By YOSHICHIKA YAMANAKA/ Staff Writer
July 25, 2022 at 18:27 JST
NAHA--Shigeaki Kinjo, who survived a mass suicide during a fierce ground battle in Okinawa Prefecture during World War II, died here from acute heart failure on July 19. He was 93.
Kinjo was a storyteller who had long shared his experiences of the war and contested attempts to paper over the causes of tragic group suicides and killings.
His funeral was held on July 23, attended by his wife and close relatives.
Kinjo is from Tokashikijima island, located west of Okinawa’s main island. U.S. forces landed there in March 1945 when he was 16.
The islanders were forced to kill themselves when the Imperial Japanese Army told them to give up their lives.
Some 300 residents were made to take their own lives and the lives of others, including their own family members, en masse.
But many of the grenades distributed to residents failed to explode, so they used blunt objects instead.
Kinjo took the lives of his mother, his 9-year-old sister and 6-year-old brother with rocks and a bat.
Although Kinjo survived the Battle of Okinawa, he had become traumatized by being forced to kill his own family.
He later converted to Christianity and served as president of the Okinawa Christian Junior College from 1975 to 1979.
More than 20 years after the war ended, he began to share his experiences. He authored a book in 1995 that told his story and spoke to groups about what had happened. He also testified in court cases.
In the lawsuit over the unconstitutionality of the government’s screening of a textbook by Saburo Ienaga, Kinjo spoke of his personal experiences and challenged the government’s changes to the high school history textbook, which had described atrocities carried out by Japanese troops during World War II.
In another lawsuit over the book “Okinawa Note” by Kenzaburo Oe, which said the Imperial Japanese Army ordered mass civilian suicides during the Battle of Okinawa, Kinjo testified that the tragedy could not have occurred without the military's order.
He influenced the court’s decision that acknowledged the involvement of the Japanese military in the mass suicides.
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Shigeaki Kinjo speaks on April 15, 2019, about the mass suicide that happened on Tokashikijima island during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. (Hiroki Ito)
