June's Thoughts of Life
by Noe Yonamine
Nishihara High School, Okinawa Prefecture
Messages of Peace from Chiran
13th Annual Speech Contest, 2002
First Prize, High School Division
"I want to see my mother. I want to see my father. If
only I could see them for just a moment and could say farewell before dying, I
would have no regrets." The teenage boy ran desperately down the dark
Waitoi road. The face of the furious military officer at the head of the group,
and then the faces of his classmates who looked at him with pity and contempt,
appear and disappear one after another like a kaleidoscope. As he ran, the
thoughts of wanting to see his mother and father came like a rushing torrent
that could not be stopped.
Mr. Tamanaha, who now gives talks on peace, was assigned
during the war to the Antitank Attack Squad as a member of the Imperial Blood
and Iron Corps. He was a member of the land-based Special Attack Corps who
carried bombs on their backs and threw themselves against enemy tanks. This
assignment took place when he was a fourth-year student in the Okinawa
Prefectural Daiichi Middle School. Even now at the schoolhouse next to Shuri
Castle, crowded with many tourists, each day "To the Death" special
drills are reenacted with a young man carrying a replica bomb on his back.
During the war Mr. Tamanaha decided in his heart that he would die for his
country.
"Young cherry blossoms not spared for you, willing to
be scattered, worthwhile lives." In those days, both from the sky and the
sea, even from the ground, many young noble lives were lost as they offered
themselves in order to cut down the enemy. For what reason did they die? Why
did they sacrifice their lives? What was their reward? The answers to these
questions must have been "to save our country." However, I think it
must be a fact that their hearts only wanted peace, "We want to protect
our loved ones. We want to keep them away from the fighting." Their hopes
and lives met an end in the sea around Okinawa, where enemy ships floated like
the meshes of a net, and on the main island, where tanks had landed.
Early summer is the most vivid and beautiful season. Both
the color of Okinawa's deep blue sea and the color of the clear sky were burned
and dyed red with fallen lives during the war. "Each year when June comes,
it becomes gloomy," Mr. Tamanaha said quietly. Only I, who deserted from
the Imperial Blood and Iron Corps, survived. My classmates did not return.
Whatever the reason may be, even now my guilt and my debt to my friends goes
after them.
"War has nothing to do with dignity of life," he
told us with uncontrollable sadness. In the midst of the firing from the ships'
guns called the "Storm of Iron," he desperately fled down the road in
the dark night. He stepped on corpses fallen at his feet. Even after becoming a
prisoner, he strongly felt the miseries of war. When he saw corpses piled in
trucks and buried recklessly by bulldozers, he did not know how to vent his
anger. Corpses were thrown in carelessly, not knowing who they were. People's
lives were trampled underfoot, disposed of as mere objects. He felt then for
the first time what sort of thing war was and what was the meaning of people's
lives.
Everyone who experienced the Battle of Okinawa greets the
month of June with unspeakably painful thoughts. June 23 is Memorial Day in
Okinawa. In front of the "Cornerstones of Peace," with engraved names
neither of enemies nor allies, but of all the dead from the Battle of Okinawa,
there were many figures of elderly people who had the lives of precious people snatched
from them. Lightly touching many times the names engraved in the mute
monuments, they had tears running silently down their faces. Only those deeply
engraved names are proof that these people surely had lived. Each name told the
story of the precious life of a person who had perished in the Battle of
Okinawa.
This year the names of 252 more persons were engraved on the
monument. The greatest number of these was 151 people from Kagoshima Prefecture
who committed their young lives for the future. There were 220,000 Japanese and
10,000 American soldiers in total. The memorial has engraved the lives of all
230,000 victims of the battle. It silently tells of the tragic past and pleads
for the preciousness of peace.
Last year on Memorial Day, my mother and I visited Mabuni
Hill, and we went down the steps from the top of the hill to the sea. Suddenly
when I looked ahead, I spotted a small bouquet of flowers that had been placed
on the ground, and next to it a cigarette package and beer cans. "There
must have been people who died in this place," said my mother next to me.
Was he someone's father? Or was he a close friend of someone? This was Mabuni
Hill, where people had been driven to the far southern end of the island and
finally killed themselves. Even the step on which I stood was a place where
someone had taken his life. Fleeing from the fierce fighting and desperately
trying to live, what did they think here, in this place, at the moment of
death? Even now the conditions of that time are clearly evident, with marks
from the bombs still on the rock cliff. My mother and I were deeply touched,
and we paused for a while at that spot.
Next year another June came around. Now, our country has
peace we can enjoy, and we have precious lives we can live. We must remember
not only the sad thoughts of the people who died hoping for peace but also the
things that exist now due to the many lives that were lost. June's thoughts,
June's lives speak to us even now. "What is peace? Do you know the
preciousness of life?" Hearts that respect life. We must resolutely
continue forward from the past to the future with hearts thinking of these
lives. Believe in the radiance of boundless lives and in peace for tomorrow.
Translated by Bill Gordon
February 2004
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