The horrific story of the Himeyuri girls in the Battle of Okinawa
Welcome to part 2 of this blog entry on the Battle for Okinawa. While the first part centred around the battle itself and the Peace Prayer Park, this time I would just like to spend a few minutes talking about the Himeyuri girls (translated literally, “Princess Lily girls”). The museum and monuments to pay respects to these girls who played an important and horrific role as the Battle of Okinawa raged on. But what made these girls so special, and worthy of specific remembrance? Well read on and you’ll find out.
Just before the invasion of Okinawa, 222 girls and 18 of their teachers were recruited from the top 2 senior high schools in Naha to work as nurses. They initially went to the military hospital in Haebaru (about 15 minutes drive from myself). The hospital itself was a network of dark and unpleasant caves, not coducive for medical practices. These girls had been more sheltered in their upbringing; their schools adopting a strict policy of keeping the girls away from boys. Even the smallest conversation with a boy would have severe consequences. Yet, these 16-18 year old girls were suddenly thrust into the reality of a wartime hospital, with no training and no preparation.
As the fighting started, casualties began coming into the hospitals and conditions became worse and worse. The girls were asked and expected to live and work in circumstances that most of us couldn’t even start to imagine. Yet they did this with diligence, in the knowledge that when they died their souls would go to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (where all the people who died for Japan during wartime are remembered). There is no way I can begin to describe the hardships that these girls faced - I just don’t have the words or complete understanding to do it. What I will do though is offer you an except from chapter 13 of a book called “Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb” by George Feifer. This is an excellent, but horrific in some parts, description of the Battle of Okinawa and its influenve in favouring the atomic bomb over a conventional invasion of mainland Japan. If you’re ready, then read this and try to put yourselves in their position:
Okinawans’ commitment to Japanese goals remained uneven, the young generally more enthusiastic than their parents and grandparents. Although many Okinawan soldiers conscripted to serve with fighting units longed to drop everything and return to their families, boys as young as fourteen happily polished their new arms, and native girls served with equal pride, many as nurses’ aides. Six high schools supplied 219 students for that work, which all saw as an honor and a sacred trust. Among them were 155 girls from the elite Himeyuri Girls High School and Himeyuri Teachers College in Shuri, the female equivalent of the Normal School. They became the counterparts to boys like Masahide Ota, selected for the most responsible student assignments.
The Student Medical Corps would later enter the literature of martyrdom as the Himeyuri (Princess Lily) Girls. Although their lot was no harder and their casualties hardly greater than among Okinawan women as a whole, the young daughters of the island’s privileged families would make captivating characters for romantic literature and prettified Japanese films, cast in the glow of their pre-invasion purity. Many would end the war in what would become known as the Cave of the Virgins — with little exaggeration; those young “princesses” of the best schools were more protected from the opposite sex than the boys. Since the Confucian teaching to separate the sexes after the age of seven had arrived on Okinawa only with the Japanese school system of the 1800s, much of the island outside its few cities observed it less than rigorously until the general tightening of discipline during the war emergency after Pearl Harbor. The strictest adherence had always been in the Himeyuri schools, where such lapses as exchanging a spoken or written word with a boy earned quick expulsion.
The most enviable place to serve was the Haebaru Army Hospital. Although many Japanese fighting units down to regimental level had their own field hospitals and lesser medical installations, Haebaru boasted the largest and soundest installation. Directly subordinate to 32nd Army command, it was the best of the military medical establishment, which now far surpassed the civilian.
It was also a new facility. When the October 10 aid raid demolished an earlier building in Naha, staff officers took the point about enemy airpower and decided to rebuild in a safer place, behind the Shuri Line. they chose a country site some five miles southeast of Naha, three miles due south of Shuri. The Okinawa Military Hospital, as it was officially called, was a series of man-made caves dug into the sides of a large, grassy ridge bordering the tiny farming village of Haebaru.
Hospital staff, including drafted Okinawan civilian doctors, lived in the village while military engineers supervised the digging, which was unfinished when the fighting began. Failure to complete the main tunnel left most of the twenty-one caves isolated instead of forming wings of the planned integrated system. When Himeyuri dormitories were also destroyed in an air raid two months after 10/10 — four months before L-day — many girls were moved to shacks thrown up just outside the construction site. Seventeen-year-old Ruriko Morishita, whose parents owned a small company that traded chiefly in molasses and lumber, remained at Shuri in order to finish her studies at the prestigious Teachers College. Her graduation day was hastily celebrated a week before the American landing, when preparations at the hospital became frenzied but remained hugely inadequate. Still hoping to become a teacher when the crisis ended, Ruriko moved in with the others at Haebaru, helping speed the hospital’s preparation.
Ruriko was amongst the most patriotic as well as one of the oldest girls. All were assigned more or less at random, she to one of Ward Three’s half-dozen caves for infectious diseases. (Ward One was for general medicine; Two for surgery.) Ward Three had quite enough to deal with even without further casualties. Japan’s tuberculosis rate was very high, partly because girls who had caught it while working in textile factories spread the disease in their villages when they were sent home with it. Attempts earlier in the war to send carriers among the troops — recruited largely from those same villagers — back to Japan from the conquered territories ended when American submarines ripped Japanese shipping lanes to shreds. Many soldiers were then returned to the front in the knowledge that no cure was possible. Now Okinawa’s dank caves served as hatcheries for the bacillus.
When Ward Three’s caves were declared ready, Ruriko and fellow aides began working light eight-hour shifts. Beisdes tuberculosis, the principal infectious diseases were amoebic dysentery, typhoid and malaria, but some patients were still recovering from the 10/10 air raid. Within days of the landing, however, Ruriko’s cave was filled beyond capacity with newly wounded, and the shelling and bombing were so intense that the girls were forbidden to go outside except to fetch food from the mess cave, water from the well at the northern end of the ridge and medical supplies from stacks deposited near the cave mouths. But conditions inside became so foul that some started breaking the rule, especially during the regular early-evening lull in the bombing, assumed to be the American savages’ dinner break. Some girls were killed on those ventures outside. The survivors had been living in a kind of dormitory cave, but now took to sleeping in the same caves as the patients. Surrounded by bodies ripped apart by bombs and shells, some prayed for instant death if they themselves were hit.
By mid-April, the medical staff stopped cheering the news of “victories” delivered by messengers. The wounded were brought in on trucks, stretchers and comrades’ backs. many were finished off by bombing, shelling and strafing as they waited in lines outside. Desperate screams sounded at daybreak when planes and shells attacked: “Please let us in!” Soldiers who had braved the heaviest American fire to carry battlefield mates to the hospital wept to see the lives of those wounded ebb away. But there was simply nowhere to fit them inside.
The girls were forced to sleep in a tangle of arms and legs, with hardly enough room to draw breath. Ever square yard of floor space was packed with grievously wounded soldiers, an average of sixty or seventy to a cave, a total of perhaps twice the hospital’s planned capacity of a thousand patients. Thick in grime and blackened blood, more wounded were carried in and laid on the floor. Relatively few had been hit by bullets. Shell fragments had caused most of the damage: bones crushed, flesh gouged out, hands and legs blown off. Space was found for the luckier ones on rock shelves cut into the walls. They were squeezed in there even more tightly than on the troopships that had brought them to Okinawa. Without the cross-ventilation from the unmade connection to the central tunnel, the only air was from the caves’ narrow mouths; it penetrated no more than a few yards.
Otherwise, the caves were fit only for bats. The walls and ceiling oozed condensation; some were covered with tent cloth to prevent the water from dripping on doctors, nurses and patients. Most of the stalactites had been removed, but a few remained, “hanging down like huge, grotesque icicles.” Sour smells of mildew and wet earth were joined by a stench of blood, pus, urine, faeces and rancid sweat from combat-broken bodies. So many deaths at such a relentless pace made Ruriko sense that her own would surely come soon; that was the nature of things. Japanese personnel in nearby caves distributed hand grenades for personal use and showed the nurses’ aides how to use them. Ruriko longed for two tastes before her time came: fresh air and clean water.
She learned to snatch minutes of sleep by leaning against a wall or standing up, even for seconds, as she groped in the clammy, stinking dark toward patients moaning for help or when holding candles during surgery. Apart from such stolen rest and the sleep of the drugged during their three hours off duty in every twenty-four, Ruriko and her schoolmates worked around the clock. Ward Three dropped infectious diseases almost entirely in favor of surgery. (Its doctor, an Okinawan paediatrician, had begun to train himself in surgery after the 10/10 raid, which convinced him that his island would not escape more devastation.) Except in the niches used for surgery, the lighting came from bottles of kerosene with wicks of twisted rag. Their flickering flames, half-starved for oxygen, barely penetrated the murkiness. Patients were faceless shadows — in some cases, literally faceless because theirs had been blown or burned away. Day and night were indistinguishable; weeks became one long nightmare.
Lice from the men with whom they were squeezed in infested the filthy cream of Okinawan maidenhood. There was no hot water for the patients, let alone the staff. Only the surgical areas were supplied with enough to sterilize the instruments. The untrained aides tried to shut out the cries of men operated on without anaesthetic, then cleaned up as assigned. Inexplicably heavy amputated limbs had to be carried outside to holes or bomb craters. Numbing themselves, Ruriko and a friend lugged the heavier and more terrifying corpses outside, one by one.
Inside, relentless screams sounded from men going crazy with thirst. The girls were happy not to be able to understand some of their babbling and filthy curses. During lulls in the bombing, however, they did hear maggots wriggling into the wounded ? like silk-worms crunching mulberry leaves, they imagined. Although the little white worms supposedly prevented tetanus by consuming pus from the wounds, even the bravest soldiers moaned and screamed when their flesh was munched. The girls pictured the vermin eating the wounded alive. One soldier’s jawbones had been crushed to a pulp; his face so teemed with maggots that dozens fell onto Ruriko’s hand when she tried to trickle rice gruel down his throat. Then she tried to see through the semidarkness in order to pick the wriggling creatures from his oozing wounds with crude wooden chopsticks - and could never finish because more and more soldiers cried out and she had to grope to them. The men for whom the aides performed this service were profoundly grateful. One watched the hand of a girl quietly work to free his wound “open like a ripe pomegranate” of its maggots. Then he looked at her face and saw “an angel in the midst of hell”
The teenagers also had to deal with every function of men, from whom they had been protected so assiduously before April. Ruriko had touched the hand of no man apart from her father and brother since she was seven. Now she had to help strangers defecate and hold the penises of double amputees so they could urinate. She watched the regular nurses do this and resolved to imitate them. To control her trembling, she tried to deepen her numbing even more. “This must be done”, she ordered herself. “I’m doing it for my country”.
In despair over the ghoulish overcrowding, Ward Three’s former paediatrician hardly worried any longer about cleanliness or his primitive supplies. Patients in urgent need of recuperation after surgery had to be sent from the cave because there was simply no room. Soon the self-taught surgeon was able to treat only the very worst patients, if they could be saved. The less critically wounded were ordered straight back to the front. Those with no hope were not admitted at all.
But despite this, despite her own horror, Ruriko remained certain that “the good side” must win in the end. She was so convinced that the enemy was the bad side that only the sight, months later, when she was a captive of American medics treating other filthy, wretched Japanese prisoners made her understand that she had been a dupe of Japanese militarism. And not even that marvel could cause an immediate change of mind; her first instinct was to take the American care for a trick. Now, in the cave, there was nothing to suggest that Japan did not deserve to win, as fated. The sacred country that had not lost a war in thousands of years could not lose this one. The Divine Wind would come again.
While many patients were eager to return to their units, the most gravely wounded were sometimes resigned. A few whispered to the student aides, although never to the aides’ bosses, the military nurses, that they knew Japan couldn’t win because they’d seen the enemy’s overwhelming power and supplies. Exhausted Ruriko was surprised and disappointed. “You’re just talking like that because you’ve been hurt a little”, she scolded men lacking arms and legs. “You’ll be better soon and come to your senses”. Sometimes she warned Japanese medics about a patient with suspect patriotism. “We’d better watch that one. It’s his mind”.
Worsening conditions in the caves served only to strengthen the girls’ resolve. Winning by surviving became a source of unchallengeable pride, which no one could take from them. They were the ones, they told themselves, who must save Okinawa. “Anyway, once we’re dead”, Ruriko reminded the others, “we’ll go to Yasukuni Shrine”. Wounded soldiers still able to smile coined a nickname for her: Miss Victory Day.
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I hope now you can start to understand the horrors that these girls faced. I’ve been to the museum a couple of times now and as I stare at all the faces of the girls who nursed the dying in those caves, I always cast a thought to my students now at school. They have such a naivety and innocence; I have no idea if they would be able to cope if they were put into that same situation. Like the Peace Prayer Park, the Himeyuri Monument and museum is a place that will most likely leave you in speechless reflection as you leave, but it is also a place I highly recommend visiting for its powerful significance.
There is another excellent article on the Himeyuri girls here. If you have any questions about this or the Battle of Okinawa, then let me know. I can’t guarantee any answers, but if I don’t know them then I can make enquiries and ask people who may. Until next time take care, dive safely, and remember how lucky you are.
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Very interesting Dave.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s very touching.
Glad you liked the article. It was something a little different from the usual, and I’m happy it was well received:)
Disturbing yet fascinating images portrayed here Dave. Makes you feel guilty for the usual daily moans and groans around here, they kind of pale into insignificance don’t they?