What the Japanese Army did to the Japanese civilians

ITOMAN, Okinawa: Clutching a hand grenade issued by the Japanese Imperial Army and driven by tales of what U.S. soldiers would do with a pretty young woman, Sumie Oshiro recalled, she fled into the forests of Okinawa during the World War II battle known here as the "typhoon of steel."

"At one place, we sat together and hit the grenade on the ground, but it did not explode," she said last week of her flight with friends after Japanese soldiers told them to kill themselves rather than be taken captive.

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In a display at the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, a spotlight highlights a glinting bayonet held by a fierce-looking Japanese soldier who stands over an Okinawan family huddled in a cave, the mother trying to smother her baby's cries.

"At the hands of Japanese soldiers, civilians were massacred, forced to kill themselves and each other," reads the caption. Nearby, a life-size wall photo shows the grisly aftermath of a family killed by a hand grenade.

"To prevent the leakage of secret information, civilians were ordered never to surrender to U.S. forces," read one wall caption inspected by a large high school group on Friday. "In many places, parents, children, relatives and friends were ordered or coerced to kill each other in large groups. These killings were in the wake of years of militaristic education, which exhorted people to serve their nation by giving their lives to the emperor."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/20/news/oki.php


Murata, himself a second lieutenant in the Imperial army, was on duty away from the island when his family committed murder-suicide with a hand grenade provided by the Japanese military. His younger sister was killed instantly, while his mother died slowly over months due to the wounds she suffered, according to Murata.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080329a1.html


Hunched over a garden bench, 81-year-old Mitsuoko Oshiro recalls how she was given a grenade by a soldier, who told her that if she failed to use it to kill herself and her family, she would be raped and tortured by the Americans.

"I wanted to die, but I couldn't do it. We fled to the hills when the Americans invaded, but they didn't harm us - they just let us go," she says.

But 11 members of her extended family obeyed the orders - they all died by taking rat poison.

Another survivor, 76-year-old Takejiro Nakamura, clutches a picture of his sister from before the war. He watched his mother strangle his sister in a cave.

"We all wanted to kill ourselves, because we believed the Imperial Army," he says.

His sister pleaded with his mother to kill her first, so she was strangled with a rope.


Some conservative Japanese historians -- also eager to revise descriptions of wartime atrocities in China and other parts of Asia -- have called into question the eyewitness accounts, arguing the suicides were voluntary.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUST29903020070622