On May 29, 1943, the last of the Japanese garrison on Attu came out of the Chichagof Harbor area in a final charge against American lines. When the island went quiet, the Americans found a village of 42 Aleut families empty. The people had been gone since the previous September, and no one on that hillside could have said where they had been taken or what was being done with them. The fullest account of what happened comes from a boy who was six years old at the time.
Nick Golodoff was an old man when the National Park Service published his memoir, Attu Boy, in 2012. Its editor warned that names and dates had gone blurry for him, and that the book was his honest experience as a child. The morning the Japanese came was calm. It was Sunday, June 7, 1942, and the whole village was in church.
When the service ended, people heard motors in the next bay. Nick and a boy named Alex ran past the church to the far side of the settlement and saw soldiers coming down the hill. For the next three months, everyone was held in place. The Japanese commander ordered the families to stay in their houses and put the houses off-limits to his own men, with soldiers roping them off.
The guard posted at the Golodoffs’ door had no matches, so he would knock and ask for one in Russian. The two Americans on the island fared worse. Charles Foster Jones, who ran the radio and weather station, was dead within days of the landing. Japanese soldiers acted out a man cutting his own wrist with a pocket knife, and the villagers took it to mean he had killed himself.
Mike Lokanin, one of the Attu men, wrote down his account of those months in 1947 and did not believe it. When investigators dug up the body in 1948, they found that Jones had been shot through the head. The Japanese took his wife, Etta, the village teacher, to Japan on her own, and she spent the war held with a group of Australian nurses in Yokohama. In September, the Japanese on Attu began to leave.
They had brought in extra supplies, and Nick took that to mean they were staying. His memory was that plans changed, because they left and took the villagers with them. Why a garrison pulling off an island would carry an entire village of fishermen, trappers, wives, and children across the North Pacific is the question underneath everything else in this story. The ship came on September 14, 1942.
Mike Lokanin called it a coal carrier. Ina Kenteel Golodoff, describing that day in 1966, remembered the Japanese carrying the villagers’ belongings aboard for them, and a stop at Kiska, where everyone went onto a bigger ship. Nick’s mother, Olean, gave her own account in 1981. They were kept in the hold, which smelled bad and was dark, and they never once saw daylight until they reached Japan.
A woman died on the way. The Park Service map of the voyage puts the arrival at Otaru, a port city on the island of Hokkaido, on September 28. Hokkaido was the island that Park Service anthropologist Rachel Mason would later call the Alaska of Japan, with a climate much like the Aleutians, colder even. The building in Otaru where the Attuans ended up was wooden and two stories high, with coal piled underneath it and two planks laid over a pit for a toilet.
Nick slept on the upper floor. Every morning he woke to the sound of wooden slippers clapping on the pavement outside. A single police officer was assigned to them. In a photograph printed in Nick’s book, he is identified as Takeshiro Shikunai.
He stayed with them for more than three years, and because the Attuans spoke none of his language and he spoke none of theirs, the two sides conducted the business of captivity in written English. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, summing up survivors’ accounts, adds that the Attuans were allowed a good deal of freedom to move about, that conditions were poor, that there was some violence, and that a policeman stole part of their rations. The adults went to work digging clay. Nick’s mother went to the pit every day, and he went with her, walking there and back alongside two or three Japanese women who worked the same ground.
When Rachel Mason went to Otaru in 2016 to find the places survivors had described, the clay mine was long gone and a tunnel ran through the hill. At first they ate rice, oats, and fish. As the war went on, the food ran down to what Nick measured as a quarter of a bowl of watery rice a day, and sometimes oats and water. The Attuan boys went out at night and stole carrots, potatoes, and turnips.
Near the building stood a sour green apple tree and another that bore something like peaches or apricots, and in summer the children waited for the fruit to fall. Tuberculosis had come with them in the hold, and hunger gave it room. Sick Attuans went to a medical clinic nearby, and by the survivors’ accounts, the ones who went there did not come back. A Japanese man once pulled Nick in a covered two-wheeled cart to another building where someone put him in a room with a window and told him to stay.
He came back. The family moved to a second, larger building with a fence around it, and his father, Lavrenty, died not long after. Hunger reached the village’s leaders, too. The chief of Attu, Mike Hodikoff, and his son, George, died after eating spoiled food they had found in a garbage can.
As the numbers dropped, Olean became the cook for everyone who was left, with almost nothing to cook. Nick’s little brother, Gregory, kept one memory of a kindness from those years. A Japanese cook scraping the burned rice off the bottom of the pot and bringing it to him. His mother’s memory was of the street.
She picked orange peels up off the pavement and cooked them on top of the heater. She told an interviewer years later that she fed them to her children, and only then would they stop crying for a while. The dead were cremated, and Nick remembered their ashes being kept in pans. Children were born in Otaru, too, into the same rooms and the same rations.
Tuberculosis did most of the killing, and beri-beri, the disease of a diet with almost nothing in it but white rice, did some of the rest. Four of the five babies born to the Attuans died there. How many died in Japan depends on who is counting and where the count begins. Some tallies start at the dock on Attu, and some at the door of the building in Otaru.
Some include the babies born in Japan, and some leave them out, and some count the woman who died in the hold. The Park Service, the Smithsonian, and the Associated Press have each printed a different total, and every one of them comes out near half. There is another description of those same years, and it tells them very differently. An account from the Japanese side, reproduced in English by researchers who document prisoners held in Japan during the war, puts the Attuans in small rooms of a dormitory built for single employees of the National Railway in the Wakakake district of Otaru and later in a former school building in Shimizu.
In this version, the adults worked for a soap factory from half past nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. The work was not mandatory and the pay was one yen a day. Local doctors, it adds, visited the dormitory every day, and the serious cases went to a sanitarium in Otaru. Many of the Attuans, by this telling, had arrived already sick with advanced tuberculosis.
The page it was first posted on is no longer online, and the English version names no document behind it. Set side by side, the two versions describe the same buildings, the same illness, and the same work. Where the survivors remembered digging clay, the other account says soap. Where the survivors remembered hunger and a stolen ration, it lists bread and meat and daily doctors.
Neither version answers the question sitting underneath this story. The account from Otaru explains how the Attuans were kept and is silent on who decided to take them or why. Nick’s memoir offers only his guess that plans changed, and the book that gathers his elders’ accounts carries no order and no stated reason from the other side. If an order exists, it would sit in an army file in Japan, and nothing published in English has produced one.
The war ended in the late summer of 1945. In the middle of September, the survivors were moved from Otaru to the airfield at Chitose, then flown to Atsugi outside Tokyo and onto Okinawa, where they waited three weeks. They were in Manila in the middle of October, in San Francisco at the beginning of November, and in Seattle and Tacoma by late November, where some of them were treated for tuberculosis. The last leg, by ship to Dutch Harbor and on down the chain, ended early in 1946.
The Park Service’s map of that journey follows them the entire width of the Pacific. The journey ended on Adak, several islands east of Attu. The Park Service’s account of the battle says the survivors were told they would not be allowed to go back, because the United States government had decided that the cost of rebuilding their wrecked village was prohibitive. The Associated Press, reporting on it decades later, put the decision with the military.
The village itself had been destroyed in the American bombing, and Attu was never permanently settled again. For Olean, Adak was a kind of homecoming. She had been born there in 1910. In 1947, she married a man named Ralph Prokopoff.
She died in Anchorage, and the book about her son gives no exact date. In 2024, Mike Hodikoff’s great-granddaughter, Helena Pagano, called for Japan to pay further reparations and to fund a cultural center for Attu descendants in Alaska. Japan’s government answered that all compensation issues had been settled by the peace treaty signed in San Francisco in 1951. Gregory Golodoff was a small boy when the soldiers came down the hill, and he spent most of his life on Adak, where he ran the village store and served as tribal president in the 1980s.
Over the years, he answered a few questions about the burned rice and about the ashes of the dead, which came home from Japan in three coffins and were buried beside the church on Adak. The rest he kept. His wife said she had tried to ask him about Japan and that he did not want to talk about it. The Park Service, gathering what it could, found that none of the Attuans had kept a diary or written letters in Otaru and that few of them wanted to talk about it afterward.
Nick wrote his book. When Gregory died on November 17, 2023, he was the last person born on Attu, and the account he never gave went with him.
