taken prisoner were interned on the Kerama Islands. After several months, the islanders detained on the Kerama islands were split up into those who would be detained at the Kushi camp, and others who would be taken to the Motobu camp. During my two years of being interned in Kushi, an administration formed and the Ie Village public office was established in Kushi. While interned at Kushi, there was a fire there. The place where I was living burned down, and I fled with nothing but the clothes on my back. In any case, life at the camp was difficult.
Food shortages
The hardest part was the food shortages. If anyone tried to take even a few sweet potatoes from the fields, they would soon be caught. There were many people watching over the fields. You couldn’t take kazura (sweet potato leaves) from the fields either. I was glared at just for walking down the footpath between the rice fields. So we would take whatever grasses that were growing along the road that seemed edible, and ate them. Sometimes I had to make it through three days on one box of rations provided by the U.S. forces. My mother and younger brother were on the verge of dying of malnutrition. I went to catch frogs with my father for us to eat. But even if we caught 40 or 50 in a day, it still wasn’t enough for a single meal. Everything but the edible parts, like thighs, simply had to be thrown away, so you wouldn’t be able to get your nourishment on frogs alone. An elderly woman told me to catch the yabo (mice) living in the house. She told me to catch them for my family to eat. They would be under the firewood and out in the grass and bushes, so you could quickly catch a number of them with just your bare hands. There were a lot of large yabo too. I caught enough to fill about half of a kamasu (jute bag), and the woman who told me about the yabo cooked it for us. I gave some of the yabo to the woman, and enjoyed eating it. That’s how we managed to survive.
Returning to Ie Island and reconstruction
In March 1947, after two years, we were able to return to Ie Island. The people of the island were all delighted to be able to return. Aboard the ship bound for the island, everyone was on the way home with big dreams in their hearts. However, as soon as I landed and took one step what I saw was not the place I used to live. In fact, not a single house or tree remained. Instead, what I saw there were U.S. army vehicles. I saw them coming and going in an open area lined with coral (limestone). That’s all I saw. It felt like some kind of optical illusion, as if it wasn’t our island. It was like I had arrived at a U.S. military base somewhere. I’ve also heard much about how some people were so shocked that they couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t even tell where my house had been. To the east of the present-day Ie Elementary School, there were Quonset huts (semi-cylindrical army barracks) and tents put up by the U.S. army. There, everyone had to start living together again. That cohabitation life lasted for almost a year. I searched for the land my old home was on, but none of the buildings were left. Not even a single pigsty remained. The first thing we did after returning home was build simple huts. To do this, we first had to clean up the land where houses had once stood. It would have been better if the houses had just burned down, but our house had been bulldozed by tanks or heavy machinery. Perhaps a few roof tiles remained. While searching through crushed houses for tiles and other things that we might reuse, we found things like human skulls and skeletons, and other corps, and even habu snakes. But back then, people weren’t afraid of the habus. We didn’t even try to kill them. We just wanted to clear the area as quickly as possible and build houses there. We found dead or partly burned gajumaru (banyan) or fukugi trees and we cut them down and used them to build simple huts. Thousands of people died in the war, from such a small island. There were also food shortages after the war. If you searched the fields, you’d find kazura (sweet potato leaves) growing all over. When we pushed the leaves away and began digging using a wooden stick, thinking that there might be large sweet potatoes underneath, what we found were human skulls and such. The kazura were able to flourish thanks to the nutrients provided by the corpses of those killed in the war. We would place ten oil drums in a row and place human remains in them. In villages near this bone collection site, people would just take the remains there by themselves. For faraway villages, as there were no vehicles or horse wagons, the remains were just left behind, and a person from the village office would come collect them later. A few months before all the islanders returned to the island, about 100 youth were gathered and dispatched as part of the advance party to clean up the island. I later heard that the only work they did was gathering up human remains, and how they couldn’t get anything else done.
The LCT explosion
When I was 11 years old, during summer vacation for my fifth year in elementary school, I went to Motobu with my father and returned by ship. We were planning to stay overnight at Motobu, but it was changed to a day trip, so I boarded the ship with my stomach empty as I hadn’t eaten. The ship arrived at Ie Island. As I was about to eat my boxed lunch, multiple U.S. military trucks carrying bombs were driving around, kicking up dust there at the pier, so I decided I wouldn’t be able to eat there. I was also thirsty, so I took my boxed lunch and went to drink water from the kitchen in the house closest to the port, using a ladle. Right at that very moment, there was a tremendous explosion, one that seemed like it would burst my ears. My surroundings turned pitch black. After a while, things brightened up again, and when I looked around me, I saw people racing in all directions. I heard people screaming. It was a really terrible situation. Amid all that, I just ran home. When I got home my mother was extremely surprised to see me. She asked me why we had returned that same day, and I told her about the situation. She asked me what had happened to my father. I said that I didn’t know. I actually didn’t know if he was safe. I noticed that I was still holding the ladle I’d used to drink the water. I was so scared that I couldn’t let it go. My mother unwound my fingers from the ladle. She asked me where I’d drunk the water. But I couldn’t remember anything. She thought that my father was dead. Before I’d gotten home, she’d been told that all passengers on the ferry had died there together. The ferry had come back, and her son was here safe, but his father nowhere to be seen. She was certain that her husband had died, then. She immediately asked her relatives to go look for him, and we all returned to the port to search for my father. The sight there was… How can I put this. The beach there, which usually was shining beautifully with white sand under the sunshine, had turned completely black. An LCT (landing craft tank) and bomb fragments were scattered about, and everyone was in a state of panic. It was a living hell. You could tell that there were human corpses but you couldn’t tell whose they were or anything else. My father had lost his right hand in a prewar accident. Among the five or six relatives was my aunt (my father’s older sister). As she peered over, she saw that one of the corpses was missing its right hand. As it seemed that the hand was not lost from by the explosion, but had already been missing, she noted that it was the same as her brother, and said that the corpse had to be him. Thinking my father was dead, all of my relatives wept. It hadn’t yet truly hit me that my father had died. I just stood there in a daze. After a bit, I heard a loud cry from behind me,“Seitoku! You’re alive!” When I looked back to see who had shouted, it was my father. My father, whom I thought was dead, was alive. It was like a dramatic twist in a play. But my father’s cousin, who had been on the same ship, actually did die there. The day following the explosion was awful. There were still many corpses strewn about, and more were washing up from the sea. None of the bodies could even be identified. The young men’s association and the fire brigade were all mobilized at once to search for bodies and to clean up. And alongside them were people who were calling out the names of family members who were supposed to return but had yet to do so. It was like hell, even the day after the explosion.
Ie Island’s history of suffering
In any case, during the war the people of Ie Island were badly hurt. They overcame hardships in the internment camps and refugee life. They didn’t have the time or leeway to allow their mental and physical fatigue to heal. And there, with their bodies and spirits already completely exhausted, they got back on their feet, telling themselves to stay strong, pick themselves up from the rubble and worked ceaselessly to survive. It was at such a time when the explosion occurred. This was the explosion of the LCT U.S. military ship carrying bombs. Just when we were starting to believe that we could survive through hard efforts, and were gradually regaining our dreams and our ability to smile, that tragic incident occurred, pouring salt over all our wounds. After that, there were many people, particularly those who had lost family members in the explosion, who had lost their will to live and all hope for life. That’s how it was. Still, we had to keep on living. We felt like we had to do something every day to get our lives back together, so we pulled ourselves to our feet. In 1953, only five years after the explosion, the residents of in Maja village were ordered to leave to make way for the construction of a shooting range for the U.S. military. All the members of “Tochi wo Mamoru Kai” (Association for the Protection of Land) with Mr. Shoko Ahagon at the center of it, held a “beggar’s march” across Okinawa, opposing the confiscation of land by the U.S. military. After this, they also went on a hunger strike, but despite how hard they campaigned against it, they were ultimately forcibly evicted by the U.S. military. A year or two later, U.S. military shooting exercises began, inflicting suffering on the villages of Maja and Nishizaki.
A message for young people
The history of Ie Island during and after the war is full of wounds. Villagers have endured a painful history full of wounds. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the military base issues in Ie village. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the LCT explosion. It is impossible to tell the history of Ie Island after the war without talking about the refugee camp issues. These are all the actual experiences of the people of the island, who witnessed a living hell. When looking back on the history of Ie Island, I want these ideas, the history, the truth of what took place there to be thoroughly conveyed to the young generations, and the young people who will lead the next generation. I also want people to find a way to live on and make efforts to forge a life here, despite the fact that this is a remote island.
Mr. Seitoku Shimabukuro worked for the Ie Village public office, and was involved in the administration of Ie Village for many years. He served as mayor for 16 years from 1989 to 2005.