Hey guys, a different kind of video today.
I talked about the Himeyuri a while back.
They were Okinawan schoolgirls who had to serve in the front lines as nurses in WaWa2.
It was the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest battle in the Pacific.
Some people suggested I read the girls’ words in full context, so here we go.
The horrific experiences of some of these girls in their own words.
The student nurses served in these big cave networks for Japanese soldiers.
Yabiku Toshiko, 17
The cave was always filled with an odious smell.
The stench was unbearable, so it was almost impossible to nurse the wounded or tend to
their wounds.
I can still hear the cries and shrieks of those soldiers in the throes of death during
surgical operations.
It was hell itself.
We didn't have enough anesthetic, so doctors administered it just enough to ease their
patients' tension.
One patient begged desperately, "That's enough!
Doctor, kill me! Just kill me now!"
"Shut up! You can't put up with this much pain?!
You're a Japanese soldier, aren't you?!"
the surgeon shouted at him.
By mid-May, you could tell the condition of the patients had gotten really bad.
All of them were smeared with pus, and lice crawled all over their bodies.
The number of brain-fever and tetanus patients rapidly increased.
Completely deranged, brain-fever patients were really terrible.
They'd suddenly stand up and start walking, trampling seriously wounded soldiers lying
in the cave.
"Take this madman somewhere else!" panicked soldiers would shout.
Medical corpsmen would rush to the scene and take him further into the cave.
"Where are you taking him to?" somebody would ask,
but the corpsmen never replied.
Tetanus patients developed cramps in their legs and arms, finally getting lockjaw.
When they reached that point, they could no longer even eat the cream of rice gruel.
Such patients were taken to a narrow isolation ward enclosed by wooden shutters.
They kept their eyes wide open and just stared at us as if to implore us to get them out
of there.
Starved almost to death, soldiers shouted and screamed for something to eat.
"You had that sergeant's arm or leg! Cook it, broil it!"
Of course they were talking about amputated arms and legs.
Horrible even to imagine.
But that's war.
Kishimoto Hisa, 17
Our job was to hold down the arms and legs to be amputated from soldiers.
For pain, a patient was given just a sniff of ether.
I held down the arm a doctor was going to cut off and encouraged the patient to endure.
That was really frightening.
The amputated hand still clutched my hand.
"Oh no!" I shouted and desperately tore it off my hand.
Such arms and legs were still warm even after being cut off, and we would wrap them in rags
and hurriedly throw them into waste containers.
For an operation on the shoulder, a soldier was told to sit in a chair.
He was a sergeant who'd been shot through his shoulder.
He was operated on without any anesthesia.
His muscles were cut about three centimeters deep and ten centimeters long, with a special
pair of scissors, in about ten cuts.
He didn't scream, but his brow was sweating and tears streamed down his face.
I tried to hold his hand, but he wouldn't let me.
Instead he held his own hand to bear the pain.
I bet it hurt him to death.
At some point, the battle went south for the Japanese and they had to abandon the caves.
The Japanese army disbanded the nursing units and the girls had to fend for themselves.
This was when most of the deaths happened.
Shimabukuro Tomi, 18
The doctors then shouted at us to leave the cave as soon as possible.
It was then that I realized we had to vacate the cave.
There was a pile of rice sacks near me.
I scooped with my hands the unpolished rice from one of the bags and gave it to all the
members of the student corps.
I also distributed among them some amount of dehydrated miso seasoning.
When we were ready to leave, it was already daybreak, and reconnaissance planes were flying
over us.
While we were waiting for our departure, there rushed into our cave two of our teachers assigned
to other units, Yonamine-sensei and Uchida-sensei.
They told us that the Second Surgery Cave had been "straddled" and attacked, and some
were wounded or killed.
The surviving members had left the cave in twos and threes to join us.
So we told them, "Sensei!
They've disbanded us.
Teachers and students all left the cave.
Only the seriously wounded students are here."
"Is that right?" they asked, evidently shocked.
But presently, they went to see the wounded students and comfort them.
My classmate Chinen-san, who couldn't move and was lying on the floor, grabbed at my
pants and said, "Don't go away! Don't leave us here alone."
I didn't know what to do, so I gathered water trickling from the wall into a bowl
and gave it to her, when a surgeon bellowed, brandishing his sword,
"Get out or I'll cut your heads off. I'll take care of the patients!
You'll all be killed if you stay here!"
He was furious.
Ishikawa-san, Kanda-san, and Uezu-san lay there.
They couldn't move but were still conscious.
We hesitated at the cave entrance, going out and coming back in again.
Then vice-principal Teruya, who had left the cave earlier, came back, blood dripping from
his face and arms.
He'd been hit by a mortar shell.
I followed him into the cave, trying to talk to him, but the doctor again shouted at me,
"Leave him alone! Get out!"
Well, we plucked up all our courage and dashed out into the open with Yonamine-sensei and
Uchida-sensei, not knowing where to go but just following other people.
During the battle, civilians hid in caves, but were sometimes forced out by Japanese soldiers.
Miyagi Toyo, 20
Two soldiers happened to pass by, so we told them we were looking for refuge and asked
if they could take us to a cave.
"Yes," they said, "wait here for a while."
They went away and back to take us to a large hole under huge coral rocks overgrown with
pandanus plants.
It was filled with refugees.
When we got there, an Okinawan man and a boy about fourteen or fifteen,
apparently his son, were sitting at the entrance of the cave.
Suddenly, one of the soldiers started shouting at the father and son,
brandishing his sword at them.
"Anyone who does not obey military orders, I'll cut him down," he growled.
In other words, he was trying to drive them out of the cave in order to make room for us.
The four of us were really frightened and said to the soldier,
"Please, soldier, we don't want to get in the cave by driving them out!”
But the frightened father and son jumped out of the cave and ran away before we knew it.
Suicide was constantly on the minds of the students.
They had been told that the American soldiers would do all sorts of things to them if they
were caught.
Many took their own lives rather than face capture by the Americans.
Kaneshiro Kikuko, 16
The tanks were after us, and Yoza-san was instantly killed.
We lay her body on the roadside and ran away.
It was daytime.
The fierce attack had started early in the morning.
The road was littered with corpses.
Tripping many times over corpses covered with maggots, we ran desperately.
That was the worst day.
If you raised your head a little, you heard bullets hitting the ground around you.
Soldiers were covered with blood, their uniforms tattered, and everywhere there were wounded
soldiers crawling on the ground.
The enemy burned pandanus groves with flame throwers and smoked out people hiding in them.
We stuck to Taira-sensei and kept on fleeing along the shore.
By then our group had been reduced to twelve.
Enemy ships would come close to the shore, broadcasting calls to surrender:
“Americans will protect you.
Come aboard as soon as possible.
Those of you who can't swim, please walk toward Minatogawa Village during the daytime.
Never move during the night.”
We could see their faces clearly.
That made us even more scared.
Tanks were approaching with flame throwers.
I felt more dead than alive.
We continued to flee along the shore of Kyan Point, wading across jagged coral reefs when
the tide was low and clinging to the walls of wave-eroded recesses at the base of the
cliff, like crabs when the tide was high.
Below, waves were pounding the cliff, and spray whirled around us.
I was scared to death.
Totally exhausted in mind and body, we were talking about committing suicide.
Third-year students were especially impatient.
"Taira-sensei, let's die before it's too late!" some demanded.
"Sensei, let's do it immediately!" others prodded the teacher.
Taira-sensei looked quite disturbed because he, as our teacher, had the responsibility
to protect our lives and was determined to do so.
I had a hand grenade he had given me.
"It's all over. So let's sing a song," someone said.
Taira Sadako, Miyagi Tomiko, Itarashiki Yoshiko, and I started singing our favorite song, "Furusato"
(Our native place), all of us looking toward the sea.
Our voices were hoarse, so we could hardly sing.
As we sang, our singing turned into sobbing.
"I want to see my mother!" Itarashiki-san said in tears.
"I wish I could walk freely again under the blue skies with no bombs dropping!"
Upon hearing that, everybody started crying loudly.
It was too sad to accept that we had to die
after being cornered in such a wretched place, we all thought.
On the morning of June 21, we found a little cave and tried to squeeze ourselves into it,
but it was too narrow, and three of us -- Taira-sensei, Higa-san, and I -- were left outside.
So we sat there near the entrance, leaning against the rock wall.
The enemy had stopped attacking, so there was no bombardment -- merely an eerie silence.
There were countless enemy ships offshore, ominously silent, while numerous soldiers
and civilian refugees, gripped with fear, huddled silently under rock ledges and in
crevices and caves along the shore.
Then that dreaded broadcasting resumed.
The frightening voice calling for surrender reverberated in the area:
“We won't kill you. Raise your hands and come out.”
Hearing this, one soldier stood up, raised his hands, and started walking in the water
toward the ship.
We all watched him in surprise.
Then came a bang.
Some soldier hiding under a rock ledge had shot him from behind.
He fell down in the water and floated, his blood turning the water around him red.
Frightened, nobody said a word.
The silence seemed to last forever, and then a blood-covered soldier tumbled toward me.
He said he had thrown a grenade toward a group of Americans and they had shot back and seriously
wounded him.
"Enemy!" he screamed.
At that instant, Taira-sensei dashed into the inner part of the cave where nine classmates
were hiding.
Higa-san and I rushed into the next cave, where Yonamine-sensei's group hid.
Almost instantaneously an American appeared and started firing at us point blank.
A deafening sound it was.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Next to me, Ashitomi-san groaned and fell against me.
Both Nakamoto-san and Uechi-san were instantly killed.
The sergeant to my right was also killed instantly and fell on my face.
Shimabuku-san, Higa-san, and Oganeku-san were seriously wounded.
Just about that time, Taira-sensei, who had dashed into the cave where nine classmates
were hiding, committed suicide with a hand grenade.
When Higa-san and I ran into the cave, we found it splattered with blood, and ten persons
were lying in a pool of blood.
Taira-sensei was lying in the center, his intestines blown out.
The third-year students had been the most badly wounded, some of them mangled almost
beyond recognition.
Lying a little apart from the group, Higa-san and Seragaki-san were also dead.
Futenma-san died after a few groans.
Strangely, the fourth-year students looked relatively untouched --
just tiny red spots on their faces --
though they too were dead.
We stood there, petrified and mute.
That was the ugliest scene we'd ever seen.
In an instant, four were killed and ten others had committed suicide.
It was hell itself.
Arakaki Setsu, 18
When I woke up the next morning, I was amazed to find so many American ships on the water
in front of me.
Some of them were broadcasting surrender instructions to us.
Come out of hiding. Detekoi, they repeated.
Now the nine of us had to make up our minds -- to commit suicide or surrender.
We had two hand grenades among us.
We all agreed to commit suicide with the grenades.
Then someone said if we had one grenade each, we could all die without fail,
but there was no assurance all nine of us would die with only two grenades.
"I've no objection to suicide, if you only let me hold one of the grenades," someone said.
"Otherwise, I'd rather stay alive without any wound."
"Don't be rash," another said.
"Have you forgotten what you've been taught?" another retorted.
"What have we been taught? Like what?" another said.
"Like never to suffer the disgrace of being captured."
Senior students got into a dead-serious argument over the matter.
Junior students wouldn't say a word.
Perhaps they thought they had no choice but to abide by whatever decision the seniors reached.
They remained silent and just listened.
Then a noncommissioned officer who was listening to our argument said suddenly,
"You student nurses, this is no time for you to die for the Emperor.
If you die now, what will happen to Okinawa in the future?
We are soldiers, but we don't even have hand grenades.
Young girl students like you shouldn't carry such dangerous things.
I'll give you some crackers to eat, so let me have those grenades."
He admonished us for a while not to do anything rash.
Finally, I handed the grenades to him.
He did all the talking because he wanted them for himself.
After he got the grenades from us, he told us to go out and surrender to the Americans.
Of course, we didn't want to do that and argued against it,
but finally he talked us into going out.
The Americans were now just behind us.
Yabiku Toshiko, 17
"I'm not afraid of dying. Kill me now, please! You may kill me," I said,
bringing the muzzle of the rifle to my chest.
"No! No!" the American soldier said.
He was trying to tell me something with his gestures.
Then he started to cut my uniform with his scissors.
I was sure he was going to strip me of my clothes, so I hollered at him and bit his
hand as hard as I could.
"Why do you take my clothes off? I'm telling you to kill me!
You can't kill me, so you're trying to put me to shame!"
I shouted at the top of my voice.
But the American soldier, standing beside me and watching me like I was mad,
was just smiling.
I tried to bite him again.
"Oh, no, no...," he said and started cutting one of my trouser legs lengthwise from the
bottom up to the thigh, where I had a gash.
Then he turned his scissors crosswise and cut off the pant leg, making it look like
a pair of shorts.
He poured some kind of disinfectant onto the maggot-infested wound
and out came many wriggling worms.
After treating the wound, he took a stick of chewing gum from his pocket
and offered it to me.
I refused to take it.
He then showed me a canteen and drank water from it.
If they were going to kill me anyway, I might as well drink the water and die, I thought.
And I drank from his canteen.
Finally, after almost 3 months of fighting, the Japanese surrendered.
Tokuyama Masako, 17
The Americans let loose a barrage of shots like fireworks from their bivouac positions.
And soon an unconfirmed report came to us that Japan had been defeated.
There were seven people in the cave, including us.
People at the sugar-mill site where we used to get together to exchange information said
with a troubled look on their faces that such a thing could never have happened,
and they would not believe the report.
The Americans were celebrating their victory, firing guns and cannons, but people thought
it was a kamikaze attack.
On that night, Komatsu-san said to us, "You are women. You'd better go out and surrender."
But we didn't listen to him because we decided we would rather die than be taken prisoner.
An officer from Yama Unit, a short distance away, volunteered to go to a nearby US camp
to confirm the report.
When he came back, he said it was true and that everybody should be ready to leave the
cave to surrender on the twenty-second.
Around ten o'clock that morning, a soldier from Yama Unit came to our cave to see if
we were ready.
Three soldiers reluctantly left the cave.
We could not make up our minds.
No soldier had asked us if we would follow him, so we were just watching.
Some of them were packing their belongings in the darkness of the cave, and one soldier
was shaving himself.
There were two seriously wounded soldiers we had been taking care of in the cave.
Apparently they'd heard what Komatsu-san and we were talking about.
One of them insisted to us, "You shouldn't surrender. You'd better stay here."
Hiroko-san, my classmate, told me that we should leave but that the seriously wounded
soldiers were counting on us for their survival.
She added, "If you decide to stay, then I will too."
But I decided to leave as she had first suggested.
I decided so because I didn't want to die in the darkness of the cave and thought that
if I were going to be killed anyway, I would rather die in an open field,
under the bright sun.
I assumed the Americans would not spare my life once I was captured.
Outside the cave, I couldn't open my eyes.
The sun I saw for the first time in many weeks was too bright.
As my eyes got used to the light, I looked around, but the people were all strangers
to me, though I had lived with them in the cave for about two months.
They looked at me strangely too.
They used to call us Masa-chan and Hiro-chan, but now they didn't seem to know which of
us was Masa-chan and the other Hiro-chan.
Of course, we couldn't tell which of them was the sergeant we had been taking orders from.
While we were staring at each other with stupid looks on our faces, the seriously wounded
soldiers who'd said they would remain in the cave crawled out.
They hadn't been able to move even to get their daily food rations.
Now, with all the strength left in them, they'd crawled out of the cave to survive and were
drying themselves in the hot sun.
The sun was bright, and it stung our eyes.
Alright, you can see the original Himeyuri video here.
Or watch this other video here.
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