80 years after World War II, Okinawa’s battle sites are still giving up bones and bombs

By Brad Lendon, CNN

Itoman, Japan (CNN) — The “bone digger” slides into a thin crevice on a hill in the Okinawan jungle. He’s a slight man, nimbly fitting his frame through the cave entrance, carefully avoiding the sharp limestone roof while navigating the crumbling stone and dirt on the cave floor.

He crouches as the lamp on his forehead shines on the dirt at his feet and scratches the soil with a gardening tool, looking to turn up the remains of people who hid in caves like this one during the World War II Battle of Okinawa.

This is the life’s work of the bone digger, Takamatsu Gushiken. He spends much of his free time in caves like this in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, trying to bring closure to one of the most fierce and deadly battles of the Pacific war.

I ask him why he does this work. He pauses and shrugs.

“They are human, and I am human too,” he says softly, looking down, his voice breaking with emotion.

Gushiken shows me what he’s found at this site so far — portions of a skull from the area of the ear, smaller bones, maybe from a foot, he says, and even smaller ones, possibly from a child or infant.

He’s found a bullet, too, and theorizes what might have happened at this spot eight decades ago: A mother and child hid as the battle raged outside. As US troops were trying to clear caves of hidden Japanese defenders, the two civilians, like so many on Okinawa, were caught in the crossfire.

They would be among the estimated 240,000 people killed or missing in the Battle of Okinawa, from the landing of the US invasion force on April 1, 1945, to the Americans’ declaration of victory on June 22.

That number includes as many as 100,000 civilians, 110,000 Japanese troops and Okinawa conscripts, and more than 12,000 American and allied troops, according to the National World War II Museum in Louisiana.

Those lives were lost in a hellscape of overwhelming American firepower. US forces used 1.1 million 105 milimeter howitzer rounds on the island, expended more than a half million mortar rounds, and fired more than 16 million machine gun rounds and 9 million rifle bullets, according to the museum.

Touching history

Eighty years later, the scars remain, allowing visitors to get up close and touch history.

On the offshore island of Ie Shima, the shell of a pawn shop still stands. It’s the only structure that survived the fighting on that 23-square-kilometer island that was home to an important airstrip during the war.

In the former Japanese Navy underground headquarters in Tomigusuku, shrapnel-scarred walls are evidence of a mass suicide. A memorial outside reads, “Vice Admiral Minoru Ota and his 4,000 men … committed suicide in this underground headquarters on June 18, 1945.”

Outside an unmarked cave near the Sefa Utaki Sacred Site in Nanjo, an unexploded grenade rests near the entrance, just off a busy road. Inside, pickaxe scars from the cave’s construction are still smooth as it opens to a dugout machine gun emplacement.

Walk up a path from the Okinawa Peace Park on the island’s southern shore and stand next to the cave entrance where the commander of the Japanese garrison on Okinawa, Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, took his own life on June 22, 1945, as US troops closed in from below.

And in the rock near a jungle cave, Gushiken the bone hunter points out where rifle and machine gun rounds have left their mark.

Matching 1945 and 2025

Drop a pin on the map app on your phone at any of these places, make the drive to the Okinawa Prefectural Archives and you can see exactly what that piece of land would have looked like during the battle or its aftermath.

Archivists have matched up surveillance and reconnaissance photos from the US military with the current landscape. Perhaps nothing can illustrate that hellscape better.

Kazuhiko Nakamoto is the driving force behind the archives’ collection, attempting to document the story of the war years and after.

He tells the story of how his mother, a 6-year-old in 1945, survived the battle separated from her parents and in the care of her grandmother, who moved about the southern part of the island looking for safe spots as the battle raged.

“It was like a miracle that she survived,” he says, adding that his family was one of the lucky ones on Okinawa.

Nakamoto and fellow archivists Akira Yoshimine and Eriko Nishiyama relate how Okinawans were victims of a war not of their making. When the government in Tokyo garrisoned the island, many thought the Japanese troops were there to protect them, not enlist them in the fighting that was to come.

But militarism was pushed even in elementary schools, they say, pointing to a textbook that taught students how to count using pictures of warplanes and tanks.

Schoolgirls plunged into war

No place on Okinawa brings that tragedy home more than the Himeyuri Peace Museum, which tells the story of the Himeyuri Student Corps, teenage girls pressed into service of the Japanese military during the battle.

The girls from the Okinawa Shihan Women’s School and the Okinawa Daiichi Women’s High School helped nurse and attend to injured Japanese soldiers in caves like the one at the site of the museum that honors them, a hole in the rock known during the war as the Ihara Third Surgical Cave, part of the Okinawa Army Hospital.

“Soon after the battle commenced, the Himeyuri students were mobilized,” the museum says. “Real war proved to be different from anything they had imagined.”

Surviving students tell of the horrors they experienced in videos shown at the museum.

They talk of helping amputate the limbs of the injured, performing the operations without anesthesia. They tell of pulling maggots from wounds, of trying to comfort those delirious with “brain fever,” of seeing their fellow students die under US gunfire at cave entrances or while running resupply errands.

And they talk of a smell that permeated the surgical caves — a mixture of human waste, blood, sweat and the rot of flesh — and never left the unventilated passages. (At another site, Army Hospital Depot Number 20 at the Haebaru War Museum, staff have recreated that stench in a vial, and offer visitors a whiff at the end of the tour. Even in the open air, it’s horrible.)

The video testimonials are raw, vivid and hard to sit through for a visitor.

After the videos, the portraits of the 227 Himeyuri who were killed or went missing on Okinawa hang on the walls of a large room. A note under each tells their fate, several noting the last time the girls were seen alive and that what happened to them is unknown.

Those hit me the hardest and bring back thoughts of those bones Gushiken had found in the cave I was in only hours earlier. Could they belong to any of these young faces?

It’s likely we will never be able to know the answer to that question. Gushiken says of 1,400 sets of remains recovered from caves and battle sites, only six have ever been identified.

He says he turns over everything he finds to authorities, but it’s up to them to determine if DNA testing is possible.

Many times there’s just not enough bone material to get a DNA match, he says.

If relics like pens or notebooks with names are found with bones, it can provide a lead, he says. But relics without such identifying information are left where they are found.

Still, he’d like to see the government doing more.

“I hope the authorities will take a more proactive approach to identifying the bones, improve their technology, and returns as many bones as possible to their families,” he says.

The Americans

If there is an American equivalent of Gushiken on Okinawa, it just might be Steph Pawelski. A native of Pennsylvania, the US military spouse and US Department of Defense school teacher curates the Okinawa Battle Sites Facebook page.

The rear of her Subaru station wagon is part war history library, part hiking and caving supply barn. Her knowledge of the island seems encyclopedic.

On an early March day, I suggest meeting at the Hyatt hotel in urban Naha for lunch. Pawelski says we should arrive early and check out a cave in a park across from the hotel’s parking lot.

During an exploration of a hillside battle site with a team led by Gushiken, Pawelski surges ahead of the group to point out possible cave entrances the Japanese man was looking for.

Pawelski says her interest in the battle sites is driven by her grandfathers, both of whom served on Okinawa.

Using pictures her maternal grandfather took during his time in the Asian theater, she’s trying to put herself in the exact spots her grandfather stood decades ago.

“I was able to see through Grandpop’s eyes, walk in his footsteps, and feel his presence in a way I never expected. It was as if the past and present had converged, creating a snapshot of history in a way that words would never capture,” Pawelski says.

Minutes before beginning that jungle trek with Gushiken, she’s on a Facetime call to Florida with an Okinawa veteran, Neal McCallum, a Marine who came ashore on the island on April 1, 1945, and 49 days later got a hole in his leg from a Japanese bullet, a “million-dollar wound” he calls it, because it got him a ticket off the island with his life intact.

The now 98-year-old McCallum is coming back to Okinawa for the battle’s 80th anniversary, and Pawelski is helping him be sure he sees what he wants, the places he says will bring him a final measure of “closure.”

McCallum says he got the bulk of that during his first post-war visit in 2000.

“If I had any dark corners in my mind, I think they were eliminated” then, he says.

But his real change of heart over history happened during a visit to Osaka 19 years before that.

“I hated the Japanese intensely until 1981,” he says. During a few days in Japan’s second-largest city, he came across some schoolchildren, eager to practice their English.

“They were saying little endearments to me… ‘Hello, sir!’ ‘I love you,’ or something along those lines.

“And I thought what a fool I am for … hating them,” McCallum says, adding that those who hate are “not going to lead a good, healthy life.”

He also says he hopes his visit helps remind the current generation of the sacrifices of the so-called “greatest generation,” those who fought World War II, and the legacy of what the Marines accomplished on Okinawa.

Back at the cave site, Gushiken says he hopes his work sends a message too.

“No more wars. There should be no more wars,” he says.

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