Okinawa Memorial Day on June 23 marks the date when organized fighting is believed to have ended during the Battle of Okinawa in the closing months of World War II in 1945.

The gruesome history of the battle, which took the lives of more than 120,000 Okinawans, should never be repeated.

The day should be an opportunity for taking memories of the suffering to heart and thinking about the preciousness of peace.

The means for passing down accounts of the battle need to be reconsidered, given that fewer and fewer people are engaged in activities for doing so.

Nitsuki Karimata, a 26-year-old native of Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, has been making the rounds of schools across the prefecture as a facilitator, who sows the seeds of discussions on the Battle of Okinawa.

On June 19, she visited Futenma Senior High School, her alma mater in Ginowan, to give a two-hour online lecture on the subject, linking her with 27 classrooms of all grades at the school.

Karimata proceeded with her talk in quiz form.

“Let’s assume we are in August 1944,” she said. “Would you choose to evacuate or stay on this island?”

Those who said they would evacuate had an eye-opening moment when they were told the Tsushima Maru, an evacuation ship that was carrying schoolchildren to mainland Japan, was sunk by a U.S. submarine on Aug. 22, 1944.

“Where would you hide if you lived in the village of Yomitan, where the U.S. troops landed?” Karimata asked the students at another point and presented the options of two “gama” caves: one with a capacity for 1,000 people and another that can accommodate only 140.

Many of the students said they would be safer in the smaller cave.

The classrooms, however, were enveloped in a tense atmosphere when the students were told there was a mass suicide in the smaller cave, whereas those who had taken refuge in the larger cave survived.

The students realized the sheer scale of the death toll of civilians while they were asked several questions in succession.

Karimata said she didn’t like peace education classes when she was a student herself.

She realized, however, a need to learn about the history of her local community when she went to study in Australia, where a friend asked her about the presence of U.S. military bases in Okinawa.

She broadened the scope of her activities by working with like-minded colleagues to set up Savira Inc., a startup firm for spreading peace education. She was named one of the “Forbes Japan 30 Under 30,” or 30 influential youths in the country, by the Japanese edition of the business magazine in 2022.

“War begins under support from the public,” Karimata said. “I hope not only to learn about history but also to help create a society without war.”

In a survey taken four years ago, 52 percent of second-year students attending Okinawa’s prefectural high schools said that nobody was available among their family members or other relatives to give them accounts of the 1945 battle.

That was the first time the corresponding ratio exceeded half in the survey taken every five years by Okinawa Rekishi Kyoiku Kenkyukai (Okinawa history education study group), which organizes high school teachers.

More study sessions on the Battle of Okinawa should draw on the sensitivity of young people, precisely because, as the survey has shown, fewer and fewer opportunities are available for listening to accounts of the battle.

Some of Okinawa’s caves that students have visited on their school excursions to learn about the battle are now off-limits because of deterioration.

The prefectural authorities are investigating the ruins of the 32nd Army underground headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army toward the eventual goal of allowing public access to the structure, which lies beneath Shuri-jo castle in the prefectural capital of Naha.

Similar mementos of the battle should be used, to the extent possible, for the purpose of passing down memories.

A lesson learned from the Battle of Okinawa is that war embroils civilians. Another lesson is that armed forces do not always defend the local population.

All the people of Japan should share the vow that Okinawa must not be made into a battlefield again.

--The Asahi Shimbun, June 23