The Last Himeyuri, ひめゆり — Shigumaashi
I still remember some Okinawan phrases I learned at that time. For some reason, all of them have to do with hospitality.
– Ikuo Ogiso, a Japanese soldier. (Feifer, 58)In Okinawa, we say Nichi do takara: Life is a treasure. Whatever the reasons to fight and kill, however profound the causes or pretexts for war, they can't justify the result. Human lives are too precious to sacrifice.
– Masahide Ota. (Feifer, 136)
The Battle of Okinawa was dubbed a “Typhoon of Steel” by those who fought in it; the amount of devastation wrought by cannons, missiles, rockets and bombs was, apparently, mind-blowing. I do not want to trivialize the loss of life; over 50,000 Americans, 90,000 Imperial Soldiers and tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians perished. The title of this segment, “Shigumaashi,” simply means “instantaneous death” in Okinawan. Fitting, I think, for the tale of the Himeyuri.
Because I rely heavily on still photographs to make these scenes throughout the movies (a rather slow and time-consuming process to go frame by frame editing and rearranging) I have tried to avoid using actual documentary images, working instead with stills from Japanese movies based on the Himeyuri. I did this mainly because wartime documentaries are always biased toward which ever side happens to be making it; you'll never see any reference to the killing of civilians by either side if all you do is watch what is on Youtube.
However, for this segment I am changing that. I am going to use documentary films made by my country about what we did to Okinawa. I think it is a danger when telling a complicated story about other people to cut out large parts of the story, especially if it involves people who can no longer speak for themselves. I believe that is one reason the Himeyuri have yet to be included in Western tales of 1945 Okinawa; they were the enemy, they were women and they weren't shooting back.
Recently Japan has seen a rise in ultra-conservatives denouncing anything that remotely sounds like criticism of its national history by “others, outsiders and anti-Japanese rabble.” To some, the Imperial Army is still seen as a benign force helping with the protection and liberation of the Okinawa people against demonic Yankee invaders.
Japan, of course, is not unique in this; for example, in 1994 when the the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC put on display part of the fuselage of the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, members of my country's the American Legion and the Air Force Association “charged that the exhibit focused too much attention on the Japanese casualties inflicted by the nuclear bomb, rather than on the motivations for the bombing.”
To me, this is a bizarre way of thinking; the exhibit actually did talk about how dropping the bombs hurried the surrender of Japan, but it also pointed out, and rightfully, that it ushered in the age of atomic warfare and went into detail of the suffering about the civilian population. To either deny or try to play down the ugly fact that we killed a humongous number of unarmed civilians would be along the lines of trying to make a documentary on the development and use of the American atomic bomb; except being told that we can't say that America actually developed it or ever used it … the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Oh … it just sort of happened, but patriotic Americans had nothing to do with it.
As General Tony McPeak and Senator Barack Obama pointed out to us recently, patriotism is hard work, “If you could just [be patriotic] by placing a flag on your lapel, that would be pretty easy.” If patriotism is about anything, for me, then it is about taking responsibility for what your nation has done, good and bad; anything else has more to do with the failings or laziness of that individual looking for an easy way out rather than saying anything constructive about a national as whole.
Unlike all the other fragments to this movie this one has no dialog at all. To illustrate the horrors the American army subjected the people of Okinawa to images will work just fine. Still, there were a couple of points I wish I could have depicted better. In her excellent short story, The Caves of Okinawa, Sylvia Watanabe describes how the Americans went from cave to cave bombing and burning alive anyone who didn't immediately answer their summons, “De-tay-ko-ee!” “Come out!” – Imperial soldiers as well as Okinawan mothers, children and grandparents. As Major General John Hodge, commander of the invasion explained, “It's going to be really tough, there are over 65,000 – 70,000 fighting Japanese holed up in the south end of the island. I see no way to get them out except to blast them out yard by yard” (Feifer, 174).
And they did, cave after cave.
At the end of the segment there are images of the Okinawa population, as well as members of the Imperial Army, who all surrendered. The last image is of two girls stoically staring away from the camera. They would be, perhaps, the right age as the other nurses in the Himeyuri. What happened to them after the camera stopped filming is unknown; but if they survived then they witnessed more atrocities than any other part of the war in the Pacific leading up the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Works Cited
Feifer, George. The Battle of Okinawa. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press (1992)
Sakihara, Mitsugu. Okinawan-English Wordbook. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press (2006)