A photograph of a mass grave for Japanese soldiers who died on Iwoto island was found at the U.S. National Archives, along with a record of 12 soldiers who died while they were held as prisoners of war, it has been learned.
This is the first time that a picture of a burial place on Iwoto for members of the Japanese Imperial Army has been comfirmed. The island, formerly known as Iwojima, was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of World War II.
The record of the 12 Japanese POWs was created by U.S. forces in 1951. It contains each man’s name, military rank, POW number, date and cause of death, and burial place.
The remains of about 12,000 Japanese soldiers have yet to be found on the island. “The records are valuable materials that could contribute greatly to ongoing efforts to recover soldiers’ remains,” a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry official said.
The new historical data were discovered by Tokyo-based private research firm Nichimy Corp. Under contract with the ministry, Nichimy collected and examined U.S.-held records about Japanese soldiers believed to have died on the island at the archives and other places for four years through fiscal 2012.
Nichimy found the list and photo in July, after its contract with the ministry had ended.
According to a written explanation kept with the picture, the photo was taken by the U.S. Army in November 1946. The explanation reads “Japanese...are buried on [sic] this well-kept plot of ground on the island of Iwo Jima.”
There is an area surrounded by a fence in the upper part of the picture. According to the ministry, previously discovered records indicate that the area is a mass grave located on the western side of a runway belonging to the Maritime Self-Defense Forces’ Iwoto Air Station.
U.S. military documents found in 2010 at the archives say about 2,000 bodies were buried at the site. Subsequent efforts by the ministry turned up the remains of 1,143 soldiers.
The ministry hopes to speed up its work to recover the still-undiscovered remains, using the landscape and the road in the picture as clues to identify the location of the mass grave, a ministry official said. After the ministry began studying documents kept by U.S. forces in 2009, it found records that about 200 Japanese soldiers were buried at Mt. Suribachi on the island. Other documents led to the locations of a field hospital and bunkers where soldiers’ bodies could have been buried.
Based on these findings, the ministry collected the remains of 822 Japanese soldiers in fiscal 2010, about 16 times the number in the previous year. It found the remains of 344 soldiers in fiscal 2011 and of 266 in fiscal 2012.
The U.S. military landed on the island in February 1945 and fought a fierce ground battle with Japanese forces for more than a month through March. About 22,000 Japanese soldiers died.
Saturday 17 August 2013
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000463848
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