One recent day, Tokiko Okuyama recounted her childhood memories on Iwojima over black-and-white photographs spread out on a table as two descendants of war-displaced islanders were writing down her accounts in notebooks.

“You can see children playing here on Seimo beach,” Okuyama, 89, said in an excited voice. “Beaches, you know, were named after people. The Koyama beach here was so named because you had to go past the Koyama family’s home to get there.”

The two interviewers, Ryoma Nishimura, 41, and Tomoko Hagiri, 46, were listening attentively.

Another photo showed Okuyama’s father, who took the mound as a pitcher during a baseball game on the volcanic island, now called Iwoto. There were also portraits of her grandmother resting on a water tank and of men in sumo wrestlers’ ceremonial aprons.

Residents were forcibly evacuated from the subtropical island, which lies about 1,250 kilometers south of central Tokyo, during World War II.

The island, placed under U.S. administration after the war, was returned to Japan in 1968.

But the authorities decided that the island is “unfit for the permanent residency of general inhabitants” on the grounds that strong volcanic activity made it difficult for industries to operate there.

The former residents have never been allowed to return to live on the island, which is now used exclusively to host a base of the Self-Defense Forces.

“I took part with my father in a postwar campaign for requesting a return to the island,” said Okuyama, an Iwojima native evacuated from the island when she was 11. “I wished to be back there. I just don’t understand why we are still not allowed even to go there freely.”

Nishimura, a grandson of a couple from the island, and Hagiri, who has a grandmother born on the island, are among those who founded the national association of third-generation Iwoto islanders in 2018.

Members have been interviewing former islanders and creating a digital archive of photos to preserve memories of life on the now-forbidden island to pass them down to posterity.

TRAGEDY DURING WORLD WAR II

Homesickness alone does not fully account for why Okuyama is so eager to return to her native island, which was once home to about 1,200 residents.

When inhabitants were evacuated from the island, many of the men aged between 15 and 59 were forced to remain there to serve as civilian employees of the Imperial Japanese military.

Japan fortified the island, the largest isle in the Ogasawara island chain, to help defend the mainland during the closing months of the war. A battle fought there resulted in a total of 50,000 or so Japanese and U.S. personnel killed or wounded. 

The island ended up as a final resting place for Okuyama’s family members and friends who were separated from their loved ones.

Okuyama lost two older brothers to the war. Nishimura’s grandparents and Hagiri’s grandmother also lost their respective siblings.

As they grew up, both Nishimura and Hagiri were told that Iwoto is a special place associated with memories both happy and sad.

The island is part of the village of Ogasawara, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo metropolitan government.

The Tokyo metropolitan government has been offering grave visits to the island for former islanders and their family members. The Ogasawara village government has also organized similar visits.

However, visitors were allowed to go ashore only on two occasions from 2020 through 2022 due to the novel coronavirus pandemic as well as volcanic unrest on the island.

“You get to take more interest in the island and learn many things about it by being there ashore and feeling the natural features on your own,” Nishimura said. “I believe it is our mission, despite all difficulties, to pass the baton to the next generation.”

NEW NOVEL FEATURES ISLAND’S HISTORY

Last summer, Yusho Takiguchi, a grandson of a couple from Iwoto, published a novel that portrays how a man and his younger sister who are descended from Iwoto residents are led by dead islanders into forming ties with them.

The 40-year-old author explained the thoughts behind the book’s title, “Suiheisen” (Horizon), in an article he contributed to the December 2022 issue of the bulletin of a national association of Iwoto islanders, which is edited by Nishimura’s group.

The story contains careful descriptions of casual scenes of daily lives on the island from the prewar years, thickening shadows of war and the history of islanders who were buffeted by shifts of fate.

A younger brother of Takiguchi’s grandfather who remained on the island as a civilian military employee was killed in the war.

His grandfather never told him about life on the island, but Takiguchi conducted extensive research, by interviewing his relatives and studying a collection of islanders’ memoirs, and spent three years to finish his novel.

Seventy-eight years from the war’s end, fewer and fewer opportunities are available for listening directly to those who were born and raised on the island.

“Still, there are voices that can be heard and accounts that can be given when the narrator and the audience are from the times and generations that are far apart,” said Takiguchi, a laureate of the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize.

“I hope to continue thinking about ways I could raise social issues on Iwoto and keep them alive precisely because I am in the generation of grandchildren.”