The Cave of Virgins
While we are on the subject of talking about Okinawa’s troubled history and the Himeyuri girls, I found a nice piece of poetry on a website called Elite Skills and written by the author “oixi”. I’m not sure if the rhyming couplet idea works with something this serious, but maybe it will give you some idea of what the civilians experienced here. This is called The Cave of Virgins, and is about the girls who were picked from the elite schools in Naha and sent into caves to work as nurses for the Japanese troops. As the conditions worsened, these girls (14-15 years old, if I recall correctly) experienced horrors that you or I could never in their worst nightmares imagine. But they stuck to their jobs until, in the majority of cases, they themselves passed away in the caves. This particular blog entry is dedicated to those Himeyuri girls, the “princess lily girls”:
Cave of Virgins
Only fifty-one were left in our caves
When the enemy surrounded us.
As nurses, we schoolgirls worked like slaves
Amongst torn bodies spouting blood and pus.
Imperial soldiers once so proud,
Serving the Emperor in his glory.
Now in darkness waiting for death’s shroud,
The Rising Sun sets to end our story.
The army surrendered and abandoned us here
And in the darkness of our cave we weep.
Once honored as Princess Lilies without fear,
The sick and injured warriors we keep.
The Himeyuri girls, school of the elite,
Made nurses when Americans came.
Left in our cave with Japan’s shamed defeat,
So too we share in the shame.
We began at two hundred or more,
In the dark caves treating the dying.
Through damp dank death, we’ve crawled along the floors
To tend those screaming and crying.
All the soldiers have gone, retreated or dead
And fifty-one Princess Lilies remain.
Shouts for surrender echo from overhead
And our fear drives us near insane.
We will not surrender in fear of our fate,
As a gas bomb in our cave is sent.
For any hope to live seems much too late,
When the bomb explodes and lives are spent.
Only five survive from the blast and the gas,
Where hundreds lived as nurses and surgeons.
The horror of war at this spot would last,
Known forever as the Cave of Virgins.
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