在ヒューストン日本国総領事館
Consulate-General of Japan in Houston

It is a great honor for me to have a chance to speak to you today at the NationalMuseum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.It is always a challenge for a Japanese consul general to speak about any World War II stories to an American audience since we fought the war as foes.What I am going to say should not be taken as the official comment of the Japanese government, but instead only as my personal view.I am neither a historian by training nor an expert on the subject, and therefore I’m afraid inaccuracy or inappropriateness may permeate my remarks.If that happens, I simply solicit your forgiveness.I have no other intention but to speak candidly.

 

I have been in the United States for nearly two years now, and I have found there are three occasions every year in the U.S. for the Japanese to be reminded of the fact that we fought the war as foes.These three occasions are the anniversaries of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Iwo Jima.The first two are understandable to me, but I was puzzled by the third--why Iwo Jima?In Japan there is no inclination to single out the Battle of Iwo Jima.Last year, I went back to Japan for my home leave holiday, and I found a non-fiction book about Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi and the Battle of Iwo Jima entitled “How Miserable I Am to Die This Way!” by Ms. Kumiko Kakehashi.My anticipation that the book might explain the annual American remembrance of the Battle of Iwo Jima prompted me to buy the book.Having read it, I found it to be very interesting and worth sharing with those Americans who are interested in the Battle of Iwo Jima.Meanwhile, I visited the NationalMuseum of the Pacific War for the first time last March in preparation for the potential visit of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force delegation to the Museum in mid-July.Upon recognizing my willingness to share my interest in Kakehashi’s book with an American audience, Helen McDonald, director of the Museum, proudly told me that they held a symposium on the Battle of Iwo Jima last year, and she encouraged me to speak about Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi and the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective.And that is why I am here today.

 

In April, I learned from a Japanese magazine article that Clint Eastwood is currently producing two films related to the Battle of Iwo Jima.One film will feature American soldiers, while the other, which will be entitled “Letters from Iwo Jima,” will be about Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi. I don’t know whether the magazine report was correct or not, but the story I read could definitely be accurately titled as “Letters from Iwo Jima,” as one of its most telling episodes concerned Kuribayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima.Clint Eastwood must have read the book too, and if so, then the story I enjoyed was discovered by Clint Eastwood and will be used to make a Hollywood movie.What an eye I have!What an aesthetic mind I have cultivated!

 

Well, that’s enough self-congratulation.It is my ardent hope that this fall when it is released, you will buy a ticket for the film, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” which will have the Japanese perspective on Iwo Jima.I am really looking forward to seeing the movie.It will be very interesting to see how Clint Eastwood interprets and deals with Kakehashi’s viewpoint in his film.

 

I, for one, am particularly interested in how the film will interpret and depict the following three points regarding the Battle of Iwo Jima or WWII.The first is the militaristic appraisal of the Battle of Iwo Jima.Can this invasion operation be considered militarily successful? Didn’t the unexpectedly high American death toll despite her overwhelmingly superior military resources make this one of her very few failed operations?I am curious how the film portrays this.The second point is how the film depicts the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima.It is quite common for Hollywood war movies to depict Japanese soldiers as faceless, robotic fanatics.Will this be the case again? The third point is whether the strategic implications will be adequately depicted.Iwo Jima was fought for securing a refueling or emergency landing point for planes in order to make bombing raids against the civilian population in the mainland Japan, and this paved the way for the Tokyo Air Raid, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

So why is it that Iwo Jima is a singled out as a noteworthy battle in the U.S.? It is because it was the battle in which America suffered her heaviest casualties against Japan.There is no other battle which better illustrates the personal valor and dedication of American soldiers to their nation.In this battle, the U.S. suffered 28,000 casualties, while the Japanese suffered 21,000.Taking into consideration the difference of combat capabilities, these are astonishing figures.The U.S. invading force, consisted of 60,000 men, outnumbering the Japanese defending force of 20,000 men by a ratio of three to one (3:1).Moreover, the U.S. had reserve forces of an additional 100,000 men ready to be mobilized from the vicinity.Ninety-five percent of the Japanese soldiers on the island died during the battle.Most of them were over 30 years old.They were ordinary men who were conscripted into the military service.

 

What is the strategic importance of Iwo Jima?The U.S.’s victory over Japan’s navy at the sea battle of Mariana in June, and its invasion of Saipan in July made it possible for the U.S. to establish control of the sea and air lanes of the central Pacific.This caused the Japanese to become more adamant about defending Iwo Jima in order to defend mainland Japan from U.S. bombers.The distance from Saipan to Tokyo is more than a good 1600 miles.Without Iwo Jima, therefore, the U.S. would still suffer technical difficulties in carrying out full-fledged bombing campaigns against Japan, as it lacked a feed point for its bombers.Iwo Jima is a small but relatively flat island with an 8 square mile area, whose geographic features enabled the building of airstrips.At the time of the U.S. invasion, there were two airstrips, and the third was under construction.After all, Iwo Jima belonged to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.If lost, it would be the first Japanese land to be invaded.

 

Upon the assumption of his office as commander of the Ogasawara Defense Force, Kuribayashi knew his mission very well from the start as he had been directly instructed by Hideki Tojo, Japan’s Prime Minister, to “fight to death just like soldiers in AttuIsland.”To win and survive the battle was not anticipated, but Kuribayashi was supposed to endure at all costs in order to delay American air raids as long as possible.An easy death was not permitted to the Japanese soldiers there.

 

The headquarters of the Ogasawara Defense Force, by the way, was previously located at Chichi Jima, the biggest and most developed island of Ogasawara archipelago.Kuribayashi transferred the headquarters from Chichi Jima to the anticipated battlefront, Iwo Jima, soon after he assumed his office.

 

Landing on Iwo Jima, the first thing he did was to inspect the whole island on foot from corner to corner.He totally familiarized himself with the island’s topography and this enabled him to design his war plan based upon objectivity and pragmatism.He dismissed the traditional battle plan of “shoreline operation.”Instead, he adopted a plan of waging guerilla warfare in the retreated rear area.In realizing this strategy, he built more than 1,000 underground bunkers and connecting tunnels.These pits and tunnels were dug more than 50 feet underground.The total length of these tunnels amounted to 12 miles.

 

General Kuribayashi discarded another Imperial Army tradition of executing ‘banzai swoops.’He forbade this as he regarded this tactic as being obsolete and futile against well equipped American soldiers.He forbade his men, in a way, to die in a manly way, but instead willed them to endure hardship without hope of an honorable death.

 

As I said earlier, Kuribayashi was a field oriented commander.He himself walked the whole island and was thus seen on the field by many soldiers.Through his exploration of the island he found that it had no rivers or springs, but only sulfur gas emitting from everywhere.Geothermal heat coming from the soil was felt everywhere.Actually Iwo Jima literally means a sulfur island in the Japanese language.It was imperative therefore to secure water to survive on the island.Conservation of water was of paramount concern.Each man was allowed intake of only one canteen of water per day.A fair but rigorous ration was implemented among the officers and soldiers.Kuribayashi invented a six point pledge which he had his men recite every day in order to boost their morale and reinforce their determination.They pledged to each other to fight to their deaths bravely, emphasizing that their own volition directed them to do so.

 

As a commander, Kuribayashi was a pragmatist.He tried to make rational judgments based on the facts only and free from traditional thinking or the constraint of previous example.He made a decision to change a combat strategy from the shoreline counterattack to the retreated defense just two weeks after his arrival.

 

He can be described as a family man in his private life.He enjoyed writing letters, and he wrote letters to his family frequently while on Iwo Jima.In these letters to his family, he never mentioned the war and refrained from using patriotic phrases.Instead, his main concern was to make sure that household chores were being taken care of properly while he was away from home.He wrote of his everyday life on the island, of growing vegetables or hatching chicks, for instance.He repented that he had not fixed a hole in the kitchen which allowed outside air to get in.He spent his final hours in Tokyo before going to Iwo Jima making shelves for his family’s home.

 

He was a maverick in the Imperial Japanese Army.Although he was an elite army officer who graduated as a top student from the MilitaryAcademy and the ArmyCollege, he never felt he belonged to the mainstream.He detested authoritarian prejudice and tried to see things objectively.At heart, he was more a civilian than a military man.When he was young, he was torn between whether to become a newspaper reporter or a military officer.Eventually of course he chose a military career.However, he never served in the elitist joint military headquarters, and his promotion was rather slow during his military career, which was unusual for a distinguished top graduate of the ArmyCollege.

 

He studied abroad in the U.S. between 1928 and 1930.He stayed in WashingtonD.C., Buffalo, Fort Bliss, New York, Los Angeles and so forth.He made a long drive in his own car from Kansas to WashingtonD.C., observing the country’s economic strength and military might.He was impressed by the fact that even a female owner of a local boarding house owned a car in the U.S.He was a staunch opponent of the war against the U.S. as was Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Naval Fleet, who attacked Pearl Harbor.Admiral Yamamoto also knew how rich and powerful the U.S. was from his personal experience in the U.S. which he gained during his stay as a military attaché of the Japanese Embassy.

 

The U.S. forces were advancing through the islands in the Pacific in order to retake the Philippines and to eventually attack mainland Japan.In Iwo Jima, they conducted 74 days of consecutive air strikes beginning in December of 1944.In addition, during that period, naval bombardment was carried out five times.Three days before D Day, between February 16th and 18th, the heaviest bombardment on the island was implemented in preparation for the invasion.More bombs were dropped there than were dropped on Normandy.The shelling was so intense that there was serious concern that there would be no one left on the island for the Marines to fight.On February 19th, the invasion of Iwo Jima began.The Japanese allowed the Marines to land without much checking and bade their time to make a counterattack.They began attacking only after the beaches were filled with troops and supplies.In the first wave, 31,000 Marines invaded the island and suffered more than 2,000 casualties, including 566 deaths.

 

Four days after D Day on February 23rd, the U.S. invading force captured Mount Suribachi, located in the south western tip of the island.A U.S. flag was raised on the hilltop and was photographed by an official cameraman of the Marine Corps.That original flag was soon replaced by another larger Stars and Stripes in order to preserve the original flag.Six men were engaged in hoisting the flag for the second time when the most famous battlefield photograph in the world was taken by an AP cameraman.The photo captured the exulting moment of victory with the most convincing poses and a composition enhanced by the light and shadow effect.This photo was sent to Guam earlier than the official one, and thus was distributed as the first victorious image of the battlefront to the world and became a classic masterpiece.

 

Now, do you know what the flag pole was made of?It was part of the debris from the steel pipe attached to the water tank the Japanese soldiers had placed on the hilltop for collecting rain water.It is rather ironic and cruel that the image of the Battle of Iwo Jima contains objects that symbolize the plight of the Japanese soldiers:the Marine and thirst.U.S. Marines were fortunate in the sense that they never lacked drinking water.

On the bridge of the USS El Dorado, two high ranking U.S. military officers rejoiced in the capture of Mount Suribachi.James Forrestal, Secretary of Navy, told his colleague Lt. Gen. Holand Smith, Commander of the Marine invasion of Iwo Jima, something to the effect that the victory will guarantee the continued existence of the Marines for the next 500 years.

 

The Secretary of the Navy left the Iwo Jima area the next day.He could not have foreseen that only four out of forty Marines who stood atop Mount Suribachi at the raising of the flag survived to return home safe and sound from Iwo Jima.Three out of the six men who raised the flag were killed in the subsequent battle on Iwo Jima.

 

On February 24th, five days after D Day, the U.S. mobilized an additional 30,000 troops to the island and launched an accelerated charge against the enemy.By February 27th, the Japanese force was reduced by half, which made it impossible for them to continue an organized resistance.They began to wage guerilla warfare.By March 4th, the Japanese troops were reduced to a mere 4,100 men and two thirds of their officers were lost.

 

On March 9th, 334 B-29 bombers took off from the airstrips of Guam, Tenian, and Saipan.They headed north to Tokyo by flying over Iwo Jima and made a bombing raid on Tokyo, killing 84,000 and injuring 400,000 civilian inhabitants.One million people suffered damage, and 267,000 houses were destroyed overnight.

 

On their way back from the bombardment campaign against Tokyo, two B-29’s made an emergency landing on Iwo Jima, and fourteen went into the nearby sea, five of which were rescued.It is said that by the end of the war, the Iwo Jima airstrips accommodated 2,400 emergency landings and saved 27,000 American lives.The Battle of Iwo Jima was thereby legitimized by the fact that it saved more American lives than were lost during the battle.It also expedited the Japanese surrender.

 

On March 14th, the official ceremony of the raising of the U.S. flag was conducted.On March 16th, Rear Admiral Nimitz issued the declaration of the victory in the Battle of Iwo Jima.The text of his remarks included the next famous quote:“Among the Americans who served on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

 

On March 16th, Kuribayashi decided to make a final charge and sent his last telegram to the Tokyo Military Headquarters.This parting message was very unusual with respect to its content since it bitterly criticized the Headquarters for their lack of strategy, planning, or responsibility.Criticism was taboo in the Japanese Imperial Military since true samurai heroes were supposed to accept their fate and hold only themselves responsible for their actions without making complaints or excuses.Kuribayashi however, dared to point out that his men on Iwo Jima had been victimized by the poor war plan, insufficient war supplies, and the negligence of the Tokyo military leadership.He concluded his last telegram with his farewell poems in which he made the statement “how miserable I am to die this way!”This rebellious message incidentally was modified by the authorities before it was made public.They deleted his critical comments regarding the military leadership and replaced them with more patriotic statements.

 

Kuribayashi sent his final battle order by local telegram to all the remaining forces on the island to make a last charge on March 17th.However, there was an exception attached to that last charge command.He ordered his immediate subordinate to stay alive and to report back to the Japanese people what had happened on Iwo Jima.This man did survive the battle but then unsuccessfully attempted to fly back to Japan by stealing an American aircraft.He never made it to Japan, nor did he accomplish his mission.Kuribayashi and his remaining force moved to another bunker on that very night, but he never launched the last charge.He delayed the charge in order to optimize its timing.

 

On the occasion of his parting from his command base to go to another bunker, Kuribayashi was witnessed by some to be greatly disheartened; so much so that he was depicted as a feeble old man with a stick being taken away by a group of young people.How do we interpret this?Ms. Kakehashi thinks that by this time, he had heard the news, perhaps by radio, of the Tokyo bombardment, and that it had completely discouraged him.It was totally shattering for him to learn that his struggle on Iwo Jima had not succeeded in securing Tokyo from being bombed.

 

However, he tried hard to retain his composure and endured an eight day long wait in an attempt to calibrate the best timing for an all out charge.On March 24th, the entire Japanese force bravely charged ahead, spearheaded by Kuribayashi.In the close encounter battle, Kuribayashi was injured in his thigh and probably bled to death soon after; otherwise, on his death bed, he might have killed himself with his pistol.This last battle did not involve ‘banzai charges,’ but was instead a silent and organized attack, resulting in 170 American casualties.Incidentally, it is on this day, March 24, 1945, that the Battle of Okinawa began.

 

In 1968, the U.S. returned Iwo Jima to Japan.Iwo Jima still has 13,000 pillars missing underground.Three hundred and fifty Japanese Self-Defense Force members are currently stationed on the island.

 

Iwo Jima became a sacred place for the U.S. Marines.It has been an important tradition for Marine trainees to visit Iwo Jima while they are stationed on Okinawa for their training program.They go there to pay homage to the deceased Marines and to their valor and dedication.

 

In 1985, for the first time, Iwo Jima saw a joint ceremony between Japan and the U.S. commemorating the forty year anniversary of the battle.The veterans from both sides and their families participated in the ceremony, and there was a gracious reconciliation.Since then, the ceremony has become an annual event and has helped to end animosity and advance further reconciliation. Indeed, Iwo Jima has become a symbol of reconciliation and trust between Japan and the U.S., and has laid the foundation upon which the two countries have bound together to become close allies under the framework of U.S. Japan security arrangement.

 

As for symbolic places appropriate for a reconciliation between the U.S. and Japan, few places can claim more authority than the NationalMuseum of the Pacific War with its attached JapaneseGarden of Peace where a replica of Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s study has been reconstructed.On my first visit to the garden, I enjoyed its peaceful and serene atmosphere.I have no doubt that the garden serves as an ideal place for reconciliation between American veterans and their Japanese counterparts.

 

This July, a group of young officer trainees of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force are scheduled to visit the museum.They will first make a port call to Galveston on their three ships, and then they will make an excursion to Fredericksburg, the home town of Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, to visit the NationalMuseum of the Pacific War.This, I believe, will certainly serve the mission of the museum to foster good will and friendship, if not reconciliation, and help both sides to move on beyond the bellicose past.

 

Recently I had a chance to see another World War Two movie entitled “Only the Brave.”It is the story of the segregated Japanese-American regimental combat team, the 442nd, which despite the extremely difficult circumstances and the great sacrifices they endured on the European battlefield, succeeded in rescuing the beleaguered Lost Battalion of Texas.They are the most decorated single unit of all the American military services.After the war, the veterans of the 442nd were recognized as “Honorary Texans” by then Texas Governor, John B. Connally.

 

During America’s fight with Germany, the 442nd fought against the Germans as American soldiers.At that time, Japan was allied with Germany, but we never fought together with the Germans since our battle fields were so distant from each other in the Pacific and Europe.In a strange and ironic note, it could be said that we fought against the Germans, I mean German-Americans in the Pacific war:Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor and Admiral Nimitz at Midway, for instance.

 

Well, I hope my remarks will not spoil the joyous mood a Friday afternoon usually brings to this beautiful German-American town.Thank you very much for your kind attention.