[Interviewer's Note:] "Sorry to keep you waiting!" she announced apologetically, swinging open her office door and hurrying over to where I was sitting. Smiling widely and extending her hand in greeting, she introduced herself. "I'm Fumiko Nakamura." I stood up and returned Nakamura-san's warm greeting, catching myself grinning at the 4-year-old Okinawan woman's energy and vitality. I watched as this tiny figure with a curl of silver hair peeking out from her cocoa-colored head scarf pulled out the metal chair next to mine and sat down sideways in it.

I still remember the very first line in my Japanese reader. It began with the words Tennō Heika [His Majesty the Emperor]. The book said the Emperor was a god, and we were all his children. Well, I couldn't understand that. I mean, how could all eighty million of us be his children? And how could I be his child if I never met him?

I entered elementary school in 1920 when I was 7 years old. The school I attended was located 4 kilometers from my home. When I was in first and second grade I went to the village school – each community had one – but when I was ready to enter third grade, I had to commute to the main school. It was huge. Almost two thousand children in total.

There were four major events during the academic year: January 1 (New Year's Day), February a (Japan Founder's Day), April 29 (Tenchōsetsu, the Showa Emperor's birthday), and November 3 (the Meiji Emperor's birthday). On each of these occasions, classes were canceled, but we still had to gather at school for a special ceremony. In the prewar period we didn't have a gym, a conference room, or any other nice place where the entire population of the school could congregate, so we removed the partition that separated the classrooms from one another and crammed all of the students inside one big room. Then we sang the Kimigayo [Japanese anthem] and listened to the kyōiku chokugo [Imperial Rescript on Education]. When the principal finished speaking, we sang the ceremonial song. I can still remember the melodies and words to those songs to this day.

At school I took subjects such as Japanese, math, geography, history, and science. I studied English for a few years, too, but English education was out¬lawed after 1941 when the war between the United States and Japan broke out. The Japanese government didn't want us studying the language of the enemy; they wanted us to focus our attention on kōminka kyōiku [good citi¬zens' education], a set of courses designed to teach us how to become better Japanese. In other words, how to be outstanding citizens not only for the good of the country but also out of respect for the Emperor.

After elementary school I entered normal school to become a teacher. I was 14 years old at the time. I always sat in the front of the classroom so I could hear everything the teacher said, even the things he mumbled under his breath and didn't want anyone to hear. Well, one day as I headed into the room with the other girls for history class, we noticed a newspaper clipping hanging on the back wall. It was an article about three Japanese soldiers sta¬tioned in China who had sacrificed themselves – made themselves human bombs – to break through the barbed wire that the Chinese had placed throughout their country to keep the Japanese from infiltrating. That was in 1932. The soldiers' bravery was written up in all the newspapers at the time. People even called them "heitai no kamisama" [soldier-gods].

While we were crowded at the back of the room reading this clipping, the teacher came in. He marched to the front of the room as we scrambled to our seats. Then I heard him mutter under his breath, "What on earth will the rest of the world think of us Japanese for doing such terrible things?" He didn't say this loud enough for everyone to hear, but I caught it because I was sit¬ting in the front of the classroom. Had the secret police overheard his remarks, they would've branded him a traitor.

After I graduated from normal school in 1933, I took my first teaching job in my hometown of Motobu Village. I was 19 years old. At that time, the war in Asia was growing bigger and bigger, and on the home front, we teachers had a lot of responsibilities. I remember taking some of the older students - the fifth and sixth graders - to the homes of families whose sons were off at war. We helped the families till the fields, collect firewood for their stoves, and do other chores that had gotten neglected since the young men were called off to service. In addition to these duties, we were responsible for participating in funeral processions for those who had died in battle and for taking part in town meetings where we, as leaders of the community, had to encourage people to support the war effort and work together for victory.

At school, too, there was hardly a free moment. When one of the male teachers or a former male graduate of the school was called off to war, we per¬formed a certain ritual. All of the students and teachers gathered together to form two lines running from the entrance of the school building to the front gate near the road. Then the new soldiers walked between the two lines of people who were waving flags and holding signs wishing the men good luck in battle. I remember we all sang a special song, too, for the occasion. We sang at the top of our lungs! We held so much respect for those men who were going off to war. All the boys at the time wanted to be soldiers just like them. They couldn't wait to be draped in Japanese flags and to walk off proudly to the cheers of us patriotic citizens.

When we finished cheering on the soldiers, we filed back into the school silently. I remember returning to the teachers room on one occasion and hearing a middle-aged male instructor next to me comment on the folly of sending our young men off to war when we knew they wouldn't come back. I was so surprised to hear someone say this. I turned toward him and asked, "What would make you say such a thing! Don't you know if the military police or the secret police heard you making such remarks, you could be hauled off to prison?" He didn't respond.

We had to watch what we said in those days. Sometimes plainclothesmen rode the trains and listened in on people's conversations. If they heard someone comment that Japan looked like it was losing the war, the police would tap that person and say, "Hey, you! Get off with me at the next stop." After that, the individual would be interrogated at police headquarters. Then the police would keep an eye on him afterward. On top of all that, he'd be forced to write a letter of regret explaining the things he said, why he said them, and that he was sorry for saying them. Yes, those years were fearful ones for us. I was forever telling the students about the glories of war, glamorizing it just like the government wanted us teachers to do. Personally I was afraid of not saying those sorts of things. After all, as a schoolteacher I was responsible for being patriotic.

When we received word of our successes in battle, we Japanese were elated. But when more and more women were becoming widowed, we knew we were slowly being defeated as a country. No one had to tell us that. And no one did. Reports about the condition of our soldiers were always optimistic; we were continually reminded of how proud we should be of them.

And the government kept hurling new patriotic slogans at us, things like, Kyokoku icchi [National Unity!], Jinchū hōkoku [Do Your Best for Your Coun¬try!], Jūgo o mamoru [Protect the Homefront!], and Umeyō fuyaseyō [Repro¬duce and Multiply!]. Did you know that in those days the Prime Minister himself even sent a letter of commendation to women who gave birth to ten children or more? She laughed.

I remember trying to do whatever I could as a citizen to support the war. I even went to Naha Port to see the soldiers off. I'll never forget the leather boots and khaki-colored uniforms the officers wore. Or the image of sailors standing on a boat as it pulled away from port. "Banzai, Banzai! " [Hurray! Hurray! ] they cried out. She stretched her arms in front of her, then lifted them over her head in demonstration. I was there as leader of the Girls' Youth Orga¬nization, a post I held from the time I was 15 until I turned 23. It was a group for unmarried women. We were responsible for cheering the soldiers on as they departed for the front lines or attending funerals for the ones who didn't survive. At these funerals the family had a white box in which the bones of the deceased were supposed to be contained. Japanese soldiers' remains were never shipped back here from overseas, so the families filled the boxes with stones to make it seem as if there were bones inside. There were even cases where a deceased soldier's friend would carry back a piece of his buddy's body, such as a finger, and present it to the family. And the relatives would cry in gratitude when they received such an offering. I guess they figured that any remembrance of the deceased soldier was better than nothing at all.

I also remember making comfort bags for the soldiers at the front. We young women always tried to send a care package out to someone we knew. In the letters we told the men things about home such as, "Sugarcane harvesting season has started," or "Everyone in your family is well and thinking about you." We also wrote messages like, "Fight hard for the country!" But we never told the men to die for the sake of the country.

We made senninbari for the soldiers, too. Do you know what senninbari are? They're good-luck belts made from cotton and embroidered with a thousand red stitches by a thousand different women. We used to take a piece of white cotton cloth about 30 centimeters in width and fold it in half. Nakamura-san picked up a piece of scratch paper and folded it to illustrate her words. Then, we put marks on the cloth, small lines running both vertically and horizontally. After that we asked women from the neighborhood, or female passersby on the street, to make a stitch along one of these lines with a strand of red thread. After each stitch they knotted the thread. This continued until one thousand different women had made a stitch in the cloth. Sometimes we let a woman make more than one stitch. For example, I had a friend back then who was born in the year of the tiger, so everyone thought she was a really strong person. That's why we let her do more than one stitch. In fact, I think she made eighteen stitches in the senninbari because she was 18 years old at the time. Generally we presented these senninbari to a special person, such as a brother or an uncle or a father. The bands symbolized our hope for the man's success in war.

I moved away from Okinawa for the first time in 1941. That was one year after I got married. My husband was a year older than I and was from the same village up north [Motobu Village]. He didn't have to go to war because he was sickly and didn't pass the physical for acceptance into the military. Instead, he went to the mainland for university. He planned to return to Okinawa to work as a teacher after graduation, but things didn't work out that way; there weren't any openings for teachers here at the time. So he took a job with Fuji Electric in Yokohama. Before I left to be with him in Yoko¬hama, we had a small wedding at my parents' house in Okinawa. We only invited about thirty close relatives to the wedding. It was during wartime, so we couldn't overdo things; it wouldn't be right.

The war was a tough time for all of us. I was working as a teacher in Kawasaki near Tokyo when the bombs were dropped on the city. What a scare that was! In the middle of a teachers' meeting at school, we heard a huge boom outside. A bomb had hit the nearby Nihon Kokan factory, the biggest factory in Kawasaki. The whole place was in flames. We ran outside, at first thinking the noise was just artillery practice by Japanese soldiers. But when we saw the flames, we looked up toward the sky and, sure enough, there was a plane with a star on the side. That was the sign of an American aircraft. What a shock it was to see that bomber! I remember being pregnant with my first child then, and the teachers warned me not to look up at the sky; they were afraid the sight would frighten my unborn baby.

I walked home alone from school that night. It was dark, but I could still see people passing me in the other direction. Most of them were on their way home from the hospital. When I saw the bandages they were wearing, I knew they were the ones hurt from the blast to that factory. That's when I really felt like I was experiencing war. It really is a war, isn't it? I asked myself. It wasn't the first time, though, that I truly felt scared. That happened when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and war was formally declared. When I heard that, I shook with fear. Up until that time I'd heard about declarations of war in history class, but this was the first time I'd heard it on the radio myself. I couldn't be afraid, though. I had to continue to tell the children in my class that Japan was isamashii [brave and courageous]; that our soldiers were fighting heroically. I also had to encourage them to use such slogans as, "Out with the enemy!" Of course the enemy at the time was America and England. And, as a teacher I was responsible for instructing the children to respect and honor the country and the Emperor. After all, that was a part of Tennoist education. I regret to this day that I had to say such things. She looked down at the table, sadly.

In 1944 I gave birth to my second child. That's when I had to stop teaching. When I had my first child, I was still able to work because my mother-in-law came from Okinawa to help us in Kawasaki. She lived with us and took care of the baby. But by the time I had my second child, there was no milk in Japan – not even condensed milk – so I had to stay home and nurse my baby. Every time I heard those sirens warning us of an air raid, I was terrified. I used to grab the baby and run for shelter. We could never get a full night's rest in those days because there was always an air raid.

Then on April 15, 1945, our house in Kawasaki burned down. A bomb hit the house next door, and the fire spread to our place. Nothing could be saved. I remember my husband grabbing hold of our eldest son while I cradled the baby in my arms. Then we pulled my husband's mother by the hand and ran out of the house. We had nowhere to go. There wasn't a big air-raid shelter or anything in the area. There were small ones, but nothing strong enough. So we headed toward town. People had started flocking there, so we moved in that direction, too, thinking we might be able to find a shelter to hide in. Now that I look back on things I realize we were open targets. Fortunately we were never hit.

Before our house burned down, my family was planning to go to Kyu¬shu. Lots of people were preparing evacuation routes at the time. Well, we were all set to go; we'd already packed our clothes and utensils and everything. Then the fire came. I can still see our suitcases there in the vestibule of the house, reduced to cinders. People had warned us that Kawasaki was an unsafe place, but we refused to listen. Now we owned nothing but the clothes on our backs.

We decided there wasn't much else we could do but leave that area as quickly as possible, so we boarded a train for Fujisawa in Kanagawa where I had a cousin. We rented a small room at a farmhouse and stayed there from April 1945 until November of that same year. After that, we returned to Yoko¬hama where we found lodging in barracks that the Japanese naval officers had formerly occupied. Ironic, isn't it, that those military buildings managed to survive the fires! We stayed there for almost a year until we were able to get on a boat taking us back home to Okinawa.

While we were in Yokohama, my husband had a job helping people get repatriated to Okinawa. He assisted them with the paperwork and other formalities they needed to go through before they could board one of the boats to the island. I stayed at home and took care of the children and tried to keep my family fed. There was a dumping ground nearby that the U.S. military used, and I remember walking there and gathering together some of the wooden crates their supplies had been packed in. I burned the wood, then placed a pot of seawater on top. This evaporated the water, leaving be¬hind the salt, which was a necessity for our diet. I also combed the beach for shellfish and seaweed.

In July 1946, we were finally able to head back to Okinawa. We took a boat from Yokohama to Nagoya where we stayed in an empty factory while we waited for an American ship to take us to Okinawa. That factory in Nagoya was a huge place. There was one large room that could hold about one hundred people. The room was partitioned into sections, and each family occu¬pied one section. Of course the sections weren't very big; just enough room for us to lie down and sleep. Thankfully there was a toilet down the hall that we all shared. It was a Japanese-style one, not a Western one, so basically just a hole in the ground with porcelain surrounding it.

While we were at this factory, we had gohan (rice) and canned vegetables like konbu (kelp) and daikon (radish) to eat. Those items had been stored in warehouses by the Japanese military during the war. Most of it was pretty old; I remember the rice was hard. She grimaced. I guess we spent close to one month at that factory until the boat taking us to Okinawa showed up. I thought it would never come.

We arrived in Okinawa one week later, docking at Kitanakagusuku in the central part of the island. It's where Kubasaki High School is located now. We stayed in Quonset huts at a relocation camp there. Actually I don't like to refer to those places as "relocation camps," but more like "detention camps" because we were forced to stay there. I remember the Americans provided us with food during the week we were at the camp, things like bread with jam and butter, boiled potatoes, canned goods, and tea.

I don't remember the camp being heavily patrolled by American soldiers. And I don't think it was surrounded by barbed wire or anything. It's not like there was anywhere for us to run away to, after all! I'll admit, though, we liked to sneak out into the fields to collect sugarcane from time to time. I'll never forget how good that tasted.

There wasn't much to do at the camps. We just tried to pass the time by talking with one another until we were permitted to return to our home villages. Sometimes a person from the village government office stopped by to give us news about home and about our relatives who were still living. I can't begin to tell you how excited we were to get news like that from the hometown! After all, we hadn't heard anything about the conditions in Okinawa for so long.

Then the day finally came when we were able to return to Motobu, my hometown. As we bumped along the street in the back of a U.S. military truck, I remember being shocked at how much things had changed. The roads had been widened for military use, and all along the sides of the road were hundreds of burnt-down houses, a little flame flickering inside each of them. "Gosh," I remember thinking, "Okinawa really was devastated during the war, wasn't it?" Then suddenly I heard the sound of a sanshin [traditional three-stringed Okinawan musical instrument]. I craned my neck to see a bunch of Okinawans sitting outside on the ground watching a play. In the immediate postwar period, people put on shibai [plays] as a way of passing the time and cheering themselves up. When I heard the sound of that sanshin in the midst of all the disaster, I got choked up. "At least the Okinawan spirit wasn't completely destroyed by the war," I said to myself.

As we approached my village, I started to get impatient with how slowly the truck was moving. I wanted to jump from the back of it and run toward the village where my mother would be waiting. When the truck finally stopped, I climbed out the back and yelled for my mother as loudly as I could. "Anma! Anma! " ["mother" in Okinawan dialect]. Just like I used to say as a child. And lots of people came running. There was no answer from my mother, though. Everyone just crowded around me and remained silent. No one knew how to tell me she had died. So I asked them directly. "She didn't survive, did she?" That's when someone ran to get my elder sister and cousins, and they told me how my mother died.

Apparently when news that the Americans had landed nearby in Nago City on April 5, 1945, reached the village, people panicked and started heading toward the mountains. My mother had already lost her sight at this point and had grown considerably weaker in the cave where she and my relatives had been hiding. She couldn't go on with everyone else, so she told them to leave and at least get the kids to safety. When things calmed down, she suggested, they could come back and get her. They agreed and left. That night my mother took her last breath in the cave all alone.

One of my aunts used her wicker trunk as a casket to bury my mother in. Then some relatives took the body away to bury it. The bombing was so heavy on the roads at the time, though, that the women in the burial procession had to turn back while the men continued walking toward the tomb where they intended to place my mother's body. They didn't burn the body, though, since the smoke from the fire would've alerted the enemy to their position.

One month later, in May 1945, the U.S. military came through with bull¬dozers to widen the roads. They needed to enlarge them so transport vehicles could pass by. More than twenty graves located parallel to this road were uprooted as a result of the construction. My mother's was one of them. A few of my cousins went there hoping to collect some of her bones or at least find a piece of her kimono. But the U.S. military told them their search would in¬terfere with traffic and they should go home. So my mother's bones are still buried somewhere in the ground up there in Motobu.

When we returned to Okinawa from the mainland in 1946, it was just three months after I'd given birth to my third child. Thankfully my relatives on the island helped us get settled. They built us a small house in Motobu, nothing fancy, just a hut with a thatched roof. Then, right when we thought we could take a breather, my husband, eldest son, and mother-in-law con¬tracted malaria. I took care of them.

First came the trembling, followed by the high fevers. The people around us told me about a certain concoction which involved boiling leaves from a pomegranate tree. Well, my mother-in-law and son got serious cases of diarrhea from it and were on the verge of death. My husband, who should've been the strongest of the three, wasn't able to move. He couldn't get up from the bed, let alone walk. I remember my son crying out to him for help, but my husband couldn't move a muscle. It broke my heart. It seemed that since my return to Okinawa I was going to lose everyone I loved. I couldn't help thinking that way.

When fall came and the weather got cooler, the sicknesses seemed to subside, but my husband still wasn't able to do much more than wake up in the morning and sleep at night. We didn't know if he was going to be able to walk again. You know, before the war we'd never heard of malaria on the island. It seemed to me just one more parting gift the war left us. It was just one more thing for us to be angry about.

In November 1946, I returned to my teaching job. After the war there weren't many teachers in Okinawa because most of the male instructors had gone off to war and hadn't survived. So, naturally I received official orders regarding my next teaching appointment right away.

I needed to find someone to watch my children once I went back to work, so I decided to go from house to house in the area asking if anyone could help me. It was embarrassing to walk around soliciting help, but I felt I had no choice. Unfortunately everyone was too busy with their own duties to look after my kids, so I ended up carrying my baby on my back to school. I remember walking home from school in the evenings and gathering what¬ever food I could on the way. In each of my hands I held something edible, and on my back I carried my child. It was a long thirty-five minute walk. I knew my baby was maturing healthily when I could feel his weight growing heavier everyday.

The school where I resumed teaching was a newly built log structure with a thatched roof and walls. It had a dirt floor and when it rained, the whole room got muddy. And the roof wasn't very sturdy; it could easily blow off during a typhoon. And sure enough it did. Thankfully the parents came to the rescue and helped fix it.

The parents did so much in those days to help get the schools back in or¬der. Some of the students' fathers helped out by making desks for the chil¬dren to use. Those desks were all sorts of shapes and sizes. The fathers didn't have time to construct chairs, so we had the students sit on empty ammuni¬tion boxes. Of course the children didn't have proper school attire in those years, so they used to wear baggy clothes their mothers sewed from U.S. military surplus material. I'll never forget watching them running around out¬side in those clothes, their bare feet stained red from the claylike ground. And to think about how good life was for them before the war! As I watched the students playing outside, I couldn't help but worry about the kind of future they'd have.

It was important for us teachers to get the students back in school as soon as possible after the war. That's why we started petitioning the American Occupation government early on for adequate school buildings and supplies for the kids. They provided us with the bare minimum: thatched roof huts with leaky roofs and mud floors. "That's the best we can do right now," they told us. They insisted they needed to think about economic issues, such as improving our daily life, before they worried about educational ones. So, we Okinawans decided to appeal to the mainland Japanese to help us out. Chōbyō Yara, the head of the Kyōshokuiinkcai [Okinawa Teachers Association] here at the time, was determined to go to the mainland and ask people for financial assistance. He'd already written to schools on mainland Japan explaining the poor situation in Okinawa, and many people up there started collecting money to help us here on the island. Ultimately, though, the Oc¬cupation government denied him a passport to travel to Tokyo. The Americans were going to permit Yara Sensei to use the money raised on the mainland to purchase supplies the schools needed, but they weren't going to allow him to travel to the mainland to collect money for improving the buildings. The Occupation government just didn't want to lose face. After all, what would the Japanese think if the Americans couldn't even provide adequate school buildings for the Okinawans?

So Yara Sensei's hands were tied. He couldn't do anything but ask each school on the island to prepare a list of supplies it needed. Most teachers wanted items like a piano or other large equipment they'd been unable to afford. Well, the schools got what they requested. I remember the children shouting, "Banzai! Banzai! " [Hurray!] when a piano was delivered to the school. Now can you imagine a big, shiny piano inside one of those thatched roof huts? Really, the Americans had to do something. It looked ridiculous. So they rebuilt our schools. They constructed concrete ones that wouldn't blow over during typhoon season. And they were big enough to house those glossy pianos. In the end, everyone was happy.

After the war so many things were in short supply here, including reading material. Sometimes we were lucky enough to get hold of some old magazines or pieces of newspapers. When we did, we were thrilled! One of the teachers at school even discovered a cache of books that someone had hidden in a cave and brought them to school. Those books were like nutrition after a long famine.

Lots of the teachers liked to read at night, but we didn't have electricity, so we used empty beer cans the American GIs discarded. We poured heavy oil into them, then cut up pieces of tent and ignited them for flame. Often the teachers stayed up all night wading through books and copying manu¬scripts. When they went to school the next morning, their faces were black from the soot the "lamps" had given off? We didn't have soap at the school since this was just another thing in short supply, so they washed their faces using plain old water. This never got all the dirt off. And we didn't have mirrors, so they had no idea what their appearance was like. Sometimes we let them walk around all day like that!

Things were tough for us here in that first decade following the war. And they didn't get any easier. Even though conditions improved economically, we still had to deal with social and political problems associated with the American Occupation.

In my opinion the Occupation was a terrible experience. I don't mean to say all of the military personnel here were bad. But the U.S. bases just grew larger and larger during those years [1945 to 1972], and more and more GIs seemed to arrive here daily, especially in the 196os when the Vietnam War was raging. The atmosphere on Okinawa changed dramatically. Not only was our island used as a launching pad for American missions into Vietnam, it was also a playground for U.S. soldiers needing rest and relaxation from the war. There was so much crime here at that time, lots of robberies and even murders. And we couldn't even arrest any of these GIs! They just ran behind the confines of the bases, and we couldn't do a thing about it. The Okinawan police had no jurisdiction inside the U.S. military bases.

I remember holding sit-down strikes with other members of the Teachers Association in the area around Kadena Air Base. It was our way of saying we opposed the military existence here and felt it threatened us rather than pro¬tected us like it was supposed to. Every time there was an accident, such as an airplane crash or an attack against a person, we drove or bused to the base after school and surrounded it. I remember American soldiers approaching the fences with dogs in an attempt to scare us off, but we didn't budge. The B-52 bombers used to fly down really low, low enough for us to see the pilot's face. I'll never forget the roar of those planes! We used to scream up at them, "Go home Americans!" as loudly as we could. There was never any violence at these rallies, by either us or the U.S. military. It was just a chance for us Okinawans to show our dissatisfaction and discontent.

I guess the worst thing about the Occupation period was the way our hu¬man rights were violated. If we protested against the American military presence here, we risked being blacklisted. In fact, I'm sure I was on some sort of blacklist the Americans had at the time. She smiled awkwardly. I remember putting in an application for a passport in 1963 to go to the Japanese main¬land for a seminar on teaching writing to children. I was denied the passport for no apparent reason. The Teachers Association petitioned on my behalf. "Why can't an Okinawan woman go to Osaka for academic reasons?" they asked. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with an individual woman traveling to the mainland for research purposes. I guess there was no logical way to deny me permission, so I was eventually allowed to go.

One thing about this trip to the mainland that I remember vividly was how much the people there wanted American dollars. See, dollars could be used anywhere in the world, and Japan knew this. The mainland Japanese were trying to get their hands on as much foreign currency as possible and saw Okinawa as a doru bako [dollar box]. I remember going to the bank in Kobe 12 one day to exchange some dollars to yen. I wanted to shop for omiyage [souvenirs] before returning to Okinawa. Well, when I announced my request at the bank, they took me into a private room and served me a cup of coffee as I waited. All this for a simple twenty-dollar exchange! They were obsessed with getting hold of dollars up there.

Throughout the Occupation, the Americans were busy teaching us about democracy and tripartite government, but they didn't necessarily practice what they preached. There were two governments here at the time: the Ryūkyū Seifu [Government of the Ryukyu Islands] and the America Minseifu [American Government]. Although the Ryukyu Government comprised elected Okinawan officials, the American Government here still had the final say on which laws passed and which ones didn't. The Americans even handpicked the Okinawans they wanted in high governmental positions.

The American Government and the Ryukyu Government shared the same office building in Naha. It was a four-story structure located right in front of the current Prefectural Government Office. She pointed out the window in the direction of the office. Well, the Okinawans occupied the first two stories of the building, and the Americans occupied the third and fourth floors. The Americans even installed an elevator to transport themselves up to these floors. I don't know of any other building at the time that had an elevator in it. It was unheard of. Plus, the third and fourth floors were equipped with heaters and air conditioners. The first and second floors had nothing. There was even a helicopter-landing pad on the roof of the building."

Do you know where Route 58 is? Well, it used to be called Route 1 during the Occupation years. At that time, American military vehicles were given priority on the road. Okinawans in private cars or taxis weren't allowed to pass American vehicles. If we overtook them on the road, we were stopped and reprimanded. So we had to ride in the wake of their oily exhaust fumes until the trucks steered into Kadena Air Base or wherever they were going. Then we could finally zip by!

Gradually we Okinawans started to get fed up with the behavior of the American occupiers here. I guess that's why we were looking forward to re¬version to Japan in 1972. We thought our problems would go away after we were reunited with the mainland. But, unfortunately, reunion with Japan was only the beginning of more problems.

Reversion took place on May 15, 1972. It was one of the saddest days in our island's history. That might seem like a strange thing to say since I've talked about how much we wanted to return to the motherland in the postwar pe¬riod. But we Okinawans thought reversion would bring with it a removal of the military bases from the island and equality with the mainland in terms of the standard of living. It brought neither.

I was so excited for the 15th of May. We Okinawans had been planning to decorate the streets with lanterns or flags, something to visually celebrate our return to the motherland. But when the 15th rolled around, things didn't feel very celebratory on the island. We discovered that conditions weren't going to change here at all. It was a pitiful situation. Our parades of celebration turned into processions of protest.

It was sort of symbolic that day, too, that it rained so hard. The drops were this big. She made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. The rain pelted us relentlessly. My tears mixed with the rain until I couldn't tell which was which after a while. And my shoes were soaked! I remember how they squished as I walked along the street with the others. For us Okinawans, that day was one of the saddest days in our history. But up in Tokyo, it was a day of celebration. The people there saw reversion as a political victory.

Something that caused panic here around the time of reversion was the ex¬change rate we received when we converted our dollars into Japanese yen. Right after the war we used a special currency on Okinawa called "B yen," and then in 1958, we started using American dollars. The Japanese government led us to believe we'd receive an exchange rate of 360 yen to the dollar after reversion, but in the end we only got 305 yen to the dollar. Because of this, prices here went up dramatically. We heard about this poor exchange rate only a few days before reversion on the 15th. Well, the announcement caused a panic. People started running to stores to stock up on everything they could. I remember seeing people coming out of grocery stores carrying crates filled with instant coffee and canned goods. Everyone was worried about their livelihood after reversion. The head of the Okinawa Women's Association at the time, Etsu Miyazato, even stood in front of stores with a megaphone requesting shoppers not to buy up everything.

Shortly before reversion, Miyazato-san traveled to Tokyo to consult with Prime Minister Sato about the anxiety people were feeling over reuniting with mainland Japan. Many people wanted to make sure they'd receive a favorable exchange rate of 360 yen to the dollar like they were told. Prime Minister Sato assured her the Okinawans didn't need to worry about the ex¬change rate; the government wasn't going to take advantage of them. Well, he never kept that promise.

Naturally reversion brought about an influx of Japanese stores to the island. When we heard that the Japanese were going to construct large grocery and department stores here after 1972, we knew this would put the small mom-and-pop stores on the island out of business. The people who were especially concerned about this change were the women who worked in the market in downtown Naha. After the war, hundreds of newly widowed women flocked to the capital to sell handmade goods, vegetables, and fruit. This was the beginning of the market near Kokusai Dōri [International Street] that exists today. So, in an effort to preserve the livelihood of these women, Okinawans banded together and appealed to the management of these big stores to postpone their grand openings for about one year. This would give us time to come up with a solution to the problem.

Eventually we asked the management if they'd consider operating their stores at half the size they originally planned and if they'd allot some space in their buildings for local merchants to sell their wares. We also requested they employ as many local hires as possible. The stores agreed to our requests by postponing their opening by seven months and by allotting space to these vendors. This situation continued for a few years, until some of the merchants returned to the market where many Okinawans preferred to shop. They liked the friendly service and rapport between the vendors and the buyers better than the artificiality of the department store atmosphere.

Japanese construction companies, too, decided to do business on Oki¬nawa at the time. About two or three years before reversion, lots of Japanese construction companies made their way here to inspect the island. They wanted to build beach resorts and bigger highways, so they started buying up land and property and destroying the surrounding mountains. Many people, especially those up north in Nago City, refused to sell their land, preferring to protect the natural beauty of the area instead of watching it crumble away. Plus, we Okinawans were taught in school and at home that God [kamisama] exists in the mountains. We shouldn't anger him by disrupting his home. Well, as time went by, many people in Nago started to give in and began selling their land to construction companies or working construction and road-crew jobs to facilitate the development of the resorts. They must've been offered a lot of money by the mainland Japanese to do these things or they wouldn't have changed their minds. It's a shame that attendance at PTA [Parent-Teacher Association] meetings and village events dropped off as people were too busy making extra money at these side jobs to participate. This hurt human relations among the people in the area. The whole development scheme hurt the environment as well. After the mountains were cleared away, soil started flowing into the sea. Now every time it rains, the sea gets dirty.

In March 1974, Nakamura-san retired from her forty year teaching career and took a position as vice-president of the Okinawa Women's Association. In her role as vice-president, she was deeply involved with the Ichi Feet Movement (Okinawa Historical Film Society), an organization designed to spread information about the Battle of Okinawa to people throughout the world. In June 1986, she retired from the Women's Association and joined the Ichi Feet Movement as secretary, a position she holds currently. Nakamura-san talked about her involvement with Ichi Feet, and the organization's work in creating films about the way.

Ichi Feet was created in 1983 to spread information about the Battle of Okinawa to people around the world. World War II, in particular the Battle of Okinawa, was so terrible that many of us on the island wanted to tell the world about it. Tens of thousands of Okinawans lost their lives and why? We were a peaceful nation for centuries before our island was sacrificed to save the mainland. It doesn't make sense. It's hard not to feel bitter about the suf¬fering we had to endure.

The goal of lchi Feet from the beginning was to purchase films and photos taken in Okinawa by American photographers during the war. Did you know there are thousands of feet of film from Okinawa and mainland Japan located in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.? We heard about these films from Okinawan exchange students who went to the States to study and from Japanese professors who had done research in Washington, D.C. Well, the members of Ichi Feet decided to purchase copies of some of these films and use them here to educate people about the war.

The Ichi Feet group was inspired by a similar group in Hiroshima, Japan, called the Ten Feet Movement. The people of Hiroshima had a fund-raising campaign to purchase footage from films taken by American photographers after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. They calculated they could purchase ten feet of footage for one thousand yen [approximately eight dollars], and so campaigned on this slogan.

We decided to do the same thing here in Okinawa. We knew one foot of film from Washington cost around one hundred yen [approximately eighty cents], so we used "Ichi feet" [one foot] as our slogan. Then we solicited donations throughout Okinawa to help pay for the cost of this footage. We figured everyone, even students, could afford to donate one hundred yen to help us out.

Ichi Feet's first film, Okinawa sen: Mirai e no shōgen [The Battle of Oki¬nawa: Testimony for the Future] was completed in May 1986. That's when the group started showing it around the country for free. Telephone and mail requests from people asking us to show the film at their school or organization came pouring into the office. From the first time the documentary was shown, it received terrific reviews, and purchases of the video were overwhelming!

In 1988, the English version of the film was ready. We got requests for the film from groups in places as far away as South America and the United States. We even ended up sending copies of the film to organizations in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Honolulu before we visited those cities in 1988. You see, that year the United Nations held the Third Session of the United Nations Special Meeting on Disarmament in New York. Our Ichi Feet group attended as a nongovernmental organization (NGO). While we were in New York, we submitted a copy of the English version of the film to the UN. Then we traveled to cities on the West Coast to hold showings of the film there.

We had an interesting experience in Honolulu. There were lots of Japanese-American viewers, along with a fair number of people from other countries. At the end of the film, an elderly white woman approached me and, through the aid of an interpreter, said she'd come to the showing to op¬pose it. She had wondered why there was a "Jap movie" about the war playing. Then, as she watched the film, her feelings changed. "I was all choked up when I saw the suffering the common Okinawan people had to endure during the war. You should show this film all over the world," she recommended as tears streamed down her face.

"Still living?" I asked, confused. "They died in the war, just like the film showed."

He looked bewildered. "You mean, it's not like the real movies where the people are killed on the screen but then they're OK when the movie's finished?"

I explained to him that this documentary portrayed what really happened to people; that the individuals on the screen weren't actors, but real human beings who had died in the war. "When you go home tonight ask your parents or your grandparents about the war and see what they tell you," I en¬couraged him.

The boy asked his grandfather that night if the war was as bad as what he'd seen on the screen that afternoon.

"No, it wasn't," his grandfather replied. "It was worse."

I heard about this from the boy's mother who called here the next day and told me what happened. She thanked me for creating the film and showing it to the students. She said her entire family was going to go and see the film together. That's what I wanted. I hoped different generations of people would watch together and then decide to talk about the war. I also hoped people would be inspired by the film to begin reading more and more about the Battle of Okinawa.

In 1995, Ichi Feet produced a second film called, Document Okinawa Sen, [Document: The Battle of Okinawa]. It was created in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Like the first film, it was well received. We're even considering doing a third film about life in the relocation camps throughout Okinawa in the early postwar period. I think it's impor¬tant to let people around the world know what happened here on the island. Most people know about the tragedies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few people seem to be aware of the catastrophe that occurred on Okinawa. We need to spread information about the situation here on the island fifty years ago so that history doesn't repeat itself.

I think the American Occupation has had both a positive and negative effect on Okinawa. Even though I'm against war and the existence of the bases here, that doesn't mean I'm against Americans as individuals. I think people often confuse the two and think that because some of us protest against the American presence, were anti-American. That's not the case. I like it when the Americans, military or otherwise, show an interest in Oki¬nawan customs and traditions. There are a lot of festivals and community events in Okinawa and everyone on the island is invited to participate in them. Plus, we're all human beings, aren't we? And, for the present time, we have to live in this small region together, so we should try to get along for the most part.

I guess there's a bit of inconsistency in everyone's feelings. Here I am say¬ing I'm against the military presence on the island, but I'm happy when I see that Americans want to learn something about our culture. It's complicated, that's for sure. When I look at military personnel I think of them as human beings, just like anyone else. But then when I think about the types of things they do each day, and the sort of war drills they practice, it makes me angry.

Because of the American influence on the island, we Okinawans have been exposed to American arts, the English language, and different ways of living. Personally speaking, my outlook on life has become broader, and I've devel¬oped a more international way of looking at things. I learned a lot about a foreign culture without ever leaving Okinawa.

Those were the good effects of the American Occupation. Of course, the bad influence is the concentration of so many military bases on Okinawa. It bothers me that the men and women behind the steel fences use weap¬ons and perform all sorts of war simulation exercises, especially considering Okinawa's history of peace. I think this type of training can change people's behavior. For example, consider that rape case from three years ago." The mother of one of the defendants refused to believe her son could commit such a heinous crime. She insisted he was a good boy, that he used to go to church every Sunday when he lived at home. I believe the woman when she says her son was a decent boy; I think it was the military that changed him, though. How could he not be affected by the drills they perform? They actually learn how to kill and hurt people. That's what I'm opposed to.

I blame both the American government and the Japanese government equally for the problems Okinawa is dealing with today. There needs to be more discussion about Okinawa when representatives from our two coun¬tries get together. If the American military were to leave the island, I think the Japanese government owes it to the Okinawans to help us out financially. A complete American withdrawal would undoubtedly hurt the economy here. But that shouldn't deter us from protesting against the removal of the bases. It isn't natural for a tiny island like ours to house 75 percent of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I don't think we need the bases at all. I mean, who wants to invade Okinawa? Many people say North Korea poses a threat in Asia. What do we have here that they might want, though? Okinawa isn't a rich place. And we aren't a threat militarily. I think if we're targeted now it's because, ironically, there's a foreign military presence here.

Okinawa is blessed geographically. It's a subtropical island surrounded by various Asian countries. What a chance for international exchange! In fact, when Okinawa was known as the Ryukyu Kingdom, it enjoyed diplomatic and trade relations with other countries such as Taiwan, China, the Philippines, all the way down to Java (Indonesia). That's why there's a heavy Asian influence in our music, art, and culture here. In fact, when I visited Indonesia and Malaysia, I went to a folk music recital and was surprised at how much the music resembled Okinawan music. I thought it was Okinawan music. I hope we can develop close relationships with these countries again like we had in the past.

At the same time we need to protect our own culture and have pride in things that are truly Okinawan. I think young people on the island are becoming more and more conscious of this. In fact, these days there's even an Okinawa Hōgen Taikai [an Okinawan dialect-speaking contest] on the island. And to think that in the prewar period our students were forbidden from using the dialect! It was all part of mainland Japan's policy of assimilation. Those students who were overheard speaking in dialect in the prewar period were forced to wear a sign around their necks labeling them as dialect speakers. The way to get rid of the sign was by getting another student to speak in dialect. Sort of like policing one another, huh?

We Okinawans have always been made to feel inferior by the Japanese. This has been going on since the Meiji era. But nowadays I think young Okinawans especially are proud of their heritage; they have confidence in their ability to succeed, just like the mainland Japanese. Lots more young people these days are trying to get jobs here after they graduate from college. Back in the 1960s when Japan was experiencing its period of high economic growth, almost all of the young people on the island wanted to work in Tokyo. These days, though, more of them are staying here, or at least returning to Okinawa after a brief time on the mainland.

You asked me once if I ever get tired of protesting, sick of standing up for what I truly believe in. Never. I'll always stick to my beliefs. If I were to quit now, that would mean I lost. I can't do that. I experienced one of life's greatest tragedies: war. Maybe that's hard for people who've never experienced such a horrendous thing to understand. But I never want something like that to happen again. So, for the sake of my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren, I'll continue in my attempt to educate people all over the world about the folly of war and the beauty of peace.

Keyso, Ruth Ann. Women of Okinawa: Nine Voices from a Garrison Island. Ch. 3. “Fumiko Nakimara.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000; 33-53.