I awoke to my last day with my now beloved Mazda Demio rental car. The return date for my rental car is one of the things I made a mistake on. My initial return date was July 20, although I wouldn’t be leaving Okinawa until the evening of July 23. I thought I’d be fine without a car for my last three days in Naha, the capital city, but I could see once my adventure got underway, I was once again mistaken about something.
Since you can’t just call and get a question as specific as extending the return date of your rental car answered due to inadequate Japanese/English and English/Japanese language skills, the best/only way is via email and the ToCoo Car Rental Company doesn’t like email from the likes of hotmail. My husband jumped in once again to send an email on my behalf to ToCoo to extend my return date until July 22. I thought my last day in Naha would be just fine without a rental car and that I would just call a takushi to take me to the airport, which I did end up doing. ToCoo replied I could keep my rental car until the 22nd. This was a once in a lifetime journey so I may not be able to use the wisdom about rental car return dates I now have again, but if I ever have a “twice in a lifetime” opportunity, I will access this wisdom and plan accordingly or if anyone ever asks me what I think about rental car return dates, I will share my opinion.
I will try to explain what my room at the Super Hotel on the tail end of my trip looks like, but I think we can all use our imaginations about what a band like Motley Crue or the Grateful Dead might do to a room, and you have what my room looked like at this point. I had been putting off totally unpacking and repacking my acquired things and the things I’d taken with me to begin with. I knew my friend had offered to mail back to the states whatever did not fit, even though I’d purchased a new Hanes zip around, rolling suitcase to check as my second checked bag. You might think I’d tackle this important job today, as I would be leaving tomorrow. This comes to mind – “Why do today what you can put off ‘til tomorrow?” I justified the decision to wait on this big job even further by reminding myself I only had my rental car until the end of business today and shouldn’t, therefore, “waste” time by doing something like unpacking and repacking right this instant.
When quandaries like this confuse and make one anxious, the confused and anxious go down to the friendly breakfast buffet in the Super Hotel’s lobby and sit with karate masters from all over the world and drink iced jasmine tea and eat noodles and miso soup and rice and stir fry with vegetables and the Okinawan delicacy introduced by the Americans after World War II, Spam.
That’s right, Spam. In the a little bit bigger at the bottom than at the top tin. I have eaten a bit of Spam in my life, when I was little and usually sliced and fried in an iron skillet. I have thoroughly enjoyed the bits of Spam I’ve eaten here and there since I arrived on Okinawa, because what’s not to like about this totally delicious pork product? On Okinawa it is displayed in a place of honor next to the Okinawa only products like the delicious cookies, salt, sugar cane products, fish, shiikuwasa juice, sake, and pineapples. All that, and Spam sitting proudly next to it. Spam appears here in stir fry champaru, on top of bowls of Soba, and in onigiri as filling. I will never again pass a can of Spam in the supermarket without thinking of Okinawa and I might just purchase some for myself and my family, as this delicious food is terribly underrated in the United States.
Once I’d eaten my fill at the breakfast buffet and eavesdropped on several conversations spoken in languages I didn’t understand a word of, I went over to say hello to my friends Carol the beautiful and Yonashiro the ever helpful. By the time I would leave Okinawa, I’d have spent a total of five nights at the Super Hotel businessman’s hotel, three nights at the front end and two nights on the tail end.
I couldn’t have anticipated it would be possible to make friends in a place that I had assumed before arriving would be rather sterile and impersonal. The Super Hotel and the people there are neither sterile nor impersonal. This place and these people welcomed me every time I walked through its double sets of automatic sliding glass doors and the people at the desk greeted me with genuine smiles and cups of iced jasmine tea and packages of the thinnest and crispiest Okinawa cookies you’ve ever seen and they were there to help me with every issue that arose from long distance calling cards to the unfortunate computer hard drive incident to taxis to directions and, once again, on this island and in a very short time, you make friends in spite of, or maybe even because of, the language barrier.
I went back to room 4015 after breakfast and got myself together for the day of sightseeing. I got my daypack ready, my car keys, my borrowed maps and sunglasses. My plan was to see the Peace Memorial Park, as I had heard this World War II memorial is powerful and there are monuments erected by every prefecture in the whole of Japan and the names of every human being lost in Okinawa’s battle are listed on monuments. I was also determined to see the Himeyuri Monument and the Japanese Underground Naval Headquarters. Everything I wanted to see was south of the Super Hotel and because of where one page of my map ended and another began, it was a little difficult to determine just how far some of it might be.
I went down to the lobby and told my friends there where I was headed and I was given a brochure in Japanese with a 10% off coupon for the Underground Naval Headquarters. I was also told I could just turn right onto the road in front of the hotel and the UNH would be fairly close. I questioned this quite a bit, in case I might be misunderstanding since the map’s version, as far as I could tell, would have taken me an entirely different route. No, Aki insisted, I should turn right and veer left at the pink building and look for the signs and I would come right to it. Okay.
I turned right and right after that is where I became unsure of the directions. Was that the building where I should have veered left? I ended up turning into what I thought was a road, but was actually it was some kind of venue with tons of people walking to a building from their cars and this pedestrian traffic made it a time consuming feat to drive back to the actual road. And I’d made this turn just to avoid the expressway up ahead, which I didn’t want to accidentally get on and not know how to get off and spend 700 yen in the process. The good thing about Okinawa is there are overhead, official looking signs to various sights, monuments and destinations and these signs are all in both Japanese and English. So if a sign said “Manzamo Point 300 meters,” I had to say okay that’s about 3/4 of the way around the track at school and then I’d know about when to turn.
Part of the problem I had with my first destination, the Underground Naval Headquarters, was the sign directed me to turn right and it gave the number of meters and the main road was making a sharp curve to the left right about then and there were two very close together roads that weren’t roads, but looked rather like alleys. I picked one of the roads at random and it turned out to be one of those tricky roads that starts out looking kind of like a road, but then narrows to an alley with concrete walls on either side and then narrows to something narrower than an alley with concrete walls on either side. These are the “roads” that make me wish for something way smaller than my tiny Demio. I had to back down this road when I made the decision I was on the wrong road until I came to a little driveway I could turn around in and then hope I didn’t meet any other cars or people on this alley before I could get back to the main road.
Once back to the main road, I turned onto road choice B, the road not first chosen. This road would prove to be not much different from the first choice in that it narrowed and narrowed again. This time I did get to meet up with an oncoming vehicle driven by a smiling driver that did end up backing up after seeing my shrugged shoulders and my grimacing face that said “I’m so sorry but I don’t have the courage or know how to back this little Demio up on this alley that is so narrow my mirrors are almost brushing the concrete walls on either side of me and then I’d have to back some more into a driveway to let you by, so if you could please back up, that would be so kind and I promise to pay it forward at some other time when I feel more confident?” This road turned out to be not much different from the first road choice, except for the signs. There were some small signs with bold print kanji. It had to be kanji and not hiragana because I could have made out the hiragana, but there was something about this kanji and my intuition told me this kanji was directing me to the Underground Naval Headquarters, so I continued to follow these bold print kanji signs based solely on this intuition. Well, actually it was intuition and the fact that I could not have backed my way off this road if my life depended on it, but I did have a strong feeling about the signs.
Eventually, this little alley/road led me up a good hill and up and up some more and when I turned the corner, I saw panoramic view of a good bit of the city of Naha and suddenly, the road widened to a bona fide road and there on my right was the beginning of the UNH park proper. This place was groomed and tended and there was a large parking lot that was deserted except for one other car and I parked and got out. I walked past the two little shops with the refreshments and souvenirs and up the hill to the very top, passing some beautiful tombs on the way. At the top of the hill, I took photos of every vista, shooting then turning a bit and shooting another and turning until I had a 360 degree picture of the views at the top of this hill. I saw the round building that would be the UNH entrance down the hill a bit and walked on down there. At this point, I don’t really think I need to say how much I had sweated and how nice it would be if this round building turned out to be air conditioned, but being hot is just part of the experience and so is sweating and I don’t mind it at all because it is just so nice to be here. As hard as it might be to imagine, that is the honest truth.
This building is very nice and modern looking and well maintained and slightly semi air conditioned, but that is not important at all because when I go inside I’m not thinking about how hot it is and how hot I am at all. Once inside this building, I found myself in a single big round room and this big round room at the Underground Naval Headquarters is lined with black and white World War II photographs and these most of these photographs are of American soldiers with Okinawans of every age after the battle on Okinawa. These photographs, in the UNH, portray the American soldiers as heroes after this bloody and devastating battle. There are photos of Americans feeding babies and carrying children and wounded citizens and sitting with old people.
I know how I felt to see these images, but I couldn’t help but wonder how the people from the mainland feel when they see that the images chosen for the entrance to the Japanese Underground Naval Headquarters are of Americans being kind to Okinawans.
I spent quite a bit of time in this big round room before I walked down the stairs to the lower level where there is a desk to buy tickets and a few other souvenirs. I was given a brochure in English, but as I found in many other places I’d been, much of the other information along the way was in Japanese only. From the ticket desk, I turned into the museum where there were photographs and relics and hand written letters and documents and all this information is in Japanese only. I know I could glean much more from my visit if I were on a tour, but this trip is not a tour type trip and I am left to interpret what I see on a base level. This was a powerful experience.
From the museum, I walked to the entrance to the Underground Headquarters. The entrance is a landing at the top of flights of stairs leading downward, downward. The stairway is dark and the ceiling is curved and arched at the top and barely high enough to stand up in. Graphically bright and light in this dark entrance are the thousands and thousands of paper origami crane chains hung in strands and bundles on either side of the entrance.
My camera is not sophisticated enough, or maybe my technique is not advanced enough, but my photos do not do justice with the dim available light to the colorful cranes. In my mind, each of these cranes is a prayer for peace placed there perhaps by people from all over the world, but most surely by the peaceful and loving people of Okinawa who know all too well what it is like to have their beautiful island and everything on it, along with huge numbers of their citizens, lost in a world war.
As I descend the stairs down to the catacombs that make up the Underground Headquarters, I cannot imagine how these passages could possibly have been dug out of this stone by men with no more than pick axes and muscle in time to have been completed for use in this war by the Japanese Navy as a headquarters.
There are old- fashioned crude lights along the way to light the passages. Once at the bottom of the stairs, there are rooms with signs in English and Japanese to tell what the rooms were used for. There is the staff room. There are officer’s quarters where space is so tight, the men were forced to sleep standing up, leaning against each other.
There are various supply rooms and meeting rooms, but I think the most obviously memorable room is the one where the ranking officers committed suicide when it became very obvious the Americans were
advancing and the Japanese would be defeated on Okinawa. This room has a sign pointing out the pock marks in the stone that were made when the grenades that killed the officers exploded. It was very solemn and moving to be in this space where men felt there was no other decision but to end their lives.
Leaving this room, I got a little disoriented and turned around and with no one else around to follow and nothing but the audio track with a woman’s voice that told the
story of the battle on Okinawa in English and then Japanese playing in a constant loop, I got a little bit panicked and claustrophobic down in those tunnels. I finally found a map and got my bearings and needed to get back up to the daylight as soon as possible, perhaps missing other areas of interest, but the need for sun and fresh air overrode curiosity and the need to know at that moment.
Back in my Demio, I don’t really know how I chose the right little walled alley to take me back to the main road and I don’t think I necessarily did choose correctly, but somehow and miraculously, I did make it back to the same main road I’d come on. I had seen the Himeyuri Monument listed as a destination on the same sign as the Underground Headquarters and knew it was a bit further down the road. That would be my next destination and I followed the signs, stopping along the way for a bento with rice and chicken and a sausage patty sized burger patty and some vegetables for about 450 yen at Family Mart that I ate at the front counter with stools right there in the Family Mart and washed it all down with a carton of iced tea.
I ended up being directed to turn off the road I was on to get to the Himeyuri Monument. When I arrived and parked, directed by an attendant to a specific space, I went through the gift shop next to it. These shops next to their monuments or castles or points of interest do not sell trinkets with the names and images of these places on them like we might find at similar shops in other countries.
Instead, they all seem to sell just about the same Okinawan merchandise. So, in any given shop next to any given historical spot, museum or shrine, you will find the roughly the same Okinawan boxed cookies, sugar cane, bingata fabric items, Spam, shiikuwasa juice and so on.
The Himeyuri Monument, as it turns out, is much more than a monument only. First I stop at a stand selling bundles of flowers for 200 yen and purchase my flowers. I knew I was purchasing these for the offering I would later make at the monument. The grounds are made up of shaded paths. There is a tree at the entrance on the edge of a huge and gaping pit that exposes the subterranean root system of this gorgeous tree.
Water trickles out of bamboo into a concrete basin and there are two ladles next to the tree. There is large statue of a winged figure, an angel. Everyone is quiet and the mood is somber and this is a place to think, to reflect.
I approach the monument, a large grey stone rising out of the ground. Next to the monument is an apparatus much like a Maypole where, again, thousands and thousands of paper cranes hang and there are notes and trinkets and offerings on the ground beneath them. Just in front of the monument and beneath it is a large, dark cave, and there is a rail in front of that and a long bench in front of the rail. On this bench are hundreds of bundles of flowers and this is where I lay my own offering of flowers.
Himeyuri is one of the most difficult places, and one of the most compellingly beautiful, I will visit on this island or anywhere. The Himeyuri monument is a monument to the schoolgirls, over two hundred girls exactly the age of my own daughter, who were conscripted into service, mainly to nurse the wounded and dying Japanese soldiers during the intense battle on Okinawa. This battle on Okinawa in March of 1945 would last 90 days and claim the lives of over 200,00 Japanese and Americans, 120,000 of whom were Okinawans.
There is a wonderful museum, beautifully landscaped and architecturally interesting, next to the Himeyuri monument. The pretty woman at the counter, Rieko, spoke fluent English and greeted me warmly, inquiring about where I was from. I was given an English brochure and directed into the museum. I immediately got a sense of the importance of “getting it right” in this place. Most of the girls who found themselves thrust into the most unspeakable of horrors and many of their teachers, 216 souls, perished in the battle or afterward when many committed suicide to avoid capture by the Americans they’d been told would mistreat them cruelly. The girls who survived, now women, have been activists for peace all these many years. These women, now in their 70’s and older, are often present at the monument. I saw one of these survivors modestly decline a request by a visitor to be photographed while I was there. This place is an effort by the “girls” who survived to tell their story and to tell it right and not to sugar coat it. The passages are hard to read and the horrors are harder still to imagine. This is one place where Japanese is translated into perfect English.
There are photographs of almost every single one of the girls. These girls came from two high schools on Okinawa, the Okinawa Normal School girls’ division and the Okinawa First Girls’ High School. Reading about their lives, I couldn’t help but compare their lives to those of the students at our private school in Atlanta. The Himeyuri (princess lily or red star lily) girls were an elite group and able to go to these two schools after a screening process that allowed only a select few from each area of the island to be admitted. They lived in dormitories and read books, both English and Japanese, studied every subject and played sports and swam in the swimming pool on their campus, the only pool on the island at that time. Their lives were quite genteel and they wore their schools’ uniforms proudly. When pressed into service, they served willingly and bravely.
The museum is filled with testimonials of the survivors, letters left behind by victims, trinkets the girls had as hopeful teenagers, personal mementoes. These young girls had gone into service to the cause with their books and papers, thinking the battle would be over quickly and that they would soon be back at school to continue their studies and resume their lives. It was not to be. There is a reproduction of one of the caves where they cared for the soldiers in the museum. There are large panels with the stories of the girls and maps of the battles. I exited this museum and found myself in an area overlooking a garden. This area is reserved for reflection after visiting the museum and for recording and submitting your impressions of the museum. Rieko found me and asked me if I had recorded my impressions and I told her I had been hesitant for some reason to do that. She encouraged me and I returned to the area and spent time writing about how the museum made me feel. I don’t see how anyone could come away from this place and not want to be an agent for peace.
The alumnae of Himeyuri founded this museum on June 23, 1989 and the following is inscribed there - “About 40 years have passed since the battle of Okinawa, and yet the indescribable tragedy we experienced and witnessed on the battlefield still haunts our memory. We will never forget the horror of the pre-World War II militaristic education, which drove us to the battlefield with no skepticism but rather with a willingness to serve.
We strongly feel that we must continue to tell our stories of a war filled with insanity and brutality now that the post-war generations, who have no idea what war is, have formed the majority of our population and that the peace-threatening signs in both domestic and international politics cannot be ignored.
Believing an appeal for world peace will be the way to repose the souls of those who perished, we, the Himeyuri Alumnae, founded the Himeyuri Peace Museum on this site. We are most grateful for the sincere encouragement and support that we received from many individuals and organizations in and outside the prefecture in the process of its foundation.”
Before I left this place, Rieko found me one more time to give me her address on Okinawa and she gave me a piece of paper which had the following written on it:
a. saying
a. proverb
Then in hiragana and romaji Rieko had written “Ichariba chode” “When we meet once we are family.”
To this I say “amen.”
