Here are letters to the witness of war experiences.

Letter to witnesses by Mao Kamata

Letter to Zenko Nakasoko by Hajime Akiyama

In April 1945 the Japanese army forced the entire population of Hateruma, the southernmost inhabited island of Japan, to evacuate to Iriomote Island and settle in a village that was known as a breeding ground for Anopheles gambiae, also known as the malaria mosquito. The village was available for occupation because most of the former inhabitants had died in a plague of malaria. The people of Hateruma knew this and tried to object to living there, but they were powerless against military orders. By the end of the war, five hundred of the population of sixteen hundred died of what they referred to as “war malaria.”

The Hateruma population found out that their evacuation had been ordered by Torao Yamashita, a graduate of the Nakano Military Academy. They were placed under the control of Yamashita and forced to cooperate with the war effort. Zenko Nakasoko, nine years old at the time, had a friend who Yamashita beat to death.

The people of Hateruma were told that the evacuation was carried out to keep the invading Americans from taking over the farm animals on the island and that the Japanese army was seizing them as food for their soldiers.

When the islanders were getting ready to repatriate—minus the hundreds who had died—the principal of their school, Shinsho Shikina, admonished them to never forget the tragedy of war malaria. A rock carved with simple characters that say “Never-forget Rock, Hateruma, Shikina” still stands on the Haemida coastline of Iriomote Island.

Letter to Yoshio Shinozuka by Naoki Ueda

Unit 731 was headquartered in Pingfang, on the outskirts of Harbin, a city in the northeast of China in what was once Manchuria. Unit 731 was one of the largest biological warfare corps in the history of the world. Even before World War II, biological and chemical weapons were prohibited by international convention, but despite this, Unit 731 was developing and producing them. To achieve its goals, the unit conducted vivisection and other cruel experiments on, and finally murdered, prisoners of war from China, Russia, and Korea, as well as anti-Japanese activists. Yoshio Shinozuka knew nothing about any of this when, encouraged by a friend, he volunteered for “the devil’s unit” in which he spent his entire youth.

Letter to Koyu Kinjo by Ai Kawashima

Two hundred thousand souls were lost during the Battle of Okinawa, one in four of the people living in the prefecture. The war was in its closing days, and boys in middle school and older were drafted into student troops called Tekketsu Kinnotai (“Iron and Blood Corps Working for the Emperor”), a student signal corps. In March 1945 Koyu Kinjo graduated from Okinawa No.1 Middle School and was inducted into the Tekketsu Kinnotai the same day. His first job was to write his will. As the fighting got worse though, the boys were allowed to leave the corps and go home. Kinjo left and escaped with his mother and younger brother, heading south and away from the fighting in Shuri. The three of them survived, but other boys who stayed with the corps were caught up in the US invasion. Most of them died.

Letter to Michiko Miyagi by Kasumi Furuhashi

Toward the end of the Asia Pacific War Okinawa became a battlefield, and everyone in the prefecture was mobilized. Boys in middle school, some as young as fourteen, were drafted and sent into battle. In March 1945, right before US forces landed, female students were assigned to student nursing corps attached to fighting forces and field hospitals in cave shelters. The work that awaited these young women was cruel and dangerous. Michiko Miyagi was assigned to Zuisen Corps and sent to the front lines where she was in the line of fire. More than half of her comrades died in the fighting.

Letter to Shinoko Hisamatsu by Nozomi Kubota

At 11:02 AM on August 9, 1945. Just a few days after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the next one exploded in Nagasaki. The wind and heat rays from the bomb destroyed the city in an instant. People living there died in agony and terror. At the time Shisono Hisamatsu was the head nurse of the physical rehabilitation department at Nagasaki Medical University. She lost many of the nurseswho worked under her. Despite their grief, she and her mentor, Doctor Takashi Nagai, treated the injured.

Letter to Fusako Iwase by Makiko Endo

As the war situation deteriorated, children from big cities were evacuated to rural areas to keep them safe in case of air raids. Fusako Iwase was only twenty-one and a brand-new teacher when she accompanied a group of Tokyo schoolchildren to a country town in Nagano Prefecture. She did her best to be a mother to the homesick girls. Then came the surrender. The US commander General MacArthur and his GHQ gave orders for a new kind of education, and Fusako started the next phase of her life full of unease about what lay ahead.

Letter to Michiko Kiyo-oka by Oulimata Gueye

In the final days of the Asia-Pacific War, about 120 cities in Japan were hit by U.S. air raids. There was much damage and many lives were lost. Tokyo suffered about one hundred attacks in all, but the bombings in the early hours of March 10, 1945 are referred to as the Tokyo Air Raids. About three hundred B-29s flew over Tokyo, randomly dropping bombs over a period of two and a half hours. The downtown area was turned into a wasteland. More than one million people were injured and one hundred thousand were killed. Streets and rivers were filled with the bodies of victims. Michiko Kiyo-oka grew up in Tokyo’s Asakusa district and spent many happy childhood days playing in the Sumida River. On March 10, the year she was twenty-one, that special place turned into the scene of a horrible disaster.

Letter to Yasuji Kaneko by Maki Miyamoto

Yasuji Kaneko was drafted into the army during the Sino-Japanese War and sent to Shandong Province in China. As a new conscript he was trained to kill, and as part of a military sweep he murdered civilians. When the war was over and he’d survived an internment camp in Siberia, rather than being sent home to Japan, he was moved to Fushun War Criminals Management Center where he was held for six years as punishment for war crimes. In 1956, eleven years after the end of World War II, Kaneko was exonerated from prosecution and sent back to Japan by way of Maizuru City on the Kouan-maru repatriation ship. In his old age Kaneko did what he could to atone for his sins by telling young people about his experiences during the war.

Letter to Hiroko Iwami by Kaho Ichimura

Letter to Hiroko Iwami by Sebrina Elaine Arruda

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, when it seemed that Japan was very near surrender, the US military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was the first time ever such a bomb had been used. Hiroko Iwami, aged ten, suffered terrible burns and lost her eyesight in the explosion. Despite her injuries, she managed to escape from the destroyed city. She survived, and the war ended. Japanese society began its recovery and people’s lives became more comfortable. For Iwami and other atomic bomb victims, though, the end of the war was just the beginning of their trials.