In February 1945, just before I was mobilized, I went home to say farewell. I assured Father and Mother that I would win the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class, and be enshrined at Yasukuni. Father was a country schoolteacher. He said, "I didn't bring you up to the age of sixteen to die!" I thought he was a traitor to say such a thing. I went to the battlefield feeling proud of myself.

The Himeyuri Student Corps consisted of the fifteen- to nineteen-year-old girls from First Okinawa Prefectural Girls' High School and the Women's Division of the national Okinawa Normal School. I was in my fourth year at the high school. On the night of March 24, to the accompaniment of the loud thunder of guns from the American naval bombardment, we were mobilized straight from the school dormitory to Haebaru Army Hospital. Although called a military "hospital," it was actually in caves scattered around the town of Haebaru. The hospital wasn't really complete, so our first work consisted of digging out the cave where we were to hide ourselves. Outside, it rained shells for five or six days.

We had our graduation ceremony in a crude, triangular barracks on the battlefield. While the bombardment continued, we knelt on a floor lit by two or three candles. It was so dim we could hardly see our classmates' faces. "Work so as not to shame the First Girls' High School" was the theme of the principal's commencement address. We sang a song which went, "Give your life for the sake of the Emperor, wherever you may go." Our music teacher, only twenty-three, had earlier written a song for our graduation. It was called "A Song of Parting," and was really wonderful. Not a war song at all. We'd memorized it while digging shelters. I especially liked one verse with the refrain "We shall meet again," but there was no time for it at graduation. It was already after ten o'clock at night. Still, with the reverberations of the explosions shaking the ground, we sang it on our way back to our cave. The next morning that triangular building wasn't there anymore. Three days later, on April 1, the landings began.

In no time at all, wounded soldiers were being carried into the caves in large numbers. They petrified us all. Some didn't have faces, some didn't have limbs. Young men in their twenties and thirties screaming like babies. Thousands of them. At first, one of my friends saw a man with his toes missing and swooned. She actually sank to her knees, but soldiers and medics began screaming at her, "You idiot! You think you can act like that on the battlefield?"

Every day, we were yelled at: "Fools! Idiotsl Dummies!" We were so naive and unrealistic. We had expected that somewhere far in the rear, we'd raise the red cross and then wrap men with bandages, rub on medicine, and give them shots as we had been trained. In a tender voice we'd tell the wounded, "Don't give up, please." Now, they were being carried in one after another until the dugouts and caves were filled to overflowing, and still they came pouring in. Soon we were laying them out in empty fields, then on cultivated land. Some hemorrhaged to death and others were hit again out there by showers of bombs. So many died so quickly.

Those who had gotten into the caves weren't so lucky either. Their turn to have their dressings changed came only once every week or two. So pus would squirt in our faces, and they'd be infested with maggots. Removing those was our job. We didn't even have enough time to remove them one by one. Gas gangrene, tetanus, and brain fever were common. Those with brain fever were no longer human beings. They'd tear their clothes off because of their pain, tear off their dressings. They were tied to the pillars, their hands behind their backs, and treatment stopped.

At first, we were so scared watching them suffering and writhing that we wept. Soon we stopped. We were kept running from morning to night. "Do this! Do that!" Yet, as underclassmen we had fewer wounded soldiers to take care of. The senior girls slept standing up. "Miss Student, I have to piss," they'd cry. Taking care of their excrement was our work. Senior students were assigned to the operating rooms. There, hands and legs were chopped off without anesthesia. They used a saw. Holding down their limbs was a student job.

Outside was a rain of bullets from morning to night. In the evening, it quieted down a little. It was then that we carried out limbs and corpses. There were so many shell craters—it sounds funny to say it, but we considered that fortunate: holes already dug for us. "One, two, three!" we'd chant, and all together we'd heave the dead body into a hole, before crawling back to the cave. There was no time for sobbing or lamentation.

In that hail of bullets, we also went outside to get food rations and water. Two of us carried a wooden half-bushel barrel to the well. When a shell fell, we'd throw ourselves into the mud, but always supporting the barrel because the water was everybody's water of life. Our rice balls shrank until they were the size of Ping-Pong balls. The only way to endure was to guzzle water. There was no extra water, not even to wash our faces, which were caked in mud.

We were ordered to engage in "nursing," but in reality, we did odd jobs. We were in the cave for sixty days, until we withdrew to Ihara. Twelve people in our group—two teachers and ten students—perished. Some were buried alive, some had their legs blown off, five died from gas.

They used gas bombs on May 9. Thrown into the cave with the third-year students—the fifteen-year-olds. Three students and two teachers perished. The way they died! Their bodies swelled up and turned purple. There were no injuries. It was like they suffocated to death. They thrashed about so much we had to tie up their arms and legs like the soldiers with brain fever. That was the cave next to mine. When our teachers returned to our cave, they wept bitterly, even though they were men. A poison-gas bomb was also thrown into the cave where the current Himeyuri Memorial is located. Forty-six of fifty-one perished there.*

About May 25, we were ordered to withdraw to Ihara. All the men we had nursed were simply lying there. One of us asked, "Soldier, what are you going to do with these people?" "Don't worry," he responded, "I'll make it easy for them." Later we heard that the medics offered them condensed milk mixed with water as their last nourishment, and then gave them cyanide and told them, "Achieve your glorious end like a Japanese soldier." The American forces were nearby. Would it have been so terrible if they had been captured and revealed the Japanese army's situation? Instead they were all murdered to protect military strategy. Only one person crawled out and survived to testify.

The road to Ihara was truly horrible, muddy and full of artillery craters with corpses, swollen two or three times normal size, floating in them. We could only move at night. Sometimes the American forces sent up flares to seek out targets. Ironically, these provided us with enough light to see the way. This light revealed people pulling themselves along on hands and knees, crawling desperately, wounded people calling to us, "Students! Students!" I had an injured friend using my shoulder as a crutch. Another friend had night blindness from malnutrition. She kept falling over corpses and crying out. We'd become accustomed to the smell of excrement, pus, and the maggots in the cave, but the smell of death there on that road was unbearable. And it poured rain every day.

Tens of thousands of people moving like ants. Civilians. Grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers with children on their backs, scurrying along, covered in mud. When children were injured, they were left along the roadside. Just thrown away. Those children could tell we were students. They'd call out, "Nei, nei!" and try to cling to us. That's Okinawan dialect for "Older Sister!" It was so pitiable. I still hear those cries today.

In daylight we were pinned down. In the wild fields, we clung to the grasses and cried out to our teachers, "I'm afraid." My group were all fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds and the teachers took special care of us. "Bear up! You can take it!" they'd reassure us.

Finally, on the tenth of June we reached Ihara. Ten days for what takes thirty minutes by car today. There the first, second, and third surgeries were reestablished. The second surgery was already completely full. There was only space to sit with your knees pulled up to your chest. I don't remember going to the toilet after we moved to Ihara, we were so dehydrated. If you put your hand into your hair it was full of lice. Our bodies were thick with fleas. Before we had been covered in mud, now we were covered with filth. Our nails grew longer and longer. Our faces were black. We were emaciated and itched all the time.

We bit into moldy, unpolished raw rice and took great care gnawing on our biscuits. When we ate those, we felt as though we'd had a real meal. Those grains of unpolished rice were so hard that, one day, a teacher said, "Let's go out and cook them." Just warming them up that way actually let them swell a little so you could get it down easier. We got some water and crawled out with the teacher. Behind rocks, we gathered dried leaves and finally warmed the unpolished rice in a mess kit. Then we headed back, at last reaching the entrance to the first surgery cave. When I stood up and put my foot in, the ground felt wet and slippery. It was June 17. I smelled blood. I thought instantly, "They've just been hit!" We lived in darkness and sensed everything by smell. From below I heard my classmates' voices, "I don't have a leg!" "My hand's gone!" At my teacher's urging, I descended into a sea of blood. Nurses, soldiers, students killed instantly or severely injured, among them a friend of mine, Katsuko-san, with a wound in her thigh. "Quick, Teacher, quick," she was crying. "It hurts!" I was struck dumb. There was no medicine left, and near me a senior student was desperately trying to push her intestines back into her stomach. " I won't make it," she whispered, "so please take care of other people first." Then she stopped breathing.

Now, her words chill me to the bone. But a militaristic girl could say such a thing. How could she have been so strong? She was only seventeen. I saw weeping teachers cutting locks of hair from the deceased and putting them in their pockets. They no longer had the faintest idea of how to take care of us. All they could say was, "Do your best! Don't die. You absolutely mustn't die!" They were desperate to protect us, young teachers in their twenties and thirties. I wonder how each of them must have suffered, and my heart goes out to them as I think about how brokenhearted they must have been. Out of three hundred students, two hundred nineteen perished. Twenty-one teachers went to the battlefield and sixteen died. No one imagined so many lives would be lost. Particularly in such cruel ways. The teachers, too, were utterly ignorant of the horror, the terror of war. Japanese of that time were like that. "Victorious battle!" "Our army is always superior!" That was all we knew. We were so gullible, so innocent.

On the eighteenth, the order of dissolution was issued. From then on, they told us, if we behaved as a group we would stand out too much. The U.S. forces were quite close, so we were to "escape" as individuals. Everyone shed tears, but what could we say? We didn't know what to do. And our friends, lying there injured, were listening to the order, too. They knew they would be left behind. There was no way to take them with us. Absolutely none.

We had to leave two students behind with the soldiers as well, because the Americans were so close you could even hear English being spoken. One of the students accepted milk from the medics. She might have been given cyanide, too. The other didn't want to die and forced her immobilized body to crawl. She was still crawling in the mud near Haebaru, when attacking American troops rescued her. They took her to the U.S. military hospital and nursed her with great care, but I heard she died there anyway. That was in May. After the war, one who'd heard her reported that she said, "I hated and feared these Americans, but they treated me with great care and kindness, while my classmates, my teachers left me behind."

Nineteen of us, three teachers and sixteen students, left the cave together. But a large bomb exploded and we lost track of four of our group immediately. We crawled, stood up, then crawled again, always under heavy bombardment. The next morning dawned so soon! It was the nineteenth of June. A severe attack was in progress. We were still in sight of the first and third surgery caves. So close! We'd gone such a little way! Hardly a minute or two by car, today. When we looked around we saw we were surrounded by tanks. Americans were whistling to each other. Tanks moved forward, attacking. Until then we'd had to flee at night. Now, we clung to the edge of the road. I heard a great booming sound and passed out. Eventually, I came to my senses. I was covered in mud and couldn't hear a thing. In front of me, two classmates were soaked in their own blood. Then they were screaming in pain. Third-year student Akiko wasn't moving. She'd died there. Two teachers in their twenties had disappeared. We never saw them again. Already on just that first morning, nineteen people became twelve. Nearby, Japanese soldiers were running for their lives, yelling, "Armor! Armor!" Behind us, the tanks were coming on, spewing out a stream of fire. I was shaking with fear. The vice-principal, the only teacher left, shouted, "Follow me!" and we all crawled after him. My friends were covered with blood. We urged them to keep up and though they were moaning, "I can't. I can't go on. It hurts," come they did.

On the twentieth, the large guns stopped firing and they began burning things with flame-throwers. We were smoked out onto the cliff tops. We friends promised each other, "If I'm unable to move, or you're disabled, I'll give you cyanide." We each kept a hand-grenade like a talisman. "If we stand up, they'll shoot us," we thought, so we stood up. We walked upright with dignity, but they held their fire. We were slightly disappointed. It was weird, eerie. Yesterday it had been Hell; why was it suddenly so quiet? We reached the cliff's edge, an incredible precipice, and we climbed down, soon covered in blood, all the way down to the sea. We were in full view of the ships at sea. If they wanted to, I thought, they could kill us with a single salvo. Yet we reached the breakers. Everywhere the shore was full of people, all civilians. Later, I learned that nearly one hundred seventy thousand people were crammed into that narrow bit of island. People, people, people. They were almost piled up on each other. There was nowhere even to sit, and the waves were coming in lapping at them.

A small boat came toward us from a battleship. Then, for the first time, we heard the voice of the enemy. "Those who can swim, swim out! We'll save you. Those who can't swim, walk towards Minatogawa! Walk by day. Don't travel by night. We have food! We will rescue you!" They actually did! They took care of Okinawans really well, according to international law, but we only learned that later. We thought we were hearing the voices of demons. From the time we'd been children, we'd only been educated to hate them. They would strip the girls naked and do with them whatever they wanted, then run over them with tanks. We really believed that. Not only us girls. Mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers all were cowering at the voice of the devils. So what we had been robbed us of life. I can never forgive what education did to us! Had we known the truth, all of us would have survived. The Himeyuri Student Corps alone lost one hundred and some score students in the four or five days that followed the order to dissolve the unit. Anyway, we answer that voice, but continued our flight. We were simply too terrified of being stripped naked. That's what a girl fears most, isn't it? We never dreamt the enemy would rescue us.

So, we climbed back up, but the top of the cliff was being scoured by flame-throwers. We had to cling on midway. When we looked down we saw the white surf. It was the night of the twentieth. Moonlit. Everything was exposed. That was Arasaki Beach. Today it is all so green and peaceful. Our friends who were injured on the morning of the nineteenth were increasingly desperate and bloody, but still with us. Our hands were growing weaker. "Teacher, teacher, I can't hold on!" "Climb up," he'd say. Finally, we clawed our way to the top and just collapsed. Twelve of us. There we all cried out, "We can't take any more." The third-year students cried the most. "Teacher, please kill us. Kill us with a grenade!"

Teacher had always urged us on, but finally even he said, "I guess it can't be helped." We felt great relief at those words. At last, we would become comfortable. "Teacher, here's good enough. Please make us comfortable." For the first time we all sobbed. We all wanted to see our mothers. "Okaasan!" came from our mouths. We'd struggled so hard not to speak of our families up until then. [Her voice chokes.] I wondered how Father, Mother, and my younger sister were doing on this battlefield. I wanted to see them so badly, but to put such feelings into words was taboo in the cave. That day, for the first time, someone said, "I want to see my mother!" Yoshiko-san, who was an only daughter, clung to me. She was such a lovely person, a sweet person. She, too, said to me, "I want to see my mother just once more." We all said it. "We want to walk under a sky from which shells don't rain." For ninety days we'd been cornered like moles in dark caves. Someone now began singing a song about a home village and "the mountains where we chased the rabbit. . ." Of course, we dissolved in tears. That night we completely forgot we were surrounded by American soldiers.

Arasaki Beach was totally silent on the twenty-first. The military ships were still glaring at us from the sea, but not a shot was fired. I had a hand-grenade, and so did Teacher. Nine of our group were jammed into a tiny hole. Higa-san, Teacher, a Japanese soldier, and I—the four of us—couldn't fit into it. We were nearby. I was sitting facing a warship, glaring back at it, gripping my grenade. A small boat approached and signaled to us. They waved, "Swim out, we'll help you!" I shuddered. I was completely exposed. Suddenly, a Japanese soldier climbed down the cliff. A Japanese soldier raising his hands in surrender? Impossible! Traitor! We'd been taught, and firmly believed, that we Okinawans, Great Japanese all, must never fall into the hands of the enemy. Despite that, a Japanese soldier was walking right into the sea. Another soldier, crouching behind a rock near us, shot him. The sea water was dyed red. Thus I saw Japanese murdering Japanese for the first time.

Out of nowhere, a Japanese soldier appeared and dropped to the right in front of me. American soldiers must have been chasing him. He was all bloody. Higa-san and I tumbled into a tiny hole. I saw Teacher and this Japanese soldier fly into the air. Then I heard, "Come out, come out" in strangely accented Japanese. Soon a rain of small arms fire began, Americans firing at close range. They must have thought we were with that soldier. They blazed away in our direction. A senior student, Aosa-san, was killed instantly, as were Ueki-san, Nakamoto-san, and the Japanese soldier. I was now under those four dead bodies. Three senior students were hit by small-arms fire and screamed out in pain. Yonamine-sensei, our teacher, shouldering a student bathed in blood, stood facing an American soldier. Random firing stopped. The American, who had been firing wildly, must have noticed he was shooting girls. He could be seen from the hole where my ten classmates were hiding. They pulled the pin on their hand grenade. So unfortunate! I now stepped out over the corpses and followed Teacher. The automatic rifles of four or five American soldiers were aimed right at me. My grenade was taken away. I had held it to the last minute. The American soldiers lowered their rifles. I looked past them and saw my ten classmates. The night before those third-year students had been calling for Teacher to kill them quickly. Now, there was nothing left of them. The hand grenade is so cruel.

I simply sat there where I'd slumped down. An American soldier poked me with the barrel of his gun, signaling me to move in the direction he indicated. I didn't speak English. I couldn't do anything but move as he ordered. To my surprise, three senior students had been carried out. Their wounds had been dressed and bandaged and they were being given saline injections. Until that moment I could think of the Americans only as devils and demons. I was simply frozen. I couldn't believe what I saw.

It was around noon, June 21. The sun was directly overhead. I staggered, crying, in the blazing sun. American soldiers sometimes called out, "Hey, schoolgirl!" I was skin and bones and covered with filth. My only footwear was the soles of workers' shoes tied to my feet with bandages. "Hey schoolgirl. No poison!" I didn't know what "no poison" meant, but when I got to their camp I was given something "ra-shon." I didn't really feel like eating. I lay on the sand, crying all night long. I was then sent to Kunagami Camp in the north. For months I was taken care of by many families I don't know anything about. During the third month I met my father and mother. Mother, barefoot, ran out of a tent in the camp and hugged me to her. "You lived, you lived!" I still remember her crying out loud.

After the war, I refused to go the ceremonies of memorial. I tried to forget as much as possible. Because it was horrible and it was sad, or for whatever reason, I just didn't want to remember. It is only very recently I have been able to speak about it. I decided to get involved in constructing the memorial museum because I felt if I didn't talk, nobody would support it.

Young people sometimes ask us, "Why did you take part in such a stupid war?" For us the Emperor and the Nation were supreme. For them, one should not withhold one's life. Strange isn't it? That's really the way it was. We had been trained for the Battle of Okinawa from the day the war with America began. I hate to admit it, but that spiritual training taught us how to endure. That's why we were able to complete the museum library, don't you think? We still have to grit our teeth a little longer until we repay the huge financial debt we incurred building the museum.

There are Okinawan references to the use of poison gas by the American forces during the battle of Okinawa. As in this case, the way the victims died points to the use of an agent which caused asphyxiation. Miyara Ruri, a survivor from the Third Surgery Cave, describes the moment: "White smoked filled [the cave] at the same time as the sound Daan, daan, daan, rang out--I can't see anything! I can't breathe anymore! Breathing is agony--I felt like I was being choked." She regained consciousness after three days. Her story appears in NHK Ohayö Jaanaru Seisaku-han, ed., Sensö o shine imasu ka [Do You Know About the War?] (Tokyo: NHK Hösö Shuppan,1989), vol. 1, p. 81.

Cook, Haruko Taya and Cook, Theodore F. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New Press, 1992. 354-363.