By MINAKO YOSHIMOTO/ Staff Writer
April 21, 2022 at 07:10 JST
Islanders in southwestern Japan have launched a fund-raising drive to restore a monument to wartime malaria victims that was damaged in a typhoon.
The monument was erected on Iriomotejima island in Okinawa Prefecture in 1992 to remember 85 people who died of malaria, including children, after being forcibly relocated from Haterumajima island in the closing days of the Battle of Okinawa.
“We owe it to our parents to pass down the tragedy because they told us about the malaria,” said Isao Uchihara, 73, who heads a volunteer group raising funds to restore the monument to mark 30 years since it was erected.
Either called Wasurena-ishi or Wasuruna-ishi (the forget-them-not stone), the monument stands in Iriomotejima’s Haimida district overlooking Haterumajima. But the nameplates fell off after a typhoon hit the area in 2019.
During the final stages of the Pacific War, Haterumajima residents were forcibly relocated to Iriomotejima in April 1945 by order of the Imperial Japanese Army.
The decision was apparently made to secure food for the army, according to Okinawa prefectural history records.
However, malaria was rampant on Iriomotejima at the time.
Haterumajima residents suffered from the mosquito-borne disease, which killed 85 of them in the Haimida district in about four months.
Some of them returned to Haterumajima while they were still infected.
Eventually, 99.8 percent of the island’s entire population of 1,590 people contracted malaria. Of these, 477 died.
It is said about 17,000 people, or about half of the population living on the Yaeyama Islands, which include Iriomotejima and Haterumajima, were infected with the disease, and 3,647 of these died.
The monument is based on an inscription engraved on a stone by Shinsho Shikina, the now-deceased public elementary school principal on Haterumajima. The stone lies on a beach on Iriomotejima, where he had taught children amid the malaria epidemic.
The inscription read: “Wasurena-ishi Hateruma Shikina.”
However, Typhoon No. 18 in 2019 knocked the nameplates bearing the names of 85 people off the monument.
The plates cracked into pieces, which have been left on the ground around the monument.
In addition to restoring the monument on Iriomotejima, the volunteer group plans to build two new cenotaphs on Haterumajima by summer.
One will be dedicated to the malaria victims, while another is designed to commemorate livestock killed during the war and show appreciation to the Japanese sago palm, which saved people from starvation.
Members of the Haterumajima hometown association living on Ishigakijima island launched the fund-raising drive last April to collect 10 million yen ($81,600).
The novel coronavirus pandemic has made it difficult to solicit donations in person. The group, whose members are mostly elderly, has not asked for donations online.
Still, the group has raised about 8 million yen so far.
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The Wasurena-ishi monument stands on Iriomotejima island in Taketomi, Okinawa Prefecture, on March 10, with the nameplates of wartime malaria victims fallen off due to a typhoon. (Provided by a resident)
