On the morning of June 30, 1951, a United States Navy fleet tug named Kokopa lay off the coast of Anatahan, a steep volcanic island roughly 75 miles north of Saipan. Aboard were a platoon of armed Marines, an interpreter, and a photographer from Life magazine. They were there to see whether a group of Japanese holdouts would finally come down to the beach. That day was the Navy’s last as the governing authority of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a scattering of some 2,000 islands spread across an ocean area the size of the continental United States.
At midnight, control would pass to the Department of the Interior, and a civilian administration would take over the schools, clinics, and filing cabinets. But before that handover, the Navy had one piece of unfinished business, and it had nothing to do with bureaucracy. The thing that brought the Kokopa to Anatahan was a short letter. It had come from the governor of Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan, addressed to men he had never met.
The letter did not argue about the war. In the old days, it said, a prisoner of war lost face, but that was no longer so. The emperor had ordered everyone, wherever they were, to surrender in peace. The men had received messages from their families telling them not to worry, and the governor hoped those messages would give them the confidence to give themselves up to the Americans.
Then came the practical part. With the new batch of mail from home, the governor wrote, they were enclosing a piece of white cloth so the men would have something to signal the Navy boat with. For six years, the Navy had been failing to answer the question of how to reach these men. Since 1945, the holdouts on Anatahan had been sent leaflets, hailed from passing ships, visited by landing parties, and handed Japanese newspapers and magazines describing the surrender.
They treated every piece of it as an American trick. What worked in the end came down from an aircraft on June 26, 1951. It was a bundle of personal letters written by the men’s own families in Japan, gathered at the Navy’s request, together with the governor’s message and the square of white cloth. Some accounts say the message first reached the island in January and only the family bundle arrived in June; others put the two in the same box.
By the end of June, the men had both. Four days after the drop, someone on Anatahan waved the cloth. The white flag was the first thing the Kokopa saw that morning. The tug was a 205-foot ocean towing ship built in Charleston during the war.
She had come up from Guam with the Marines and with an interpreter named Ken Akatani. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander James Johnson, was also the Navy’s deputy civil administrator on Saipan, which is why he was the man going ashore. Johnson and Akatani went in by rubber boat. The Japanese came down out of the grass in shirts and trousers cut from parachute nylon, carrying their belongings bundled in cloth.
The surrender was taken on the sand, and by the end of the morning, every one of them was aboard the tug. How they came to be there at all is a much older story. In June 1944, as American carrier aircraft worked over the shipping around the Marianas ahead of the Saipan landing, three small Japanese ships went down near Anatahan. About 30 survivors, a mix of navy seamen, army privates, and merchant sailors, got ashore.
A plantation manager named Kikuichiro Higa already ran what was left of an old coconut plantation there, and with him was a young woman named Kazuko Higa, the only woman for a very long way in any direction. Saipan fell a few weeks later, and the war moved on, leaving Anatahan behind. The castaways ate coconuts, taro, wild sugarcane, fish, crabs, birds, and lizards. They smoked dried papaya leaves rolled in banana leaf and brewed a strong drink out of coconut sap.
The Americans knew they were there almost from the start. In May 1945, an army detachment landed and searched the volcano for a week. In July, a Marine military police battalion came ashore and took off the 45 island workers still living in the village. Navy ships stood offshore and called on the Japanese to come out.
After the surrender in Tokyo Bay, the leaflets began. Then came the newspapers and magazines, and every one of them was dismissed on the hill as a forgery, a feat that credited the United States with running a printing operation of heroic patience aimed at 30 men on a volcano. The first crack came from the one person on the island with a very good reason to want off it. In June 1950, an American vessel appeared off Anatahan, and Kazuko Higa walked down to the beach and asked to be taken away.
She came into Saipan aboard a boat called the Miss Suzy. At Charlie Dock, a Navy photographer caught her meeting Eloise Johnson, the deputy administrator’s wife, and the caption on that print in the Trust Territory archives notes that it was the first time in six years that Kazuko Higa had seen another woman. She told the authorities on Saipan something they had not quite grasped. The men on the hill were not holding out from stubbornness or pride.
They still did not believe the war was over. What the Navy did with that information is the most interesting part of the whole affair, and it was almost entirely clerical work. Word of the holdouts had reached Tokyo, and officials there asked the Navy about what one inquiry called the doomed and living Robinson Crusoes of Anatahan, offering to send a ship of their own. The Navy asked for something more useful.
It had the men’s families found and asked to write, and it began running a delivery service to a band of armed enemy holdouts. Johnson’s packages went in under a white flag. They carried letters from relatives and from officials at home, Tokyo newspapers, magazines, food, beer from Japanese breweries, and cigarettes. He kept it up for a year.
The service most people picture in terms of battleships and carriers had turned itself, for the sake of one island, into a post office. And the post office was patient in a way the leaflets never were, because a leaflet can be forged by an enemy, and a brother’s handwriting, in the logic of a man on a hill, cannot. The first reply came in the middle of June 1951, and it came from one man. Junji Inouye, the senior military man among the holdouts, had a letter from his brother, and whatever was in it did what six years of leaflets had failed to do.
Inouye came down out of the bush in parachute cloth and gave himself up to the crew of a Navy tug. He told them 18 of his companions were still up on the island, still holding out, and still had one machine gun among them. Aboard the tug, a Navy photographer took his picture holding a written appeal urging the others to come in. The photographers also laid out everything Inouye had carried down.
Those prints survive in the Trust Territory archives at the University of Hawaii. Sandals woven from fiber, a hat made from coconut husk, and knives hammered out of the wreckage of an American bomber. That bomber was a Superfortress from the 498th Bomb Group that had crashed on Anatahan on January 3, 1945, returning from a mission over Nagoya. All of its crew were killed.
The Japanese found the wreck up by the crater and took it apart for years. They beat the aluminum into pots, razors, and fish hooks, bent the machine gun springs into shark hooks, turned the oxygen bottles into water tanks and the engine bolts into chisels, and made diving goggles out of Plexiglas and strips of rubber. They unpicked the parachute cords for fishing line and wore the nylon. One man built a three-string Japanese banjo out of the scrap.
Two others found a pair of pistols. So the Navy sent a fleet tug, a platoon of Marines, an interpreter, and a photographer to collect men in parachute silk and coconut hats, which in fairness was the right amount of caution for a group believed to still have a machine gun. The pistols are where the story of Anatahan turns ugly and where the accounts stop agreeing. Quarrels ran through the years over food, over drink, over fishing, and over the one woman there, and men died in them, Kikuichiro Higa among them.
Time magazine, reporting on Inouye’s surrender in June 1951, said that eight of the men had died at their companions’ hands and that one seaman ruled the rest by threatening death to anyone who tried to leave. The account that later circulated from the Navy’s side on Saipan counts 11 deaths among the holdouts, six of them by violence, and one survivor carrying 13 knife scars. The two counts do not match, and nobody who was not on that hill has ever been in a position to settle it. Even the number of men who walked out on the 30th depends on whose count is trusted: 18 in the magazine’s figure, 19 in later lists that put the survivors at 20 in all.
By afternoon, the Kokopa had them aboard and was heading south. At Guam, the men spent a week in hospital, and then the Navy flew them home to Japan, six years after the war that had stranded them ended and seven years after their ships went down. What ended Anatahan is a harder question than the neat version admits. The Navy’s account credits the letters, and the timing supports it: a box dropped on the 26th and a white flag on the 30th.
But mail from home had been arriving in one form or another for a year, and the group it finally reached was not the group that had ignored it. The woman at the center of the island’s quarrels had been gone for 12 months. Several of its most dangerous members had been killed by the others. And the senior man on the island had just walked down the hill and not come back, with his own written appeal following him in.
Any one of those things could be the reason, and the men who could have said which were the men themselves. Nobody asked them with much care. The Japanese press turned the story into a lurid tale of sex and murder almost as soon as the men landed, and in 1953, the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg made it into a film. One of the survivors, Michiro Maruyama, wrote his own book in 1954, in large part to set the account of the island straight against what the papers had made of it.
By then, the version that stuck was the one with the queen of Anatahan in it, and the quieter question of why 20 men changed their minds in one week of June was left where the newspapers had dropped it. A surrender that took a year of mail to arrange got about a paragraph’s worth of attention for its method and a decade’s worth for its gossip. That night, at midnight, the Navy’s administration of the Trust Territory ended, and the next morning the Interior Department was in charge. The Navy’s official history of the Kokopa, the entry kept in its Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, gives her Atlantic towing work, her occupation duty in the Far East, and her return to Puget Sound for overhaul in 1947.
It then covers the years from 1947 through 1960 in a single sentence about rotating between the West Coast, Hawaii, and the Far East, and notes one battle star for the Korean War. Anatahan does not appear in it.
