Okinawa in Movies: Ryukyu Islands, Mass Suicides, U.S. Army and Shamisen(Part 1)

A few weeks ago, I spent 10 days wandering around Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands that belongs to said prefecture. Although I didn’t attend any film festival or visit any cinema, I rediscovered the rare joy of encountering unfamiliar yet surprising films while on the road. Through these films which spanned different historical periods of this Pacific island chain, I deepened my understanding of the Ryukyu Kingdom (former name of Okinawa), the Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, the era when the Ryukyu Islands were under U.S. administration and its contemporary local culture.

Interestingly, this meaningful journey was sparked by a film festival I ultimately decided to forgo.

In my previous article, “Beyond the Classroom: The Fascinating Work of Japanese Film Researchers,” I mentioned my university classmate Ma Ran, who’s now a film professor at Nagoya University. Originally, Okinawa wasn’t part of my long journey across Japan, but when she invited me to join her at the Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival, I briefly considered it. However, tempted by the snowy landscapes of the north of Japan, I chose skiing over cinema. Still, I ended up altering my final itinerary—originally planned for the Seto Inland Sea—in favor of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands. The chance to explore a region entirely unfamiliar to me, while transitioning from snow-capped mountains to the ocean and shifting from skiing to diving, was simply too enticing to resist.

While staying at Ma’s home in Nagoya, I had the chance to watch part of the festival’s opening film, “Ocean Elegy: The Tragedies of Mudan and Ryukyu”, a dramatized documentary retrieved by her from a Taiwanese director. The film recounts a historical event I’d previously known nothing about:

In 1871, a ship carrying 69 Ryukyuans set sail from Miyako Island to Shuri, Okinawa’s main island, to deliver annual tribute. Caught in a storm, the ship drifted to southern Taiwan where it landed in a Paiwan indigenous community. Tragically, most of the Ryukyuans were killed. This incident became the pretext for Japan’s 1874 invasion of Taiwan during which Japan also formally annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom, significantly altering the geopolitical landscape of East Asia.

The Ryukyu Kingdom was an ancient state situated between Taiwan and Kyushu. Since the early 17th century, it’d paid tribute to both the Ming and Qing dynasties of China as well as Japan’s Edo shogunate. This arrangement continued until 1876, when Ryukyu was forced to sever diplomatic ties with the Qing dynasty and was administratively absorbed into Japan. Following China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan’s annexation of Ryukyu was irrevocably sealed. The documentary employs dramatized reenactments to recount this tragic elegy. Yet for the Ryukyuan people, their long and brutal tragedies had only just begun.

The morning after arriving in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, I took a ferry to Tokashiki, one of the outer islands. Not far north of its port, on a hillside with a sweeping view stands a white jade monument mourning the war dead. Further up at the cliff’s edge is the site of the islanders’ mass suicide site. It was the night between March 27 and 28, 1945, just before or shortly after the U.S. forces landed. The Japanese military commander gathered 380 Tokashiki residents at two designated locations and issued a suicide directive: regardless of gender, age, or nationality, they were ordered act together with the army, never surrender to their enemy, and instead fight back with their grenades until the last moment and sacrifice themselves with honor and dignity.

Back on Okinawa Island, I visited the Peace Memorial Park in the south. In a corner of the meticulously curated and well-documented museum, I came across the testimony of one of the survivors of the Tokashiki mass suicides—only 50 out of the 380 people survived.

Nahe, who was 16 at the time, fled into the mountains with her two young sons: “Despite the heavy rain slowing us down, the thought of the demonic American soldiers leaping out of their massive warships to massacre men and violate women made us run like mad. We climbed desperately to the mountaintop. The village head shouted ‘Long live His Majesty’ and led us in singing ‘Kimigayo’ (Japan’s national anthem) as our final farewell. Once the singing ended, the mass suicide began. I was handed a grenade distributed by the defense corps, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t detonate it. A young man dismantled his grenade, extracted the explosive powder within it, and shared it with everyone to swallow. I thought, if gunpowder can kill so many people, it must be a deadly poison too. But nothing happened. If my husband, who’d gone off to war, had been there, he probably would have helped me complete my ‘honorable death.’ I scanned my surroundings, looking for someone who could kill me and my children. Suddenly, I felt a sharp blow to my head, as if I was struck with a hoe, and everything went black. When I opened my eyes again, my two sons were already dead beside me. Choking back tears, I covered them with my raincoat.”

Outside the memorial hall, a vast grassy slope is filled with neatly arranged square gravestones. A central stone pillar bears the recorded death toll from the Battle of Okinawa; among the 242,046 dead, 149,634 were Okinawan residents, 77,823 were non-Okinawan Japanese, and 14,589 were foreigners.

As the final major battle of the Pacific War, the 82-day-long Battle of Okinawa was also the bloodiest confrontation the U.S. military had ever faced.

Not far from the Peace Memorial Park stands the Himeyuri Monument. It is only 10 centimeters high and is dedicated to the Himeyuri Student Corps—women who perished during the battle. The 240 students and teachers came from two elite girls’ schools: Okinawa Prefectural First Girls’ High School (“Otohime,” meaning princesses) and Okinawa Women’s Normal School (“Shirayuri”, meaning white lilies). They were assigned as nurses in the army’s field hospital, but in the final days of the battle, many of them met the same fate as the islanders of Tokashiki and other regions—misled or coerced by the Japanese military into committing suicide with grenades.

I’d heard of the film “Himeyuri no Tō” but had never seen it. A quick search online revealed that there were as many as six films with the same title. However, I could only find the earliest version, produced by Toei, directed by Tadashi Imai, and released in 1953. This black-and-white film follows a typical three-act structure:

The enlistment scenes are filled with youthful energy and laughter, portraying the girls’ vibrant lives. As the American forces advance from north to south, the field hospital moves repeatedly, seeking refuge in caves, emphasizing camaraderie and mutual support among the girls and their teachers. In the end, with nowhere left to hide, the military’s daily reports still delude themselves with exaggerated claims of Japanese victories, while the girls’ increasingly hopeless expressions and broken bodies serve as a silent critique of the absurdity of militarism.