In a farming village in northern Japan, a family register holds two death entries for the same young sailor. The first records that Yamakage Kofuku was killed in action on Iwo Jima on March 17, 1945. The second is dated May 8, 1951, and gives the place as a clinic at Central Field, the airstrip the Americans were still flying in and out of six years after the battle. Between those two entries, someone in the village office had to amend the first one.
In February 1949, the register was corrected because the dead sailor had walked up to an American headquarters and given his name. He had not come in alone. Yamakage was nineteen when he volunteered for Iwo Jima, a leading seaman out of the naval gunnery school at Yokosuka, who spent the battle loading shells for twelve-centimeter anti-aircraft guns. His battery began with fifty-five men, and by March 12, six were left.
On the fifteenth, he went out on a scouting patrol with Matsudo Rikio, a seaman first class from Chiba, thirteen years older, with a wife and four children at home and a lower rank than the boy beside him. When the two returned from that patrol, their officer and the others were gone. At first light on March 16, by their own account, they crawled into a crack in the northeast cliffs that American shells had torn open, a hole so ugly nobody would believe a man was inside it, and dragged a broken rock in after them to plug the opening. Any proper bunker drew dynamite.
A shell hole did not. The hole sloped at about forty-five degrees, and neither man could sit up straight in it. Crabs that had been feeding on the dead along the beach came up their legs and went to work on their thighs. For water, they waited for rain, scraped puddles into an empty shell casing green with corrosion, and drank from it anyway.
When the hard tack from wrecked bunkers ran out in the middle of May, they found the thing that kept them alive. It was a weed, the dayflower, which comes back in every crater on that island no matter how often the ground is blown apart. They sewed a bag out of a spare loincloth, stuffed it with leaves, and steamed it over the volcanic vents that hiss up through the rock. Their book says four years would have been impossible without it.
Even their waste went down to the sea at night in empty cans so that nothing near the cave would give them away. In the middle of January 1946, picking through an American dump, they found a copy of Life magazine with photographs from Tokyo. A young Japanese woman sat in a small boat with an American soldier on Shinobazu Pond, and on the next page, couples were feeding each other apples while Japanese grandmothers and children stood beside GIs at the Ueno Zoo. Neither man needed anything more to understand that the war was over and that Japan had lost it.
Yamakage wanted a last attack on the American tents. Matsudo talked him out of it, and they settled instead on a plan they meant in complete seriousness to hold out to the age of a hundred if they had to, waiting for the families who had farmed before the war to be allowed home. In 1947, the Americans began blowing up surplus explosives in a pit twenty or thirty meters from the hole. Of every patch of ground on Iwo Jima, the garrison had picked the one beside their cave, and it was, by some distance, the worst neighbor they ever had.
They moved to an old air raid shelter at the far end of a runway, which suited them until an American vehicle pulled up nearby and its passengers started a drinking party. By the summer of 1948, they were in a shelter under a hill the Japanese called Tenzan, with a lamp that burned gasoline and a pet, a white mouse no bigger than a thumb, kept in a cage of salvaged wire and named Chotaro. By late 1948, eating what the garrison threw away and what they could carry out of dark buildings at night, both men were putting on weight, and both had heart palpitations that got worse by the week. They became convinced they did not have long.
If they were going to die anyway, their book says, they might as well walk over to the Americans, where they reckoned the odds of being shot at nine in ten. They argued about it for ten days, and when they were done, they swore an oath. If the Americans lined them up to be shot, they would bite through their own tongues first so that no American hand would kill a man of the Imperial Navy. They buried the diary they had kept in pencil on paper napkins stolen from an American mess hall, and they opened the cage for Chotaro.
The mouse would not leave until one of them tapped the bars. He walked about a meter, turned, looked back at them for a long moment, and disappeared down the tunnel. They watched the first sunrise of 1949, waited for full daylight, and walked out into the sun for the first time in almost four years. A truck stopped for them on the road, and a young soldier at the wheel looked them over, could not understand a word, and drove off.
They walked about five hundred yards while five or six more vehicles went by. Then they sat down at the roadside and smoked a cigarette. A lone soldier in a jeep pulled over and motioned for them to climb in. He drove them to a motor pool, made them get out, and drove away without a word.
The sailors identified the headquarters office in the end by the Japanese machine guns mounted out front as trophies. At noon, a supply sergeant noticed two men at the foot of the headquarters flagpole gazing up at the flag and walked them into the island commander. The two sailors remembered standing at the door, then stepping forward to say the one English sentence they had prepared: I Japanese. Inside, a sergeant fetched an English and Japanese dictionary and pointed to the phrase for fishing boat, because the garrison’s first guess was shipwrecked fisherman.
The sailors found the word for soldier and pointed at it, and then the word for navy. A Chinese laborer who spoke Japanese came over to interpret. The island commander, a colonel, questioned them for about half an hour. Somebody gave them a nickname that stuck: jungle boy.
Then the Americans asked to see where they had been living, and the sailors led them to the caves. The barbed wire came first. They had strung it across the openings, and the American servicemen, who liked to poke around the old Japanese positions, had always taken one look and stayed out. Behind the wire sat a good deal of the garrison’s missing property, including much of the canned ham set aside for Christmas 1948, a large supply of flashlight batteries, and heaps of salvage from the island’s abandoned family housing.
The two men’s own inventory, set down years later, runs longer: six dozen new undershirts, three sets of summer uniforms and three pairs of shoes apiece, a hundred cartons of cigarettes, whiskey, beer, canned food, cold cream, aspirin, and two photographs with about fifty discs to play on them. For four years, without knowing it, the American garrison on Iwo Jima had been feeding, clothing, and supplying two sailors of the Imperial Navy down to their music. The garrison’s answer to two enemy sailors who had been robbing it all that time was a physical examination and a seat at dinner. Over that meal, they learned the emperor was safe and that Tojo had been hanged two weeks earlier.
The next day, a twin-engine plane flew them to Guam, where the medical examinations went on for ten days or more. The doctors found a hernia on Yamakage. He was offered an operation and turned it down because he did not want the Americans to be the ones to cut him open. On January 21, they boarded a transport plane for Japan.
Over Saipan, they pressed their hands together and prayed for the dead there. Their book describes the jolt as the landing gear hit the runway at Haneda and crying so hard that nothing could be seen through it. They had believed they were hiding for about two and a half years. It had been almost four.
At Ueno Station on January 24, Matsudo saw Yamakage off, and it went harder for the younger man after that. When Japan formed its national police reserve, Yamakage applied and passed until a follow-up examination found the same hernia the American doctors had found on Guam, and he was turned away. Matsudo got work at a relative’s iron foundry in Tokyo. Yamakage had been writing all along, and his manuscript about the island ran to almost a thousand pages.
Before he left Tokyo for the last time, he gave his landlord a sealed letter for his old officer from Iwo Jima, asking him to get the manuscript published and send whatever it earned to his mother. The man who flew him back was an American, Stuart Griffin, who worked in the historical section of Far East Air Forces at Tachikawa. By Griffin’s own account, they flew out on May 7. Yamakage searched his last cave through the night and came back empty-handed with his hands torn.
On the morning of May 8, he and Griffin climbed Mount Suribachi to take photographs, and about ninety meters from the old crater, Yamakage stepped out onto a narrow ledge, raised both arms, shouted banzai, and jumped. He was twenty-six. His old officer told the paper that only someone who had been through that terrible war could understand why he jumped, and that even he could not be sure he would not do the same if he climbed Suribachi. Matsudo heard it from a reporter the day before the news ran.
The same man had come by to say Yamakage had gone back to Iwo Jima for the diary, and the older man sensed at once that something was wrong, because the diary was in his own handwriting and Yamakage would never have gone after it without a word to him. Years later, Matsudo wrote that he still did not understand it. Four years of suffering, home safe, and then back to that cursed island to throw his life away. Matsudo had gone home to Chiba in 1949 with a shell fragment still troubling his left foot.
He could not sleep, and when he did, he dreamed about the bombardment. By his own account, ten letters or more a day came to his house from families whose sons and husbands never came back from Iwo Jima, each one asking whether he had seen their man. He had been the one in the hole on the cliff who argued that they should stay alive and the one who bet on that one chance in ten in 1949. His partner’s ashes had come back to Tachikawa in May 1951 with the manuscript.
In August 1968, two months after the United States handed Iwo Jima back to Japan, he finished what his partner’s letter had asked for. The Yomiuri newspaper company published a book called The Last Two on Iwo Jima with both their names on the cover and Yamakage’s manuscript inside. The diary did turn up in the end, dug out of the ground by a construction company’s bulldozer after the island came back under Japanese control.
The pages written in ink had faded to nothing, but the early pages written in pencil on napkins from an American mess hall could still be made out.
