In the Kerama Islands, just off the coast of Okinawa Prefecture’s main island, the sea is so clear it appears to glow from beneath. They call it Kerama Blue – not just any blue, but a tone so vivid it feels almost otherworldly, as if it carried the memory of something unspoken in its depths.
Tourists now come to the Kerama Islands for this color, the coral reefs, and the diving. But it was in these same waters, in late March 1945, that the U.S. Navy first dropped anchor in the port of Zamami, launching what would become one of the bloodiest chapters of the Pacific War.
Months before the Battle of Okinawa, the U.S. military conducted aerial reconnaissance across the region. While they obtained clear images of Okinawa’s main island, photos of the nearby Kerama Islands – like Zamami and Tokashiki – were too blurry to assess for coastal artillery or military presence. Fearing a threat to their planned landings and recognizing the islands’ strategic value as a resupply base, the United States decided to target the Kerama Islands first.
On April 1, 1945 – Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day – the U.S. 10th Army, with more than 180,000 troops and an armada of over 1,300 ships, landed on the western shores of Okinawa, the start of a brutal, drawn-out campaign that would cost over 200,000 lives, including more than 100,000 civilians.
But the true beginning of hell – often overlooked, even by history textbooks that mark the start of the Okinawa campaign on April 1 – came days earlier, on March 26, 1945. That’s the day American forces landed on Zamami, part of the Kerama Islands.
The monument near Zamami Port that commemorates the First Place of the Pacific War in Okinawa. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi
Fear took root quickly, and heartbreaking tragedy soon unfolded. Fear of capture, of torture, of rape, fed by Japanese military propaganda, spread from house to house, like radioactive fallout from an invisible bomb. The people of Okinawa were indoctrinated with the phrase “the demon-like Americans and British” (kichiku beiei), and many believed that U.S. soldiers were inhuman monsters. In some communities of this small island, entire families took their own lives in caves, by hanging, drowning, or swallowing the infamous “nekoirazu” – that is rat poison. But not everyone followed that fatal tide.
Misa Kawamura is a 32-year-old woman who works at a hotel near the Zamami port; she was raised here. But she was only born because her grandfather made a last-minute decision not to kill himself.
“My grandfather was 10 years old at the time of the American landing. He held the ‘suicide poison’ in his hands – just like the others,” she says. “But somehow, he didn’t take it. He watched relatives do it, even his elder sister, but something in him resisted. Maybe it was just instinct. Or maybe he didn’t believe the fear.”
Her grandfather’s choice spared not only his own life, but eventually gave Misa hers, and her own two children, now aged three and one.
Misa Kawamura. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
Given her family history, Misa insists that the mass suicides weren’t a written destiny, but a product of fear, strategically planted and unevenly distributed.
“Some places were hit hard by the rumors,” she says. “In others, even close by, people chose not to believe them. The difference between life and death came down to what someone heard – or refused to believe.”
Misa’s grandfather eventually published a memoir where he recounted such stories, with a title that captures the moral tangle of those days with dire eloquence: “Please Don’t Hold a Grudge Against Your Father.” No phrase could better distill the psychological conundrum faced by Okinawan men during the war: torn between what was thought to be a high moral obligation (killing their own sons, daughters, and wives to prevent them from suffering) and the sheer terror of the encounter of the feared enemy.
But sometimes, the line between choice and coercion disappeared entirely.
The memoir recounts the moment when Japanese soldiers, stationed in the village, made their chilling announcement: “Soon the American army will get its foot on this island. So be prepared to die.” The message was clear: your death will serve the empire. And die people did – by their own hands, in some cases.
The monument above the cave where a mass suicide happened in Zamami Island. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
The memoir gives a graphic account of suicide attempts:
There were more than 20 people inside the shelter. Among them were the principal of the elementary school his wife, and a teacher. The female teacher had one hand grenade. Her mind must have gone blank – she probably didn’t even know where to throw it. The grenade landed between my elder sister and the teacher. My sister lost part of her hip, and the teacher had her side torn open. They were both critically wounded. The school principal, who realized he didn’t die either, slashed his wife’s throat with a razor before cutting open his own artery.
Those who survived the night of suicidal madness soon found the reality of U.S. occupation to be quite different than they had been led to believe:
We went to a cliff on the far side of the island to end our lives, but by the time we arrived, we no longer felt like dying. The group suicides on Zamami happened between the night of the 25th [March 25, 1945] and the morning of the 26th. After that, everyone tried to survive. After hiding at the base of the cliff for about two weeks, we surrendered, prepared to be killed. The U.S. soldiers, who we had been taught were demons, treated our wounds and brought us food. I couldn’t help but wonder – why did we ever go to war against a country like that?
*****
The arrival of the American military in Okinawa in the spring of 1945 marked the beginning of one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific and the start of a presence that, 80 years later, still shapes the island’s political and emotional landscape.
After setting foot on Okinawan soil in the spring of 1945, the U.S. military never left. Roughly 26,000 U.S. military personnel remain stationed across dozens of bases on the island, a source of both economic dependency and deep local resentment. Today, Okinawa hosts more than 70 percent of the U.S. military facilities in Japan, despite comprising less than 1 percent of the country’s landmass.
For some locals, the U.S. bases represent a legacy of occupation that undermines the island’s autonomy. For others, they are a source of economic stability in a region that has long lagged behind mainland Japan in terms of development. But beneath this surface duality lies a vivid wound, one that has never time to heal as it repeatedly opens.
Mr. Kinjo. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
Kinjo, 75, the guardian of the Shikinaen Garden in Naha, shared his thoughts on this duality.
“We’re on friendly terms with the Americans,” he says. “But for Okinawans to truly be independent, the bases have to go. Sure, it brings some economic benefit, but not enough. We don’t want a relationship of subservience. And anyway, the military per se is not something used to build things. Just talk to anyone here and you know what I’m referring to.”
Before making his next comment, he pauses to ask me cautiously, “Are you a soldier?” When I assure him I’m not, he continues: “The biggest problem now is the rapes committed by the military.” He almost whispers, as if he is ashamed to even mutter the word in a public space. “It’s especially the [U.S.] Navy. The real issue is that many who join them come from the poorly educated parts of the American society.”
The most recent rape case involving U.S. military personnel in Okinawa occurred in March 2025. A 27-year-old U.S. Marine, Austin Wedington, was indicted for raping a Japanese woman and injuring another who attempted to intervene. The incident took place in a restroom on a U.S. military base in central Okinawa. According to prosecutors, Wedington choked the first woman before sexually assaulting her and then stomped on the face of the second woman, who tried to help.
In the American Village, I meet Mike, a 25-year-old U.S. sailor from Texas, stationed in Okinawa for the past year. He’s sitting outside a burger joint with his fellow sailors. “Most people here are cool with us,” he says without the slightest hesitation. “Some even thank us. If someone doesn’t feel good around us, I try not to take it personally.”
When I ask about the incidents involving U.S. troops, Mike shrugs. “I just focus on doing my job,” he says. “You hear stuff, but we’re not all the same. It sucks when one guy messes it up for everyone.”
The landing beaches of April 1, 1945 on Okinawa Island near today’s American Village. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
*****
This spring especially, as the Battle of Okinawa marks its 80th anniversary, a focus has returned to the origins of the U.S. military presence. The front pages of Okinawa’s local newspapers still echo with memories of the war. The May 9 issue of the Okinawa Times, for instance, was filled with testimonies. The survivors are in their 90s now, making their recollections all the more precious.
“I was 10 years old when I experienced the Battle of Okinawa,” says Tetsunaga Tamaki in one interview. “I fled through the southern battlefields. When I tried to take shelter in a cave in Shikina (in Naha), I was driven out with the words, ‘Are you spies?’ A Japanese military officer took our food and handed me a grenade, saying, ‘Use this.’”
Tamaki adds: “Until then, I had referred to the Japanese military as our ‘allies.’ But I came to realize how terrifying they truly were.”
The Former Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters in Naha, Okinawa. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
His words speak to an unresolved reckoning in Japan itself about victimhood and responsibility, especially when it comes to military’s pattern of coercing civilians into suicide. In 2007, Japan’s Ministry of Education ordered textbook publishers to remove references to the Japanese military’s “involvement” in mass suicides on Okinawa. The outcry from survivors and historians was immediate but the denial continues to this day.
Just this month, Nishida Shoji, a 66-year-old LDP politician from Kyoto, sparked outrage when he dismissed the Himeyuri Monument in Naha – a site that honors the hundreds of schoolgirls conscripted into frontline nursing duties, over 100 of which died in the Battle of Okinawa – as a “rewriting of history.” What he meant was that the memorial dared to suggest Japanese military forced locals to die for the empire.
Higa Masami, 65, works at the Former Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters in southern Naha, a sobering historical site carved deep into the earth. She carries with her a layered legacy of war.
“My grandfather was a prisoner of war in Siberia for four years,” she tells me. “He had many friends who died, they just froze to death.” She pauses, then adds, “My other grandfather was killed in the north here in Okinawa.”
Higa Masami. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi
The details of his death are etched into the family’s collective memory, retold countless times over the decades. “At that time, they were hiding in caves,” she says. “Someone had to go out to find food. One night, he went down toward the beach, hoping to find something to eat. But he was mistaken for a soldier – and shot.”
As she speaks, there is no anger, only a quiet gravity. In Okinawa, war is not even history; it is a family inheritance. The memories live on in the bodies of survivors, in their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In another quiet corner of Naha City, I paid a visit to a solemn building that holds one of Okinawa’s most painful memories: the Tsushima Maru Memorial Museum. The Tsushima Maru was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine on August 22, 1944, while evacuating civilians – mainly children – from Okinawa to mainland Japan. More than 1,400 people died, including 834 schoolchildren.
At the museum, Tsugiko Taira works not only the director but as a guardian of a tragedy that shaped her own family.
“Last year marked 80 years since the Tsushima Maru was sunk,” she tells me, standing beside a glass wall filled with the faded pictures of the children who never returned. “For me, it’s not just history. My mother was on that ship. She was nine years old when it happened.”
Tsugiko’s mother was one of the few who survived.
Monument of Peace in Zamami. Behind it are all the names of those who died on the island during the Pacific War. Photo by Cristian Martini Grimaldi.
“She saw children dying all around her,” Tsugiko says quietly. “Some were being picked up by adults who tried to protect them inside the ship, but the panic, the darkness… it was chaos. The boat tilted so suddenly that many were thrown into the sea. Some screamed. Others disappeared without a sound.”
Her mother was swept into the open ocean, where she clung to debris for two days under the scorching sun and relentless waves. “She told me how she floated, barely conscious, with no idea where she was. Eventually, an airplane spotted them and called for rescue. That’s how she survived.”
The museum supports not just remembrance, but healing. Survivors and their families gather here each year not only to honor the victims and share memories, but to turn pain into purpose: lessons of peace for future generations. And so, too, do many of the American visitors who pass through these halls. They try, in their own way.
When I ask a young American couple if they knew about the Tsushima Maru, they admit they had no idea that a ship carrying hundreds of children was sunk by a U.S. submarine. Moved and respectful, they tell me they left apologies in the museum’s guestbook – small gestures, perhaps, but sincere.