ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
July 6, 2015
Japan’s secret navy bunker
gives glimpse of war’s final days
By Mari Yamaguchi
The Associated Press
OKOHAMA, Japan — On a
hillside
overlooking
an
athletic field where high
school students play volleyball, an
inconspicuous entrance leads down a
dusty, slippery slope — and
seemingly back in time — to Japan’s
secret Imperial Navy headquarters
in the final months of World War II.
Here, leaders of Japan’s combined
fleet command made plans for the
fiercest battles, including those of
Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa
from late 1944 to the war’s end in
August 1945. They knew when
kamikaze pilots crashed to their
deaths when signals from their
planes stopped. They cried when they
monitored cables from officers aboard
the famed battleship Yamato as it
came under heavy U.S. fire and sank
off southern Japan.
Today, the barren, concrete
tunnels sit quietly underneath a high
school and university campus, largely
untouched and unknown, occasion-
ally visited by guided tours for the
students. The school opened them to
the media for the first time in June to
raise public awareness of the site and
the tragic history it represents, in the
70th anniversary year of the end of
World War II.
“It’s a negative heritage that
humans made. It’s the perpetrators’
legacy,” said Takeshi Akuzawa,
assistant headmaster of Keio Senior
High School, who escorted the media
tour. “Just imagine the massive
number of people who had to die in
the final year of the war because of
their operations.”
The inverted U-shaped tunnels are
a silent reminder of a time when
students and many others were sent
to war, many to their deaths, under
orders that emanated from this
bunker under a school.
Experts say the significance of such
war remains is increasing, especially
as that era fades from memory, and
amid a growing reluctance among
some Japanese to look at the negative
side of the history.
Y
DEVOTED TO SERVICE. Nuns and others walk beside the gar-
landed coffin of sister Nirmala Joshi during her funeral procession in
Kolkata, India. The Indian nun who replaced Mother Teresa as head of
the Missionaries of Charity died June 23, the organization said. She
was 81 years old. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)
Nun who took on Mother
Teresa’s India charity mission dies
KOLKATA, India (AP) — The Indian nun who replaced
Mother Teresa as head of the Missionaries of Charity has
died, according to the organization. Sister Nirmala Joshi
was 81 years old.
Her health had been declining in recent days, the
charity said. It did not give more details about the cause of
her death.
She was selected to lead the Roman Catholic charity six
months before the death of its founder, Mother Teresa, in
1997. She remained its leader, or superior general, until
stepping down in 2009. That year, she also received
India’s second-highest civilian award, the Padma
Vibhushan, in honor of her service to the nation.
She was born to Hindu parents in 1934 in the northern
Indian city of Ranchi, now the capital of the state of
Jharkhand, before India gained independence from the
British Empire. She reportedly converted to Roman
Catholicism after being educated by Christian mis-
sionaries and learning of Mother Teresa’s work.
Indian politicians including Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and opposition congress party leader Sonia Gandhi
praised her work for the poor in the eastern city of
Kolkata, where the charity is based.
“Sister Nirmala’s life was devoted to service, caring for
the poor and underprivileged,” Modi said in a statement,
adding that he was “saddened by her demise. May her soul
rest in peace.”
West Bengal’s highest elected official, chief minister
Mamata Banerjee, said in a Twitter message that
“Kolkata and the world will miss her.”
The Vatican newspaper, l’Osservatore Romano, paid
homage to Nirmala in a long obituary, noting that she was
elected superior of the order even though she had an
incurable form of malaria that gave her constant fevers.
A funeral took place late last month at the charity’s
Kolkata headquarters, called the Mother House.
Mother Teresa received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for
her charity work and is considered a candidate for
Catholic sainthood.
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Japan aims to
resume Antarctic
whaling later this year
Continued from page 2
in the Antarctic this winter season.
“We have not changed any policies
and our goal,” Joji Morishita, Japan’s
representative to the IWC, told
reporters. He said Japan will respond
sincerely to “scientifically backed
comments” in the report, but
criticized it as lacking consensus.
Reflecting the sharp divide among
the nearly 90 member nations of the
international body, the report laid
out both sides of the argument.
Under Tokyo’s revised proposal for
the upcoming whaling season, it
plans to catch 333 minke whales each
year between 2015 and 2027, about
one-third of what it used to target.
Japan’s actual catch has fallen in
recent years in part because of
declining domestic demand for whale
meat. Protests by the anti-whaling
group Sea Shepherd also contributed
to the lower catch. The government
has spent large amounts of tax money
to sustain whaling operations.
Associated Press video journalist Ken
Aragaki contributed to this report.
HIDDEN HISTORY. Journalists walk in underground tunnels (top photo) that Japan’s Imperial
Navy once used as secret headquarters underneath the Hiyoshi Campus of Keio University in Yoko-
hama, south of Tokyo. Today, the concrete tunnels sit quietly under the high school and university
campus, largely untouched and unknown, occasionally visited by guided tours for the students. The
school recently opened the tour to the media for the first time to raise public awareness of the site
and the tragic history it represents, in the 70th anniversary year of the end of World War II. (AP
Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
One of the top Japanese univer-
sities, Keio, leased the site to the navy
in 1944 under an Education Ministry
order, after thousands of teachers,
staff, and students were drafted and
sent to the battlefield, leaving the
campus virtually empty. Above
ground, the navy commanded from a
dormitory, rushing to the under-
ground command center whenever
U.S. B-29 bombers flew over.
Keio’s Hiyoshi campus, south of
Tokyo in Yokohama, was chosen
apparently because of its relative
proximity to both Yokosuka naval
base and command headquarters in
Tokyo. The hilltop campus also was
suitable for an underground facility.
Construction of the underground
tunnels began in July 1944,
mobilizing troops and Korean forced
laborers. A room for the chief
commander, Adm. Soemu Toyota,
and key departments were up and
running in a few months.
Only in the chief commander’s
room, cement on the walls was
smoothed out, the floor was covered
with tatami mats, and there was a
door. He climbed up and down 126
stairs between the two command
centers — above and below ground.
His room was slightly elevated so
that the floor remained dry, and there
was even a flush toilet.
The tunnel command center also
had ventilation ducts, a battery room,
and food storage with ample stock of
saké, in addition to deciphering and
cable and communications depart-
ments. Marks on the ceiling remain
from where overhead lights hung.
The tunnels housing the command
center and its facilities under the
campus are 100 feet underground
and stretch about 1.6 miles in length.
The conditions for those leading the
war contrasted with those of ordinary
people, who hid in small mud shelters
as firebombs rained down from the
sky, Akuzawa said.
Hisanao Oshima, who was there
from February to May 1945 as a com-
munications crew monitoring Morse
code, still cannot forget the moments
when he lost signals from kamikaze
fighters. “The sound stops, and that
means he crashed. I just cannot get
that out of my head,” he said in an
interview with public broadcaster
NHK.
This site must be preserved “so that
we can say it’s the proof why we
should not wage war ever again,”
Oshima said.
Japan also built the Matsushiro
Imperial Underground Headquarters
in central Japan for then-Emperor
Hirohito and Imperial Army and key
government
officials,
as
they
prepared for a possible ground war
with the Americans, though that one
was never used.
Hundreds of hangers, tunnels, and
other wartime remains still exist in
Japan, but many have been
abandoned as interest has waned. A
growing sentiment among some
conservatives favors the removal of
such remains if they are seen
portraying the negative history.
Sections of the navy tunnels at Keio
were damaged in a development
project a few years ago, prompting
experts and volunteers to call for
more support from the city to
preserve the site.
Akuzawa said what struck him the
most as a teacher was the fact that
the university was used as a war
command center to send students to
the battlefield. A Keio University
graduate himself, he did not know
about the tunnels until he started
teaching at the high school.
“I feel emotionally shaken when I
think of those students sent to war
were just like these boys,” he said.