OKINAWA -- The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum has translated testimonials from 70 people who experienced the Battle of Okinawa and other events into seven languages, and made the subtitled and dubbed videos available online.
The museum in Itoman, Okinawa Prefecture, has experienced an increase in the number of foreign visitors recently, and hopes the videos will "help people all over the world understand the realities of war," a person related to the issue said.
"My mother and younger brother were around me when a bomb pulverized them. I was hit by pieces of flesh," said Yoko Kamiya, an 83-year-old resident of Uruma in the prefecture, in one of the 70 testimonials. When U.S. forces landed on Okinawa Island in April 1945, Kamiya was 9 years old.
In her testimony, Kamiya recalls wandering all alone on the battlefield where dead bodies were scattered after her mother and younger brother were killed. Wanting someone to help her, she approached a nearby family, who told her: "If you cry here, we'll be killed. Go over there," and beat her with a stick. Later she was taken in by the U.S. military.
The museum decided to release the video testimonials it has shown on site, as well as new recordings, translated into English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, French and Malaysian.
The translated versions were posted online along with Japanese versions on March 15. As of June 20, they had been viewed a total of 4,607 times.
One reason for making the translations was an increase in foreign visitors to the museum, which grew about 3.5 times from 4,937 visitors in fiscal 2007 to 17,475 visitors in fiscal 2017, many of them from China, Taiwan and South Korea.
"We will continue to tell the world about the peace-seeking soul of Okinawa," said Keiji Uehara, leader of the curation team.
Kamiya, who ran a fishmonger's business with her husband and raised six children after the war, was pleased with the multilingual initiative.
"War is when you call out, 'My mother is dead, somebody help me,' and nobody responds. I was running about all on my own. I want people from Japan and around the world to understand my real experiences," she said.
Each testimonial is about four to 13 minutes long. The videos play dubbed audio and display subtitles in the language selected.
The testimonials can be viewed at the following website: http://www.peace-museum.pref.okinawa.jp/evidence/
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