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By the beginning of May 1945, Germany had already surrendered to the Allied forces in Europe and the Soviet Union had agreed to enter the war against Japan. The country had ended up fighting against the whole world. |
| In Okinawa the 32nd Army, which in April had been 94,000 strong, had already lost eighty percent of its manpower and was engaged in a desperate battle against American forces totalling 550,000. The Americans had gained overwhelming superiority and held complete control of the sea and air. The role of the 32nd Army was to sacrifice themselves and hold down the Americans in Okinawa for as long as possible, so that arrangements could be made to counter the inevitable American landing on the Kanto Plain near Tokyo. |
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| By making use of the hilly terrain and natural caves, the Japanese army held out for about a month, blocking the advance of the American forces over the twenty or so kilometres from the landing point on the coast at Kadena to the old Imperial Ryukyu capital of Shuri. But it was becoming increasingly hard for them to hold on against the ceaseless cannonade and air attacks from the fleet of American warships which blanketed the sea from the port of Naha as far as Cape Zanpa, the strafing from Grumman fighters and the attacks of American soldiers protected by tanks. |
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| The rations for the troops were barely 120 grams of rice a day and they were already at the limit of their physical endurance. On 4 May, the 32nd Army launched a final overall offensive. That was the day when Akiyama Hirotaka, from Hirosato near Kitami, lost his life. "Attacked at Shuri by American forces from the east and the west and from the air, our entire army was wiped out." |
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| Hirosato, where Hirotaka was born in 1921, is located in what is known as the Kamitokoro heights. His father Tamizo and his mother Chitose had just arrived as settlers. There were still stumps in the fields. As a little boy, Hirotaka had burst into tears when he heard the howl of a bear from the nearby forest. The couple worked hard to make the fields into rice paddies. Six-year-old Hirotaka astonished his parents by working unbidden behind them as they harvested rice, reaping two rows instead of the five usual for an adult. However his mother died when he was seven and his father went into hospital when Hirotaka was eleven, suffering from pleurisy brought about by overwork. On his own, Hirotaka worked the water supply system for the fields and managed to harvest a crop of rye. |
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However that year, 1931, the harvest was a disaster because of exceptionally cold weather. The Akiyama family could gather just a few barely formed husks of rice and had no option but to plough most of the unripened plants back into the ground. The family needed to pay hospital expenses and to buy rice to eat, so they had to take out a loan by mortgaging their land to the Takushoku Bank. Some of their neighbours resorted to burning off standing rice plants. A chamberlain came from the Imperial Household to inspect the nearby Hokkosha settlement and take photographic records of the terrible plight of the people there. |
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| Tamizo was determined to leave his land to his children debt-free, so he worked madly and by cutting back on food and living expenses to the bare minimum, was able to pay off his loan by 1941. There is no knowing what went through the mind of the young Hirotaka at that time, but when he graduated from the Kamitokoro Elementary School he was awarded a commendation for helping his family and his younger brother Toshiyasu remembers him hard at work. |
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| In January 1942, Hirotaka entered the Field Artillery Regiment of the Asahikawa Division and in March was sent to Manchuria with the Kanto Army, undergoing special training in the extreme heat of Botanko (Mutanchan). The following words from a letter sent to his father by military post at that time, while restricted by censorship, convey some idea of the depth of his feelings towards his home village and his concern for his father struggling at work in the fields there. |
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| "The Kitami plain, stretching green all the way to the mountains. You must be busy and hard at work. I hope things are going well." |
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| In August 1944, the brave Hirotaka was sent as a member of the 3480 Unit of the 32nd Army across the sea to the main island of Okinawa, then facing a critical stage of the war. There his life ended at the age of twenty four. |
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| Of the thirty one boys in the same year as Hirotaka at Kamitokoro Elementary School, as far as is known, seven failed to return home alive from the war, most of them dying in Okinawa. |
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| (from the Kitami City Newsletter, August 1988) |