So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  Kuribayashi’s strategy—allowing the Americans to land before picking them off from close quarters rather than clinging to the old orthodoxy of stopping the enemy from coming ashore—proved itself effective. On that single day, 566 American soldiers were killed or missing in action; 1,755 were wounded; and 99 were so traumatized that they could fight no more. This adds up to 8 percent of the total 31,000-man-strong landing force.

  The Japanese side sustained heavy damage, too. The defenses at the water’s edge were put almost completely out of action on the first day (though their loss was already factored in). Kuribayashi never planned on a showdown at the water’s edge; his aim was to inflict as much damage as he could, then continue to resist from his main inland defenses, before finally holing up in the honeycomb position.

  The sun set on D-Day at 6:45 p.m., but night did not mean sleep for the exhausted marines: they had no way of knowing when the banzai charge might come.

  The Americans were sure there would be a large-scale banzai charge on the day they landed. It had been that way on every other Pacific island they had invaded up to this point. Officers brandishing Japanese swords, soldiers armed with bayonets and grenades, the sound of strange voices, howls, cry after cry of “banzai.” Although the Americans hated and feared these attacks, they also represented an opportunity to dramatically reduce the fighting power of the Japanese. The Japanese soldiers who charged in so recklessly were always equally quickly slaughtered.

  The combination of casualties from the fighting on the beach by day and the banzai charge at night usually meant that the fighting ability of the Japanese would fall sharply on the first day of any battle. That was the basis of the Americans’ conviction that Iwo Jima would fall in five days.

  Early morning on D-day plus one (the day after the landing), Lieutenant General Smith was on the deck of the Eldorado, gazing at the island and wondering why the Japanese had not yet made their banzai charge. Smith did not yet know what kind of man the commander in chief of Iwo Jima was.

  Kuribayashi’s battle was only just getting started.

  WHAT WAS KURIBAYASHI THINKING in the battle command post in the Command Center when the Americans came ashore?

  Accounts written by American historians tend to paint a picture of Kuribayashi, the consummate samurai warrior, biding his time, ready to pounce on the enemy. But what was really passing through his mind?

  “America is the last country in the world Japan should fight.”

  This was something Kuribayashi had told his family repeatedly before the outbreak of war. His opinion derived from the time he had spent in the United States and the evidence of the power of the country he had seen with his own eyes. “It was because His Lordship the General was opposed to starting a war against the United States that Prime Minister Tôjô disliked him and ordered him off to Iwo Jima.” This is still the opinion of Sadaoka Nobuyoshi, the former army civilian employee.

  The United States may also have been “the most difficult country” for Kuribayashi to fight. After all, in the course of his two-year sojourn there while in his thirties, Kuribayashi had not just experienced the industrial and military power of the place, but the everyday life of the people—and they were just like the Japanese.

  When I first visited Tarô Kuribayashi’s house in Akishima in the fall of 2003, I was shown one folder of letters that did not come from Iwo Jima. Reading them, I was surprised at how different they were from the letters he had sent from the front.

  Each letter was a brief passage of text coupled with humorous and deftly drawn illustrations on unlined white paper. There were forty-two letters in total. Kuribayashi had written them to his family while he was studying in the United States.

  I felt I had stumbled upon an unlikely talent for Kuribayashi to have. The drawings were all surprisingly good: there was nothing amateurish about their freedom and confidence of line.

  Tarô, Kuribayashi’s son, was three at the time and not yet able to read. It was for him that Kuribayashi described, on August 27, 1928, from Buffalo, New York, his life in America in pictures.

  This is an American child

  At play

  Here tricycles are all the rage

  And when your daddy sees

  Children playing that way

  I always stand rooted to the spot a while

  And look at them

  Thinking: I wonder if little Tarô

  Is having fun playing like this, too?

  The letter includes a pen drawing of a group of three children playing on tricycles.

  Off in a foreign land, Kuribayashi must have often thought about his young son, as little children make frequent appearances in his illustrated letters, whether he’s giving a child a lift back from school in a car, or admiring the dancing of the daughter of an army captain friend. Kuribayashi would even invite the newspaper delivery boy in for a meal, or talk to a couple of poor brothers out on the street at night.

  Daddy has invited in the delivery boy

  And given him a slap-up meal

  He has a stepmother now, not a mother

  His real mother

  Died when he was just a baby

  So he never knew her

  “My daddy is a sergeant-major

  He works in a place called ‘the accounts room’

  Do you know him, Mister?

  When I get bigger, I’ll go to Japan, sure I will

  So your son’s called Tarô, Mister?

  Reckon that’s an interesting name …”

  “Ah, I see

  Are you tired out from delivering the papers every night?

  It’s all right. Today I bought candy and walnuts

  All sorts of nice things for you

  So go on then, eat up

  What? Me, teach you Japanese?

  It’s difficult, you know.”

  At about nine at night

  Daddy gets out of his car and walks a little

  In a murky spot, standing dejectedly,

  Were two children

  One of them was of the same age as Tarô

  Without thinking I stopped in my tracks

  “What are you doing out so late?

  Are you brothers?

  Where are your shoes? What? You haven’t got any?

  Poor you. I’ll give you both a little bit of money….”

  “This is my little brother

  Yes, we are Mexicans

  Our father drinks too much and life’s difficult

  Me, I’m six

  Our father doesn’t give us any money at all

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  The illustrated letters were neatly bound like a book. By the time I looked at them, more than seventy-five years had passed since they were written, but they were neither stained nor damaged, and the two illustrations that had been colored in had not faded at all. It was obvious that the family had preserved them with the greatest care.

  Tarô was reluctant to talk much about the letters from Iwo Jima— the scene of his father’s death—but his expression softened when he looked at the illustrated letters. In them his father is a young man, overflowing with curiosity, hope, and ambition, while Japan has yet to plunge into a doomed war. In light of what the family was later to experience, this was a happy time for them, even though duty had taken the head of the family abroad.

  “It looks like my father was a big hit in America. Here, have a look at this one.”

  Tarô was pointing at a letter in which a group of people were waving good-bye to Kuribayashi as he went off in a taxi. When he started his studies in America, he lodged with an ordinary, nonmilitary family in Buffalo, New York. The picture shows him leaving Buffalo to go to Washington, D.C., from where, on November 19, 1928, he had written:

  My landlady in Buffalo

  And all the ladies of the neighborhood

  Are sorry

  That Daddy is leaving

  That’s how much Daddy

  Was loved by them all.


  Kuribayashi had sailed for America in March 1928. He was a thirty-six-year-old cavalry captain five years out of the Army War College.

  Overseas study was a special privilege of the guntô-gumi, the “saber squad,” officers who had graduated with honors from the Army War College and were so named because they were personally presented with a saber by the emperor. Members of the saber squad would go to countries like Germany, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and China to study, with Germany being the most popular destination.

  Kuribayashi was in the twenty-sixth graduating class of the Military Academy. An examination of the overseas destinations selected by the twenty-eight graduates from the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, and twenty-seventh classes shows that Germany, chosen by ten people, was top, with France, chosen by seven, in second place. The unpopularity of English-speaking countries is striking, with only four graduates choosing the United States, and one choosing Great Britain.

  There were few people in the Japanese army who knew much about Great Britain or the United States, and the resulting tendency to underestimate their military and industrial might was to prove one of the causes behind Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. This deficiency was directly related to the army’s system for educating its high-level officers.

  The typical course followed by elite army officers involved Military Preparatory School, followed by the Military Academy, and culminating in graduation from the Army War College. It was also possible to attend an ordinary middle school (under the old system) rather than the Military Preparatory School, and go on to the Military Academy. Graduates of the Military Preparatory School, however, fared far better when it came to promotion. The idea was deeply entrenched that the graduates of the Military Preparatory School were privileged, while anyone who had graduated from an ordinary middle school was merely acceptable. As a result, most of the pivotal posts in the army were held by officers who had attended the Military Preparatory School.

  The foreign language curriculum at the Military Preparatory School included German, French, and Russian, with English not offered until 1938. Since the Japanese army was modeled on the German army, the majority of students chose to learn German. This also accounted for the large numbers of army men who chose to do their overseas study in Germany.

  In ordinary middle schools, however, English was compulsory. Many of the young officers who had progressed to the Military Academy from such schools chose to spend their period of overseas study in English-speaking countries like the United States and Great Britain. But since the products of ordinary middle schools were not viewed very highly, officers with a strong knowledge of the United States and Great Britain seldom attained the most important posts.

  Kuribayashi was not a product of the Military Preparatory School, having progressed to the Military Academy via a middle school in Nagano. One of Kuribayashi’s men from the days when he had commanded the First Cavalry Brigade in Baotou, China, told me that he believed “Kuribayashi having not gone to the Military Preparatory School was a major factor in his having such a breadth of vision.”

  Army officers who had attended the Military Preparatory School were often criticized for having an overweening sense of being “special” and also a narrow way of thinking. The Military Preparatory School had been modeled on the Prussian schools that turned the sons of the aristocracy into soldiers, and high-ranking officers often sent their sons to the school.

  Kuribayashi, good at English thanks to graduating from an ordinary middle school, chose to study in the United States. He went off alone, leaving his wife and son behind in Japan. Attached to the U.S. First Cavalry Division for military study, Kuribayashi found the time to audit courses at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, where he studied English, American history, and U.S. current affairs.

  Kuribayashi was fascinated by the motorization boom in the United States. He acquired a Chevrolet K, a state-of-the-art model at the time, learned how to drive it, and in December 1929 had an “adventure,” driving it the entire 1,300 kilometers from Kansas to Washington, D.C. His illustrated letters depict all the difficulties he encountered on his journey, including crossing mountains on narrow, snow-covered roads and getting a tire puncture in the middle of a snowstorm.

  In a letter to his eldest brother, Kuribayashi recounts a surprising experience he had during this trip when his car broke down, leaving him stranded. A girl of seventeen or eighteen who happened to drive by—herself at the wheel—repaired his car. Kuribayashi was most impressed that in the United States anyone over sixteen with the right paperwork was allowed to drive, and that everyone was able to perform routine maintenance themselves.

  It was from everyday experiences like this—and not just from book learning—that Kuribayashi developed a sense of the economic gulf separating the United States and Japan. The United States was a place where “the housekeeper lady” who looked after Kuribayashi could also own her own car.

  The housekeeper lady has recently

  Bought herself a new car

  And is showing it to Daddy

  “I see

  I see

  I see

  That’s great

  If you take good care of it

  It will last a good long time.”

  “Hey, captain

  I just bought myself this new car

  It cost me 400 dollars

  It’s an old model, so they gave me a good price.

  The old one? I gave it to my husband.

  I keep separate accounts from him

  My husband is a genuinely good man

  But he likes to drink and gamble

  And I don’t like it when he nags me for money

  Even since the beginning of this year, I’ve lent him so much

  Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter blah-blah-blah-blah.”

  What Daddy was thinking was:

  An automobile like this

  Is much better than the buses

  Running in the Japanese countryside

  Japan has got to pull itself together….

  That, and her keeping her money separate from her husband,

  It’s so typically American….

  Kuribayashi started on his way home in April 1930, but as he made stops in London, Paris, and Berlin, he only got back to Japan in July.

  In the course of his two-year stint in America, Kuribayashi had socialized with American military men and their families, and he counted some of them as true friends. One of them was Brigadier General George Van Horn Moseley, the head of the U.S. Army Cavalry School.

  At the Kuribayashi house, I was shown the photograph album covering his years in America. It included a portrait of Brigadier General Moseley, with the inscription: “With high regard and esteem. I shall never forget our happy association together in America. Best wishes to you and to Japan.”

  While Kuribayashi waited for the Americans to come ashore, deep in his underground bunker surrounded by the stench of sulfur, did he think about the newspaper delivery boy, about driving in his Chevrolet, or about the families of the soldiers who had invited him into their homes?

  February 19, 1945; D-day. Kuribayashi was trapped in one of the ironies of history, about to engage the United States—the country he least wanted to fight—in battle at the front line of his Japanese homeland.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE ISLAND WHERE YOU WALK ON THE DEAD

  —

  “IF YOU LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW ON THE RIGHT, IWO JIMA WILL soon be coming into view.”

  When a crew member made this announcement, everyone undid their seat belts and got out of their seats. Two and a half hours had passed since the Air Self-Defense Force C-1 transport plane had lifted off from Iruma Air Base in Saitama Prefecture.

  The transport plane had only a few modestly sized portholes. Taking turns to peer out of them were members of the families of the Japanese soldiers who had died fighting on the island.

  I placed my forehead against the faintly misted glass and looked
down. The island was small enough to fit inside the small round window only 50 centimeters across.

  “Such a tiny place,” whispered an old woman beside me as she leaned on her cane. She had been holding a bunch of white flowers to her chest ever since we took off at Iruma.

  We only started our descent after slowly circling the island many times, as though to give the families time to burn its image onto their retinas.

  “Did you know that there are bones of the dead sleeping under the runway? When we disembark from the plane, we will be walking on the dead.”

  The man who said this to me was in late middle age. His father had died on Iwo Jima.

  I had heard about the bones beneath the runway from many people. The present Self-Defense Force airfield is located on the site of the Japanese forces’ wartime Motoyama Airfield. When the Americans captured the airfield, it was littered with the corpses of the Japanese soldiers who had fought to the death defending it. In their haste to repair and enlarge the runway for the conquest of the Japanese homeland, the Americans reportedly left the bodies uncollected and spread asphalt directly on top of them.

  When the Ogasawara Islands, of which Iwo Jima is a part, were returned to Japan, the Self-Defense Force took over the airfield and constructed a new runway in a slightly different location from the American one. At that time, emergency digs were carried out in thirty-three locations in one area and as many of the dead as possible were recovered, but the remains of many others are still thought to be buried beneath it.

  There, where their fathers, husbands, and brothers died, the families have no choice but to walk upon the bones of the dead. That is Iwo Jima.

  The Self-Defense Force is not alone in making use of the runway; carrier-based U.S. planes also practice nighttime take-offs and landings there. Since no one lives on the island, there is no one to protest the noise, and as Iwo Jima is far out to sea and free from artificial light, the airfield makes a perfect stand-in for an aircraft carrier out on the high seas. Planes of both the Japanese Self-Defense Force and the American military are thus constantly taking off and landing on top of the remains of Japanese soldiers.