Letters sent by Lieutenant General Kuribayashi from Iwo Jima silently illustrate the pain of one family and its efforts to preserve these historical records. Published on By Kumiko Kakehashi's is a masterpiece. I find challenging, as it reveals the depth of my own ignorance.
This is the story of Lieutenant General . Five months before Japan's surrender on August 15, Kuribayashi led a fierce battle against overwhelming American forces on the isolated island of . He ultimately died in combat.
Kakehashi's book reveals that Japan's Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) altered his famed death poem. "Unable to complete this heavy task for our country, arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall" was the original first line in the poem. However, the IGHQ changed "so sad we fall" to "so bitterly we fall.
" Along with this historical fact, Kakehashi presents 41 letters that Lieutenant General Kuribayashi sent to his family from Iwo Jima. I also read Kuribayashi's letters and telegrams from Iwo Jima in 1995. This was a decade before the publication of Kakehashi's book.
At that time, Kuribayashi's wife, Yoshii, was living in Akishima City, Tokyo, with their eldest son, Taro, an architect. I was then conducting interviews for the series "Voices Without a Voice: The 50 Years of War Dead's Families." Despite the chaos during and after the war, the family managed to preserve the letters from Iwo Jima carefully.
However, I focused not on their content but on how the family read them. "Have y.