On July 30 and 31, 2010, my cousin Rebecca and I interviewed our grandmother, Teruko Hiner, about our Okinawan family’s history.
Zamami Island
The Nation of Peace left my grandma, Teruko Hiner (Matayoshi).
So even though she left Okinawa for Los Angeles, California, in 1960, only to return sparingly over the next fifty years to visit her sister and nephew, grandma never left her home. It left her, disappearing into the clouds and memories of the most tolling battle in the most awful of wars.
Zamami was the island where grandma was born and raised. The island is a part of the Kamera Islands, which are a 35-mile boat ride away from Okinawa, but 350 miles from mainland Japan. When people ask if grandma has been to many of Japan’s great cities, she says no, because she hasn’t.
Grandma is not really Japanese. She’s Okinawan.
Visitors to Naha, Okinawa’s ancient capital, invariably will visit the Shurei Gate, a secondary entrance to Shuri Castle. The inscription on the gate is said to mean “Nation of Peace.” My grandmother said her early childhood on the island of Zamami was peaceful and that the island was a “happy place.” But when the Japanese and the Americans collided head-on there for nearly three months during 1945, that all changed.
As far as nations of people go, Okinawans are not Japanese. Okinawa was a popular stop on a trade route between Japan and China since the Fourteenth Century. According to American World War Two historian Robert Leckie in his book “Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War Two,” Okinawans originally resembled Japanese, but a migration of Malay, Chinese, Mongol and other races caused these people to take on shorter body types and rounder faces. During the times of migrations, Okinawa and its islands flourished. Its cultural intercourses with China, Japan and other Southeast Asia nations caused it to adopt a very superstitious form of Buddhism. Their religious practices included a mystical reverence for fire and hearth and worship of the bones of ancestors.
Okinawans kept the remains of ancestors in urns and placed these in a turtle shell shaped tomb made out of rocks. Grandma said that such a tomb for her family exists in Zamami. Many of these tombs though were violated by Japanese troops when they fortified them with machine guns and cannons. The Japanese thought the Okinawans were an inferior race of people and thought they’d be good for supplying the Imperial military with food. But the Japanese also accepted many Okinawans into the armed forces, especially as the war got desperate.
Even the Okinawan language was different. It is similar to Japanese, but neither tongue is recognizable to the other, sort of like English to German or Dutch, or Spanish to Italian.
Okinawa’s ancient history is a dichotomy of many Asian cultures and shifting alliances with Chinese, Mongolian and Japanese rulers. But, according to George H. Kerr in “Okinawa: The History of An Island People,” by the time Japan claimed Okinawa under the Emperor’s reign in 1879 its customs and dialects were odd, but not so odd and difficult to understand as the speech, dress, and customs of the Chinese. The similarities between Okinawan and Japanese culture were more abundant than were their differences, making Okinawan assimilation into the Japanese Imperial nation more seamless than any of the other lands the Japanese conquered, spurring many Okinawans, like grandma’s three brothers, to readily enlist in the Japanese army even though they were seen as second class citizens in the eyes of mainland Japanese. As the prestige of Tokyo grew, so too did Okinawan awe, respect and reverence for their Japanese lords.
But unlike Japan, Okinawa and its surrounding islands had always been peaceful and was one of the few places in the world that rarely saw fighting. According to Leckie, Okinawans were among the most docile people in the world. It was rare for Okinawans to have ever made and carried arms.
Grandma said that only about 2,000 people lived in Zamami before World War Two. She said that everyone in the village knew each other and helped each other. If a neighbor needed a vegetable or fish or anything, then they asked and usually received. She said you didn’t go into the village without saying high to people you met. According to a recent census, fewer than 1,000 people live on Zamami now.
Despite its cultural difference and its geographic location – Okinawa appears to be as close to Taiwan as it is to mainland Japan – by the time Grandma was born in 1934 Okinawa and its islands had been recognized as sovereign Japan. Its citizens had learned Japanese for a generation and the old Okinawan language was on the way toward dying out.
For the first ten years of grandma’s life, there was no electricity or modern commodities, including running water or toilet paper. The standard of living had been low in Okinawa and, according to Lechie, the Japanese had done nothing to raise it. Like most other families, hers had a well for water and bathing. They went to the restroom outside and used the large leaves from the sea hibiscus to wipe themselves.
The family house was a simple structure and grandma confirmed that it was like many of the other homes that were typical of the time in Okinawa – everyone in the family slept in the same room and there was a small space for boiling water and cooking rice. It was probably a lot like the house where Tomiko Higa grew up and described in her account of life during the battle of Okinawa, “The Girl with the White Flag.” This is how Higa described the house:
Our house had a thatched roof and was built in the traditional Okinawan farmhouse style. It faced east, and had a spacious earthen-floored entrance hall beyond which was a wooden-floored area that served as both living and dining room. Next to that was a room about twelve feet square that served as the bedroom for all of us. Unlike most houses in mainland Japan, each room had an outdoor entrance. The ceilings were high and the roof so thickly thatched that even at the height of summer it was cool at night. It was a pleasant house to live in.
Grandma’s father’s name was Kami Matayoshi and her mother’s name was Kama, they were both older folks when she was born. Kami was 50 years old and Kami was 46 and they had already had four children – three boys and a girl. Her father went out on a boat with other men and fished most days. Grandma collected sea turtle eggs, caught octopuses and ells and helped her mother tend to the family garden. Her father caught what they needed to eat and probably a little extra to trade on the main Okinawan Island, where they visited about once a month. Their garden included sweet potatoes, soy beans, rice and papaya and probably also included a form of tomatoes, other citrus trees, very likely banyan trees.
Children in Zamami went to school until they were about 12 years old and if they wanted to continue their education they had to attend high school on the main Okinawan island. There was also a university on the main Okinawan island. Grandma, her siblings and her parents never attended high school or the university.
Modern day Zamami’s economy is almost entirely dependent on tourism. Its clear waters are a scuba diver and snorkeler’s paradise. Grandma said it’s the clearest water she’s ever seen and compared to pictures online, it does appear to be as clear as water can be, much clearer than even the Florida Keys.
So for a very long time, Zamami, the Kamera Islands and Okinawa were peaceful, beautiful and quiet, but, Grandma said, they were very poor in the sense not having material things, especially the instruments necessary to conduct war. I think when she looks back at her family and her peoples’ situation, grandma is angry at how the Japanese made her peaceful island a battle ground.
The boys who fought
Kami and Kama Matayoshi’s boys, grandma’s brothers, were Sabuko, who was 23-years older than grandma, Shuiyayo, 13-years older, and Saiko, 7.
Sabuko and Shuiyayo were enlisted in the Japanese Imperial Navy. Grandma keeps there navy photos in an old wooden photo album. They were handsome boys, looking bravely into the camera. They wore blue navy uniforms. Short, almost no hair hid under sailor caps. The Japanese flag flew proudly in the background. Their hands were on a naval navigation compass.
Grandma’s family received notice that Shuiyayo died on a Japanese military ship off Taiwan. Sabuko never returned home and grandma’s family never saw him again. It was presumed that he died too.
Saiko was only 17 when the fighting came to Okinawa, but he had left the island to fight for the Japanese Imperial Army. Grandma doesn’t have a picture of Saiko. When he was drafted the Japanese Imperial military forces didn’t have time to mess around with any of the trivial, but important, formalities like taking pictures in military garb. He was just old enough to see fighting and die for his country.
Saiko never returned home and grandma’s family never saw him again. Like Sabuko, it was presumed that he died.
Why fighting came to the Nation of Peace
As the war in the Pacific dragged on, the military importance of controlling Okinawa and its islands was obvious. Grandma was 10 years old when the fighting came to Okinawa so she didn’t know what made Okinawa so important. She also said that she didn’t know in advance (or doesn’t remember that she knew) that the fighting was coming to Okinawa.
According to Higa, her father knew a year before the battle for Okinawa that the war was going poorly for the Japanese and that times may be very rough for Okinawans in the near future. So grandma’s father, Kami, likely knew similar facts.
Without divulging too deep into the American reasoning for the attack, here are the basic facts according to Leckie that led up to why Okinawa was invaded:
- After victories in the Philippines and other Pacific islands, the American Commander of the Pacific Ocean Fleet (Admiral Ernest King) and the General of the Armies (Douglas MacArthur) were trying to decide whether their next move should be an attack on Japanese forces in Taiwan or Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Although many in the American military command wanted to swiftly aid the Chinese, it was decided that an invasion of Taiwan, where Japan had a very large land force, would be extremely costly in American lives. If the Americans tried to invade Taiwan it was estimated that the cost to American servicemen would be about 150,000 dead and wounded, which the American military leadership believed would be unacceptable to the American public.
- Japan would be without a way to get to her oil sources in Borneo, Sumatra and Burma if Okinawa and Iwo Jima fell to the hands of the Americans. This would effectively sever the lifeblood of the Japanese war machine. Its fleets could not sail, her airplanes fly, her vehicles roll, nor her industries produce.
- Perhaps just as important as clogging Japan’s oil routes, American control of Okinawa gave the Americans airfields to conduct air raids on just about anywhere still in control of Japanese Imperial forces, including the mainland and China.
- An American victory in Okinawa would be the first American victory on Japanese sovereign soil. (More on this and its significance in the Matayoshi family history in a second.) It also would be the perfect area to launch an American invasion of the Japanese mainland. Some in the American military command called Okinawa the Pacific’s Great Brittan, as far as how Great Brittan was where Allied troops launched its invasion of Normandy.
- For the Japanese, a victory in Okinawa was of the utmost importance. Japan had suffered bad defeats across the Pacific, including some foolhardy battles where some of its best aircraft and pilots were wasted in kamikaze attacks (Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, the chief Japanese commander in Okinawa, realized these mistakes and, while the battle of Okinawa saw some of the war’s most suicide attackers, used only his worst pilots and oldest and least effective planes for these attacks). The Americans had demanded that only unconditional surrender was an acceptable credence of defeat. The Japanese higher command reconciled that they could not regain the expansive Pacific empire it had acquired over the last 10 years, but thought that an authoritative Japanese victory at Okinawa, one that turned the American ships around and cost the Americans lives in the upper tens-of-thousands, might lessen the Americans’ demand to something lesser than surrender unconditional.
All the military planners and strategist on both sides knew that the battle of Okinawa was the linchpin that would break the Japanese back should they lose. And the Japanese were prepared to defend it at all costs.
The American navy mobilized the largest armada in naval-warfare history to combat the anticipated Japanese defense.
Grandma, though, didn’t know any of these conditions leading up to the battle of Okinawa, but they’re the facts that led to the largest land invasion of the war, surpassing even the Allied forces D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Grandma saw and felt it happen.
“Typhoon of steel”
One morning between October, 1944, and March, 1945, grandma said she woke up to find that American navy ships were sitting in the clear waters that surrounded Zamami. They didn’t go away. Soon thereafter the bombs fell and the ships’ cannons fired and the people of the Zamami Village were forced into hiding in the island’s caves.
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Storms greater than any recorded in a thousand years of history were about to sweep across these frontier islands.
- George H. Kerr “Okinawa: The History of an Island People”
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The assault on Okinawa and its surrounding islands began months before the March and April invasion (American troops had taken the Kamera Islands during the last days of March, but the land invasion of Okinawa’s main island did not start until April 1).
On October 10, 1944, nearly 200 American navy planes bombed Naha, leveling Okinawa’s capital. A steady air assault continued for months. American bombs found their way to Zamami, leveling areas that appeared to the Americans to be pockets of Japanese military entrenchment. It is very likely these were the most hellish days of grandma’s life.
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It seems that grandma and her family and perhaps many others on the island received strength and pragmatic thinking from grandma’s father, Kami Matayoshi. During the months between the start of the American air assault and invasion of her island, grandma said after people died their relatives would leave them gifts and often these gifts included scarce rations of food.
But grandma’s father told his family that if he were to die not to leave him gifts, because “dead people don’t eat anything.”
Grandma said that the food left for dead relatives only rotted.
Grandma also asked her father if he believed in a lot of the superstitious elements of the Okinawan religion. He said that he didn’t, but that “if you believe it, then it’s true, if you don’t then it’s not.”
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Gardening was difficult and fishing was impossible with the American bombs falling and the navy fleet controlling the waters. So grandma’s family found food however they could.
Occasionally the bodies of American service men floated ashore; likely a sailor or a Marine who had fallen victim to a Japanese kamikaze air or suicide-boat attack. The first time grandma saw canned food was when she found some on the body of an American.
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American Marines landed on Zamami on the night of March 26, 1945. According to the U.S. Army’s history of the battle, four battalion landing teams made the first landings in the Kerama Islands in the morning.
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It is difficult to get grandma to talk about her wartime experience. She tends to jump from one subject to another. It is also difficult for her to create a fluid and lucid narrative of the events in March and April 1945. Some of it may be unrecoverable, because of the atrocity of the events. And some of it may simply be because she has a limited vocabulary in English. She seems more secure relating events if there are pictures to aid her.
She’d much rather talk about the family she raised in America than her life in Japan. She has pictures to aid her when she talks about her children and grandchildren and she’s very proud of everything her family’s accomplished. It is a much better chapter of her life.
But she does get emotional when she talks about war, tears swell in her eyes.
The following two stories are not facts that Rebecca and I learned in our interview, but stories that we heard over the years from our mothers and uncles that grandma neither confirmed nor denied for us. I don’t know if these events happened before or during the invasion of Zamami in March 1945. It is with some hesitance that I note these two events before confirming them with grandma. But they have been told repeated in our family, so, despite my journalistic hesitance, I will note them here because they’re an important part of the narrative and even if it turns out they’re not true, these two stories resinate deeply as myths. And sometimes myths are more important than the truth anyway:
- In what must have been the months between when the American’s started their naval aviation assault and the invasion, Grandma and one of her childhood friends were playing in somewhere on the island when bombs started to go off. When they returned to her friend’s family home, it had been destroyed by an American bomb and her friend’s family was all found dead.
- During these months her father was probably not able to fish for food and the Matayoshi family became desperate. They became so desperate that they ate the family dog. Grandma didn’t know they ate the dog until after they finished the meal and the dog was nowhere to be found.
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The following excerpts are parts of the U.S. Army’s history of the battle of Okinawa that pertain to its seizure of Zamami. I’ve included the relevant parts rather than paraphrasing them because they tell an interesting narrative of what happened around grandma during those wretched days:
At 0900 (9 a.m.) on 26 March the 1st BLT of the 305th invaded Zamami, initially meeting little resistance. A two-legged, humpbacked island, approximately 5,500 yards long east-west and 400 yards at its narrowest point, Zamami is formed, except for a few low flat areas along the southern coast, by a group of wooded hills which rise about 450 feet. Amtracks (amphibious troop transporters) carried the troops ashore in a deep bay that cuts into the southern coast. A sea wall fifteen feet from the water’s edge held up the amtracks and forced the men to continue by foot. The assault elements received sporadic mortar and sniper fire until they reached the town of Zamami, just to the rear of the beach. Then a group of Japanese estimated to be of company strength, together with about 300 Korean laborers, fled north from the town to the hills.
…
On both Aka and Zamami the invading forces met stiffer resistance as they pressed up the steep slopes into the interior of the islands.
…
On Zamami advance elements of the 1st BLT of the 305th pushed up into the high ground during the afternoon without closing with the enemy. From midnight until dawn of the next day, however, groups of Japanese armed with rifles, pistols, and sabers tried to break into the American perimeters near the beach. Company C bore the brunt of the attack, repulsing nine local thrusts supported by automatic weapons and mortars. One American machine gun changed hands several times. In a series of night fire fights that at times developed into savage hand-to-hand combat, the 1st Battalion killed more than 100 of the enemy at a cost of 7 Americans killed and 12 wounded.
On [the morning] of 27 March … [F]itful action was still in process on Aka and Zamami … On Zamami patrols of company size reconnoitered the island and eliminated scattered groups of the enemy. One organized position was located but could not be assaulted until the following day, when amtracks blasted frontally the caves where the last Japanese to be found were dug in.
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By the evening of 29 March all islands in the Kerama Retro were in American hands
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Three days after Marines landed in the Kamera Islands they found many woman and children dead who had been disemboweled by grenades that the Japanese military had given them. The Japanese military ordered civilians to kill themselves, telling them the Americans would torture and murder the men and rape the women.
The U.S. Army history tells of a tragic scene at Tokashiki; an island that neighbors Zamami:
28 March… troops … heard explosions and screams of pain in the distance. In the morning they found a small valley littered with more than 150 dead and dying Japanese, most of them civilians. Fathers had systematically throttled each member of their families and then disemboweled themselves with knives or hand grenades. Under one blanket lay a father, two small children, a grandfather, and a grandmother, all strangled by cloth ropes. Soldiers and medics did what they could. The natives, who had been told the invading “barbarians” would kill and rape, watched with amazement as the Americans provided food and medical care; and an old man who had killed his daughter wept in bitter remorse.
Grandma tried to tell a story about how American troops had attempted to save someone – a cousin, uncle or aunt, maybe – who had had their throat cut. She said the troops, upon finding the dying person, stuck tubes (perhaps oxygen tubes) down their throat and into their lungs. But grandma was not clear and was already quite emotional. She quickly changed the subject before finishing the story. It seemed the person died.
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To this day, there is an ongoing controversy between the local Okinawan government and the Japanese national government as to how much involvement the Japanese Imperial armies had in aiding and rewarding families for killing themselves (according to the Japan Times, 110,000 Okinawans protested the Japanese Ministry of Education in 2007 for its approval and endorsement of history books that downplayed the Imperial army’s role in suicide persuasion and aid. It was the largest political protest in Okinawan history to date.).
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Grandma said that when the Americans landed on the island her family was forced into the island’s natural caves. They probably spent three days there.
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By the time it became apparent the Americans were going to take Zamami, grandma said the village was split into a few caves. Grandma and her family were not with all their many aunts, uncles and cousins. She said that after the battle she found that many members of her extended family had taken poison pills and that some of the men had slit their families’ throats.
She did not mention grenade detonation as a form of suicide, but they very well could have perished that way too.
“He was smart and hard working”
Kami Matayoshi ultimately decided to surrender to the Americans and not kill his family, probably with the hope that they may someday find peace. Perhaps he thought this was worth betting against the odds of torture, murder and rape that the Japanese Imperial Military warned.
Sometime between March 26 and 29, Kami Matayoshi took off the white pair of knickers he was wearing, put it on a stick and walked out of the cave he and his family had been living in and surrendered to the Americans. According to grandma, over 200 of his fellow villagers followed him out of the caves (a little under 2,000 people had lived on the island when grandma was young, so 200 was already 10-percent of that population, but like grandma’s brothers many had already left to fight in the war and even more still had decided at that point to take their lives and the lives of their families. The 200 who followed Kami Matayoshi must have been most of the remaining survivors who chose to live).
I asked grandma if her father held a special leadership position on the island. She said that he didn’t. He was just a fisherman who supported his family and that was it.
“He was smart,” Grandma said of her father, “and hard working.”
Kami Matayoshi’s surrendering of Zamami was significant, of course, because the choice to live, rather than die, and the action of forsaking pride and taking the white knickers off and surrendering to the Americans saved grandma and many others lives. So I suppose I wouldn’t be here, typing away late at night, if it wasn’t for Kami Matayoshi’s courage.
In a subsequent conversation with grandma I’ll have to ask her how long she suffered in the cave, because her father’s surrender may also be significant in a trivial sort of way. Zamami and her sister Karmera Islands were the first parts of sovereign Japanese soil surrendered to the Americans. Most of the civilians on the island surrendered by March 29, but some, mostly military personnel, refrained from surrender until days, or weeks later. One Japanese military commander held out in the caves of neighboring Tokashiki until after it was relayed to him that the Japanese Emperor ordered an end to hostilities months later (the Americans didn’t bother coming after his small brigade, since they agreed not to exchange fire). Back to the point of Kami Matayoshi’s surrender, American military records say that on March 28 a group of 300 Korean laborers came out of Zamami’s caves and surrendered under a white flag. But it makes me wonder if perhaps the American military history, which was based on notes taken by leaders of BLT divisions, may be wrong. Perhaps this surrender, which was giving just a single sentence in the military history, was actually Kami Matayoshi’s surrender. And the reason this is significant is because if Zamami, a sovereign part of Japan, was in fact surrendered by grandma’s father, my mother’s grandfather, my great-grandfather, it then was not surrendered by a Japanese general, admiral or member of the Emperor’s family. No, the first sovereign part of Japan was surrendered by Kami Matayoshi, an Okinawan fisherman and gardener.
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I asked grandma this question: “What gave your father the courage to live?”
I thought he must have had some reason for wanting to live, a reason to doubt the sure-minded Japanese Imperial Military’s brainwashing propaganda. He must have thought life was worth living no matter the conditions and that they would find a way to survive in an uncertain future.
But grandma said the reason he left the cave and surrendered to the Americans was because “he was tired of living in a cave.”
Her answer seemed a little off color. I guess I expected something profound, something about the value of life or some bullshit like that. But it was probably that simple. While others were killing themselves rather than leaving the cave to surrender to the Americans for what they thought would lead to certain pain and suffering, Kami Matayoshi decided that, first, life was worth living, and second, whatever life was like under American martial law couldn’t be worse than life in the cave.
According to Higa, the caves smelled of dead corpses and human feces. There was not much water. Generally someone had to risk their life to make a water-run, which also risked giving up the cave’s position. Food was scarce. It was dark and the air was thick, wounded soldiers moaned and hungry children cried. They lived in constant fear.
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Still, facing the prospects of torture, murder and rape, I thought there must be a reason why Kami Matayoshi decided to surrender on Zamami.
Reflecting on our conversation with grandma, I find it interesting that she said sometimes, when the rhythm of bombings must have stopped and American planes weren’t flying overhead, she’d go down to the ocean shore and find food that the Americans had thrown off the ships or lost overboard and washed to the Zamami shore.
It makes me think that perhaps Kami Matayoshi, knowing the Americans were providing some life sustaining food, thought that the Americans had compassion and was not the barbaric creatures the Japanese Imperial Military made them out to be.
Perhaps, also, he did not trust the Japanese Imperials who had already taken three sons from him. Kami Matayoshi was sixty when the war came to Okinawa, so he may have been among the elders who remembered the older generations who were more politically and culturally autonomous from Japan. Perhaps for these reasons he never fully trusted the Japanese Imperial voices and, therefore, didn’t trust their prescription of death.
And the battle waged on
After Zamami fell in late March, the Kamera Islands were used by the American forces for its seaports to launch bombing missions during the battle of Okinawa.
The Americans also found over 300 flimsily-made boats fortified with explosives hidden throughout the Kamera Islands. This was a surprise to the Americans, who didn’t expect to find these suicide vessels. According to the U.S. Army history, the Japanese planned to launch these boats during the American assault on the main Okinawan island, hoping to pierce holes in the American navy armada.
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The battle of Okinawa lasted 81 days after grandma’s island was invaded. In this respect, grandma was lucky the Americans chose to invade Zamami early in the battle. Globalsecurity.org summed up the battle best:
Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.
Life after war
With this storm of fire and thunder of guns, the story of the old kingdom and the modern province came to an end. The Ryukyu Islands and the Okinawan people passed under American control. A new chapter of Okinawan history had begun.
-Kerr
It sounds like Grandma and her fellow villagers experienced great culture shock immediately following the American seizure of Zamami. Their diet drastically changed, eating canned food almost exclusively as the Americans fed the island’s refuges while the battle in Okinawa waged on. Grandma said that the foods contained in metal containers seemed so strange at first.
To grandma, the Americans were these strange, round-eyed, pale-skinned creatures. Higa said she found fascinating the rosy cheeks of the U.S. Army historian photographers who took pictures of her carrying a white flag. There were also horrible things that the Japanese government told the population about American Americans, comparing them to something less than humans. So seeing these people must have been a shock to grandma.
There was also a foreign language to deal with. Grandma probably never heard English or any of the western languages when the Americans arrived. She said that the children of the island gathered around the American soldiers during the first few days after they arrived and learned a song. The soldiers taught the children a Louisiana folk song: “You are my Sunshine.” Grandma still knows the song’s chorus and its cheery melody:
You are my Sunshine,
My only sunshine.
You make me happy
When skies are grey.
You’ll never know, dear,
How much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
Grandma’s noble sister
Grandma has pictures of her sister Mishi, who was 20 years older than her. Two are black and white pictures that have turned yellow and brown of Mishi holding my Aunt Mary as a newborn in Okinawa. The other is a colored picture of a much older Mishi standing on a building top in a city, perhaps Naha, with her son Yoshimitu.
In the first two pictures, Mishi looks lovingly at Mary. In the third picture, she and Yoshimitu strike endearing poses. If looks can say anything, Mishi looked to be a wise and even noble woman. She looked both gentle and stern at the same time. Her face has a very mother-like quality.
Since both of grandma’s parents were old, Mishi performed a lot of the motherly duties for grandma after the war. After the war, Mishi was 30 and grandma was 10.
Meeting Frank Phillip Hiner III
Grandma received a job serving food to the U.S. servicemen in the mess hall at the U.S. military base on Okinawa. This is where she met my grandfather, Frank Phillip Hiner III.
She has a picture of her in her work uniform. In the picture she sits with two of her friends from work. It’s odd to think they lived through the largest land invasion and naval assault in World War Two. At the age of 20-something, they look as young, pretty and mischievous as any young person.
The morning news was on the television for a little while when Rebecca and I talked to grandma. The news person said that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding cost $5-million.
“$5-million!” Grandma said, shaking her head. “My god, that’s too much.”
I asked her how much her wedding cost.
She said: “A dollar.”
Soon thereafter, she came to America with her American husband and two daughters.
