Japan's last World War II survivors are still fighting for recognition and an apology

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a day ago

With the might of the United States military bearing down on the Japanese island of Okinawa, Kohsei Kyan's mum fled deep into the jungle for safety.
It was April 1945 and the Japanese empire was in its dying months, as the Americans secured victory after victory.
Rather than surrender, Japan's armed forces were ordered to fight to the very last man.
Mr Kyan's mother and her four children sought refuge in one of the island's many caves, where soldiers and civilians alike were sheltering.
But instead of protection, she was offered a cruel choice: a Japanese soldier, pointing his gun at the family, ordered the two youngest children outside, fearing they would cry and attract attention.
Mr Kyan, then aged six, and his younger brother, aged four, were left inside the cave as his mum took his younger brother and baby sister outside.
"The three-year-old realised what had happened," Mr Kyan recalls. "He cried and chased after her, calling, 'Mummy, mummy.' My mother carried my younger brother again and took him to a distant place."
Mr Kyan never saw his siblings again.
To this day he wonders if they were left to perish from the elements, be killed by artillery fire, or if they were thrown off a cliff like many others.
"Even after the war ended, I couldn't bring myself to ask her," he says. "Ten years after the war, my mother died at the age of 39. She cried every night: 'I am sorry, Yoko. Yukio-chan, I am sorry.'"
The Battle for Okinawa is infamously one of the most brutal of World War II with up to 150,000 civilians killed, almost a third of the population.
Japan, at this stage, had lost the war, it was just a matter of when.
But the imperial government and military dug in their heels, hoping to exhaust the Americans and secure more favourable peace terms.
Civilians, it seems, were expendable. Suffering reached hellish levels.
Tokyo was firebombed and central Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated with the world's first nuclear weapons.
Many survivors old enough to remember the final year of the war believe Japan should have surrendered sooner. If it had, much pain and anguish would have been spared.
"American soldiers were an angel, Japanese soldiers were the demon," says Mr Kyan.
Now, 80 years since the end of World War II, some of Japan's last survivors have told Foreign Correspondent they are demanding recognition, an apology and even compensation.
It's a desperate plea. There's not much time left.
159 days until surrender
By early 1945, the US had destroyed Japan's Pacific holdings and could freely bomb its home islands.
Until then, bombing raids had strictly targeted military structures, but it was expensive and had failed to get results.
So, late one Friday in March 1945, the US launched the most destructive firebombing campaign in human history, targeting Tokyo suburbs where factory workers lived.
The idea was to demoralise the industrial base. The result was so much more.
"The Great Tokyo Air Raid was the largest and most intense firebombing raid in history," says American academic turned-Tokyo-local, Mordecai Sheftall.
Nobuaki Muraoka was just 13 when swathes of his city was turned to ash. Within moments of the bombs dropping, he realised this strike was unlike all the others.
"A man was walking [in front of our house] and he was hit by a bomb," he recalls. "It was a phosphorus incendiary bomb, so magnesium sprayed out. He couldn't run away."
The man flailed as he burned alive.
"This is called a 'death dance,'" Mr Muraoka says. "It was the beginning of hell."
The young boy and his family ran to a nearby park that was miraculously spared from the bombing. Scores of his neighbours who were stuck outside burned.
By daybreak, the carnage was clear.
"There was no more human dignity, no more pride, no more anything," he says. "All I saw were blackened charred corpses."
136 days until surrender
The firebombing was designed to weaken the Japanese war machine, but it was not enough to secure a surrender.
For months, the Americans had been planning a massive D-Day type operation against mainland Japan. But to do that it needed a launching base closer to the target.
On a calm Sunday morning, the Battle of Okinawa began.
Kamikaze pilots flew their aircraft into American warships, throwing away their lives in a desperate bid to push back the invaders.
"They were the 1945 Japanese equivalent of rock stars," says Professor Sheftall. "The kamikaze tactic of simply pointing your airplane at your target and flying it into it was something that even a student pilot with only a few hours of stick time could do."
When the Americans landed on the beaches, the Japanese weren't there.
Instead, they were hiding in the jungles and complex cave systems, using whatever cover they could to launch surprise attacks, forcing the Americans to use flamethrowers and grenades to flush them out.
Surrender wasn't an options, even for Okinawan civilians.
"I believe that the Japanese military wanted to remove from the civilian imagination the hope and the possibility of surviving the war," says Professor Sheftall.
"Once that was gone, the only option left would be, if you're going to die, are you going to die well? Or are you going to die poorly?"
Japan also wanted the Americans to believe that no matter the odds, every inch of Japanese territory would result in a bloodbath.
It hoped the Americans would realise a ground invasion of the mainland would be too costly and seek an easy peace.
Up to 150,000 Okinawan civilians were killed by the time the fighting stopped. Many have never been formally identified.
Mr Kyan says he's still furious that the Japanese government not only failed to protect Okinawan civilians, but actively killed them.
To date, there has been no apology or compensation.
"It makes me so angry," he says. "I think, 'What the hell were you doing? Why did you kill Okinawans instead of doing your duty? You did not help them, you killed them!'"
Nine days until surrender
In late July 1945, the US gave Japan an ultimatum: surrender or face utter destruction.
"The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces, and just as inevitably, the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland," the statement read.
Japan ignored the request. It had no idea what was to come next.
On Monday morning, August 6, 1945, the port city of Hiroshima suffered the world's first nuclear attack.
Keiko Ogura had just celebrated her eighth birthday.
"There was a flash," she remembers. "Everything I was seeing turned to white. No colour at all."
Everything within a 1.5-kilometre radius was annihilated. Bodies were turned to ash.
For those further out, the suffering was immense, with burns so severe the skin draped off their bodies.
"Everywhere, people were dying," Ms Ogura recalls. "I saw a long line of people coming, like ghost or zombie. Skin was peeling off, and swollen faces. They said only 'water', no other words."
Then came the effects of radiation.
Over the following weeks and months, seemingly healthy people would turn ill and die in slow, agonising fashion.
"Spots appeared all over the body," Ms Ogura recalls. "Pink, purple. Then they died all of a sudden. That made us horrified."
By the end of the year, some 140,000 people were dead.
"The person has to endure rotting like a corpse while they're still alive," says Professor Sheftall.
"Unimaginable suffering not only for them, but for their loved ones, who are having to care for them and watch for them slowly dying under those circumstances. It's the worst thing imaginable."
Despite the carnage, Japan was still not prepared to surrender.
On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war and within hours swept through Japanese positions on the Asian mainland.
Suddenly Japan's entire northern half was exposed to invasion.
On August 9, the United States dropped the second atomic bomb, destroying the city centre of Nagasaki.
Extraordinarily, Japan's war council was still split on whether to surrender, with the army, in particular, egging for a fight on home soil.
Its primary concern was to avoid occupation and maintain the position of the emperor; the suffering of its own troops or civilian population was not part of the calculation.
"The army were the ones that were really resisting the surrender to the bitter end," Professor Sheftall says.
"Believing this bloodletting would finally be enough to get the allies to agree to a conditional surrender where the Japan could avoid occupation."
The vote in Japan's war council was a tie, so Emperor Hirohito got the final say.
On August 15, his message of surrender was broadcast across Japan.
The war was finally over.
Japan is a vastly different country to what it once was, with pacifism written into the constitution.
But how Japan has grappled with its own past differs greatly from its old Axis ally, Germany.
Professor Sheftall says true reflection of the war only began after Emperor Hirohito's death.
"I've been here since 1987. People talked about the war, but on a very strictly personal basis," he says.
"People didn't ask the big 'why' questions. Why were we in that war? Why did that happen to us? Who was responsible?"
When the US occupied Japan, it quickly disbanded the military, but much of the civilian bureaucracy was allowed to continue.
Most importantly, the emperor got to stay.
Keeping Japan stable — and anti-communist — was the US's top priority, as the Cold War ignited and China fell to Maoist forces.
This stability, Professor Sheftall says, dampened scrutiny about the war for decades.
To this day, no Japanese government has ever apologised to its own people for the suffering its decisions caused the Japanese people.
"If the Japanese were to admit or to declare that that war had been at fault on some moral level, that would impugn the person of the emperor and the institution of the imperial throne," he says.
"Even a Japanese politician in 2025, is not quite ready to go there."
Soon after the war, Japan moved to compensate the families of deceased soldiers, but civilians received nothing.
Those who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, known as hibakusha, led a campaign to change that.
In the late 50s, the government agreed to cover some of their medical costs. Over the years, the scheme broadened to cover more medical expenses.
But financial compensation proved a thorny issue.
The argument against was that all people in Japan suffered for the war effort, and no one special group deserved compensation.
"So many people died because of decisions by the Japanese government," Hiroshima survivor Keiko says. "People's agony and desperation shouldn't be ignored."
In 1968 and 1981, the hibakusha finally won local and then national financial compensation, becoming eligible for a special pension.
However, the government ensured its agreement was strictly due to radiation exposure. Those who endured the hardships of firebombing campaigns or the Battle for Okinawa were left out.
All legal action from these survivors failed.
Eighty years since World War II ended, the few survivors left know their time is running out.
Every Thursday, outside the national parliament, about a dozen survivors and their supporters gather.
They hand out leaflets demanding compensation for survivors of the firebombings and Okinawa.
Activist Yoshikazu Hamada was seven at the time of the Tokyo firebombing.
"War was the most important thing," he recalls. "The emperor was the most important thing. No individuality. It was all about the war."
At the protest, Mr Hamada approaches a group of school children and desperately tries to hand them a flyer.
Many students in Japan do a field excursion to Hiroshima to learn about the atomic bombing, but the Tokyo firebombing barely gets a mention in the curriculum.
The students and their teacher decline his flyer.
"I feel that there is a very big problem there," he says. "I really wanted those children to learn that kind of thing. I am worried about what kind of society it will be when those children become adults now. People have become complacent."
He wants an apology, but holds out little hope of getting one.
"What we want is an apology from the leaders of the government that governs our country," he says.
Japan has stated regret for the past war actions, but the last civilian survivors feel their suffering has been ignored.
Mr Muraoka is too frail to join the protest. He can only paint his memories hoping the horrors he endured are never forgotten.
"I would ask for (an apology) but the government doesn't seem to care," he says. "They have never accepted responsibility."
He fears stories like his will be lost once the last survivors are no longer alive.
"There is no interest in reflecting on the war. The Japanese government is waiting for all of us to die."
Watch Japan's Last WWII Survivors on Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8pm on ABC TV and iview.