Tomiko Higa was barely six years old when she lost her mother.
It was meningitis.
The fever that just won’t quit.
Her father was naturally heartbroken.
And yet, carrying her still corpse he turned to his daughter, and said something
that she would remember for the rest of her life.
She’s fortunate, Tomiko.
Fortunate that she doesn’t have to be here for what’s about to come.
When America invaded Okinawa on April 1st, 1945, the war was nearly at an end.
Japan had crumbled back to its main islands, and in many ways this was just being run as a test.
To see how many soldiers would die.
To see how many civilians they would have to kill.
Tomiko’s father was not a soldier.
Nor was he even Japanese.
He was Okinawan.
An imperial subject, released from battle so that he could continue running the family farm.
So that he could keep the troops fed.
And yet, nine days into the invasion, he walked off with a package of food
and never returned home.
Tomiko would never get to say goodbye.
That was not a choice she was allowed to make.
Even today, she doesn’t know what killed him.
Some bomb, probably.
But it doesn’t really matter.
Soon, everyone would be dying.
Cause was irrelevant.
All that mattered was effect.
The first choice Tomiko would get to make was to run.
To leave the house she’d inhabited since birth, and head out into a world she’d never truly seen.
Even without a war, this would have terrified any six-year old.
But with a war, it was a necessity.
Her father’s last command.
Along with her two sisters, aged 17 and 13, and her brother, aged 9, they set out South.
It was the one place he might still possibly be.
Perhaps he’d been conscripted at the last minute, or held up by the war. Anything.
Regardless, they had no idea where else to go, so that was as good an anywhere.
Led by her eldest sister, with as much food as they could carry on their backs,
they set out into the night.
In the town of Makabe they came across a house full of refugees.
A flat surface to sleep on.
But they were turned away.
It was already too full, and no more room could be found for four young children.
They may have been able to sleep in the yard nearby, but this was the rainy season,
so they made the choice to spend the night in a nearby cave instead.
It was in that cave that they heard the thunderous clap of the bomb that tore that house to pieces.
Everyone in it killed.
But for that young family it exposed the good choice that they'd made.
From then on, they would always try to sleep in caves.
The following day, on the road South, they came across an infant
laying in a pool of blood on its mother’s chest.
It was still sucking at her tit, drinking the liquid that poured out of the hole in her abdomen.
As they walked by, the infant reached out to them with wide eyes.
Carry me, its body cried to them.
Save me from this.
They made the choice to leave it behind.
The world it was born into could no longer understand compassion.
It would have to die with its mother.
As it should be.
The further they walked, the worse things became.
But they kept walking.
Years later she would realize that they’d walked right through the heart of the fighting,
circling the battle again and again like some lost sheep dancing around wolves.
And eventually, they walked far enough south that they reached the ocean.
Komesu.
A town she had never heard of, but would soon never forget.
On the beach, with nowhere to sleep that wasn’t entirely exposed,
Tomiko and her brother made the choice to dig a small pit.
It wasn’t enough to lay down in, but enough to cover their lower halves
as they sat back to back and slept.
When she woke, her brother had a small, red hole through the side of his head.
A little nine year old boy.
Adventurous and silly, he was the one person she’d loved most in this world.
And he was such a good brother that he died silently.
He didn’t even wake her up.
Her sisters made the choice to bury him on the beach.
They told Tomiko again and again.
"Remember Komesu.
Komesu is where your brother is."
If she survived the war, she’d have to come back here.
He needed to be buried properly.
But for now, they covered him with sand, and they made the choice to keep walking.
The following night, they found themselves with a large group of refugees on the road.
Tomiko didn’t want to get separated from her sisters, so she held tight to the youngest’s dress.
Holding on in a sea of humanity, and fear, and confusion, they walked together for hours.
By the time light broke and she could look up and realize the dress belonged to someone else, it was too late.
Her family was nowhere to be found.
From here on out, little Tomiko was by herself.
Every choice she made would be hers and hers alone.
She can’t say exactly, but she thinks that was her birthday.
The day she turned seven.
From here on out, the world would be filtered only through those innocent little child's eyes.
Nobody was there to correct her.
And in her mind, she moved because she wanted to see her sisters again.
She moved because she wanted to find them.
She remembered her brother taught her that in hide and seek you never hide where the people are.
That way you don’t get caught when they do.
And every cave she came by trying to find her family reinforced that wisdom.
The first cave she came across had an adorable baby, the happiest infant she’d seen since before the war.
And so she took out her last gumdrop, a gumdrop she’d found in a mess kit of a dead soldier,
and gave it to it.
And their mother turned to her in kindness and said "would you like to join us in suicide".
We're all so tired, we just don't want to continue.
We're going to seal this cave off and blow ourselves up with a bomb."
But she said no, thank you.
And she made the choice to keep living.
The next cave she came across had a different mother with a different child.
This child was screaming, colicky.
As you would expect.
But the soldiers inside didn't appreciate that.
It would bring the Americans to them.
So they said to her either you shut that child up or we kill you both.
The child kept screaming.
So they riddled them both with machine gun bullets.
Tomiko then went to the soldiers and asked if her sisters were there.
They said no, so she moved on.
The third cave she came to had a soldier killing his wounded troops one by one with a katana.
They tried to crawl away.
They begged him to let them live.
But he kept slicing them.
Their cries of pain might attract the Americans.
So they had to die.
Again, she moved on.
The fourth cave was filled with a soldier who’d lost his mind.
It was here that Tomiko faced the worst danger of her life.
As soon as she’d called out her sister's name into that cave, he came running out with his sword,
telling her she’d die for making such noise.
She fled, and he ran right behind her, until they both came to the edge of a cliff.
And in an instance she thought, time to die.
But just as that sword came down upon her, the cliff gave out and she fell.
When she woke up, she was in the branches of a tree halfway down.
It had stopped her fall, and saved her life, but in turn had ripped her clothing to pieces
and had torn her little body open.
It was there she made the choice to stop trying to sleep in caves.
As the days passed, she continued to wander in those wide circles, searching for food as best
as her adolescence would allow.
To survive, she befriended dead soldiers, talking to them like respected members of her family.
After all, they provided for her.
In their pouches she often found food.
And she would thank them for it.
They were much nicer than living soldiers, she thought.
To survive, she befriended animals.
She knew all about animals from her farm.
Eventually they would even become her good luck charms.
If you could see an animal, she would think to herself, you won’t be bombed.
After all, no goat is dumb enough to be bombed.
To survive, she drank from a river so infested with corpses
that she had to push the maggots out of the way just to grab a scoop.
She endured a hell that makes me cry to even think about it.
But she made the choice anyway, because she really needed the water.
After nearly a month on her own, Tomiko decided she’d had enough.
Like that mother with her child, the idea had just come to her doorstep.
It was time to die.
But just as her will gave out, as if it was fate itself, she smelled her mother’s cooking
in the distance.
A faint hint, like a memory, came wafting past her nose.
It was a dream, she thought.
Her mother was dead.
Her mind was playing tricks on her.
She was just remembering something that wasn’t, and could never be again.
But the smell was overwhelming, and a hungry little girl is inquisitive, even if in the middle of hell.
So she followed her nose to the mouth of a tiny cave opening, and took a giant whiff.
Miso, for sure.
It was definitely miso.
So she lowered herself down through a hole that she thought no human could ever be able to fit through,
only to see in the corner a pair of emaciated, terrified elderly Okinawans.
This had once been their pantry of sorts.
A place to keep pickles and miso out of the hot Okinawan sun.
And now it would be their tomb.
They didn't let her know their names.
They didn’t want her to know.
They were worried it would just make it that much harder when she had to watch them die.
So she called them grandma and grandpa.
And they would save her life.
Even if they couldn’t save their own.
Grandpa had no arms and no legs.
They’d recently been blown off in an explosion, and the maggoty, bleeding stumps
that were left behind had begun to rot.
He would soon be dead.
Grandma had gone blind, possibly from the trauma, and without his eyes, she would soon follow.
But these were nice people, so Tomiko made herself useful.
During the day she’d help with the management of the cave, cleaning grandpa’s wounds of bugs,
squeezing out the pus and coterizing the stumps with the little salt they’d managed to keep.
And at other times she'd scratch his back, and grab food from the shelf for her grandmother to cook.
She would even chew the bonito flakes to soften them,
as her grandparents had long since lost their important teeth.
She was a good granddaughter, and for those few short days she was living her relatively normal life again.
A life she understood.
One she never wanted to leave again.
But before she could get comfortable, the war returned as ever.
This time, as a loudspeaker.
And in broken, foreign Japanese came the repeated statement
“People of Okinawa, I am a second-generation, surrender to Americans and you will not be harmed.
People of Okinawa, I am a second-generation, surrender to the Americans and you will not be harmed."
Hearing these words, her grandparents would make her final and most important choice for her.
With virtually nothing remaining to work from, her grandpa ripped apart the cloth
he had been wearing around his waist, tearing it into a triangle
and attaching it as best he could to a stick she found him at the mouth of the cave.
Against her wishes, crying and scared, they forced her to leave her newfound home.
Their last words to her, on repeat.
"Hold up the flag, Tomiko, it will keep you safe!"
She didn’t want to leave them behind, of course.
She loved them.
She wanted to take them with her.
But she’d seen what the soldiers did to the wounded,
and she wasn't willing to watch her new family die, as well.
Plus, they weren’t taking no for an answer.
So in her final choice of the war, she crawled out of that cave, raised that white flag above her head
as high as it could go, and in an act of courage that I couldn't master as an adult,
walked towards the very noises that she'd been running from that entire time.
The first American soldier she came across was carrying a weapon she’d never seen before.
And as he pointed it right at her face, she knew she was going to die.
I’m sorry, grandma. I’m sorry, grandpa.
The flag didn’t work.
You cannot trust a living soldier.
He’s going to kill me.
But instead of a bang, there was a click.
The photo he took would take would become the most memorable of the entire Okinawan campaign.
A symbol of what had happened here.
Of the hard choices that nobody should ever have to make, let alone a seven-year old girl.
As she entered the American camp, and was filtered like all refugees to the town she originated from,
she saw in the distance her two sisters.
A miracle that they'd survived.
And yet, the costs that it took still weigh on them to this day.
None of them would ever get to bury their brother.
Nor their father.
Tomiko would never again see her grandparents from that cave.
In the end, they were all just pieces of a puzzle that allowed her to survive.
A quarter of Okinawa’s population would die, but not her.
Thanks to the last bit of cloth from the waist of a dying old man, she somehow survived.
And that’s how this island remembers her.
A traumatized little girl, waving a white flag.
Wishing she could go home and hug her father one last time.
That was June 25th, 1945.
And this is Rare Earth.