As summer approaches, small tin buckets filled with water begin to line the schoolyard at my daughter’s preschool. The children run outside and squish their little butts in them to cool off. The faucet is placed at eye level so the children can reach it, and they are free to play in the water as long as they like.
“Doesn’t this run up your water bill?” I once asked one of the preschool teachers on a particularly hot summer day.
“Of course it does,” she replied. “But water is important for children.”
The nursery school teachers take good care of my daughter, Fuka, and sure enough, she’s grown to love the water. Whenever she takes a bath, she puts her mouth right up to the faucet to drink out of it. If she sees a bucket of water, she immediately climbs in and wants to play. Ocean or river, she’s drawn to water like a magnet.
In May of 2019, just as it was time to start getting Fuka’s floaties and buckets out for the summer, I found out our tap water was contaminated.
According to news reports, a series of tests administered to residents of Ginowan, Okinawa, revealed that their blood contained perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), a known carcinogen, at rates four times higher than the national average, as well as perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), a synthetic chemical compound restricted internationally under the Stockholm Convention, at rates of fifty-three times the national average. The suspected source of contamination was the Chatan Water Treatment Plant, near Kadena Air Base.
The morning paper that day was filled with comments from people who had taken the blood tests: “I knew the spring water was contaminated, but I never imagined the tap water was too.” “And here I was trying to avoid the groundwater this whole time.” “I guess the water purifier was useless after all.”
I wasn’t angry so much as sad. In the fall of 2018, firefighting foam, a toxic substance used in airfields, was detected in the spring water around Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. And, more recently, the groundwater below a promenade near our house also showed traces of firefighting foam, prompting a new sign that read: “This spring water is undrinkable.”
When my husband woke up, I told him that high levels of toxic substances had been detected in the blood of Ginowan residents, and that we should keep Fuka away from the tap water until we could confirm our water purifier was working properly.
“So you’re saying we have to buy all our water now?” he asked. I was slightly hurt by the incredulity in his tone.
“Yeah. We can get it delivered from Kyūshū or something. Either way, I don’t want her drinking the water in Okinawa until we have more information about this.” My husband agreed, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was so upset about.
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “It’s not just the spring water anymore — it’s the tap water too. Remember when the Osprey came along, just when we thought the roar from the airplanes couldn’t get any worse? And we wondered if we could really go on living here, or whether we should move? That’s how I feel now, all over again.”
My husband listened in silence. “Hmm,” he said after a pause. “I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s realistic to move. Besides, I’m pretty sure other places are using the same water purification plant. Let’s take our time and think this through.”
This time I was the one who fell silent.
I decided to go to the local vending machine to buy water for the morning before my daughter woke up. Two five-hundred-milliliter bottles of water should be enough to make breakfast, I thought, but what about the water for her bath? My daughter liked to drink water straight from the tap whenever she bathed.
Some time later, toxic substances were detected in the tap water of other towns that rely on the Chatan Water Treatment Plant as their main water source. Every day, the water in Okinawa is becoming more and more contaminated. I don’t know where to run to.
When I first moved to Ginowan, a neighbor told me that there used to be some natural caves nearby where people hid during the war. She said there was clean spring water in these caves, so there was no need to worry about the drinking water here.
“It’s because of the spring water that you see a lot of fireflies in this area,” she told me. “And there are kingfishers in the river over there too.”
I later found out that kingfishers are beautiful jade-green birds and that the natural caves where Okinawans hid during the war were only a short distance from my house. Ever since then, I’d longed to hear the stories of longtime local residents and to see real kingfishers flying over the water.
In March of 2018, a local acupuncture doctor put me in touch with a woman in her nineties who had lived here her entire life and could tell me about her experiences during the war. When I visited her house, I found a man in his sixties sitting outside and a gray-haired woman sitting in front of a Buddhist altar inside.
“Hello,” I said.
“Sorry, my hearing isn’t so good these days,” the woman replied.
“You have to speak up — she’s hard of hearing,” the man repeated as he came in to sit down beside her. He did so with such ease that I thought he must be her son, but he turned out to be the woman’s nephew, who, according to the woman, often helped out around the house.
“Did you work in the fields after the war?” I asked, spotting a large field that was visible from inside the house.
“Yes, I grew flowers,” she replied. “Calendulas and carnations at first. I sold them to the Amerikaa [Americans] for a dollar a piece. I’d take a bus to Kadena Air Base and sell them there every day.”
Then the woman began to talk about how she made her living by selling everything she brought back from the base.
“You know those small jars, the ones that are real wide around the middle? I brought those home, yeah, I bought them for a penny and sold them for two cents to the karasugwaa [salty fish] shop in Naha,” she said, laughing. “You know how they sell karasugwaa. They’d come around to my house to buy the jars. I used to say to those Amerikaa, ‘What a waste!’ And take ’em right off their hands.”
In Okinawa, newborn baby rabbitfish, which have never eaten any seaweed, are caught, salted, and fermented, and the resulting dish is called sukugarasu, or karasugwaa in Okinawan.
“She was really something,” the woman’s nephew said. “She even got her license after she turned forty!”
“Hasshyeh! It took me a whole year to get it!” the woman said.
“Hasshyeh! No, it was more than that!” the man replied, and we all laughed.
Then the conversation turned to April of 1945.
The woman said she hid with her family and relatives in a natural cave. That there were so many people hiding in there she couldn’t even count them. In April, the bombs from the naval bombardments began raining down on them incessantly, and many decided to flee, realizing it was no longer safe to stay.
On April 4, the woman left the cave with a few other family members and moved south with the Japanese troops.
“Where did you escape to?” I asked.
“I took the road that runs in front of Urasoe Castle,” she said, “which took us to Shuri, then Shigetagawa, then I don’t know where, then finally to Cape Kyan.”
I inhaled sharply when the woman described their route. That was the famous route that the Japanese army took when it used Okinawan residents as human shields during the Battle of Okinawa. We who were born after the war know what happened after that.
The woman continued.
“My little brother didn’t fight in the war, but someone said a bunch of people had died, and when I went to help bury the bodies, I found him collapsed like this . . . I couldn’t bear to look. There was a broken piece of shrapnel right above his head. I didn’t want to see it. But I saw it.
“My little sister wanted to go and get milk for our brother’s children, but when she went out to get it, they killed her. She never came back.
“My father was killed while walking in Ōzato Village [present-day Nanjō]. Da-hya, we never found his body. Before he died, he told me he had some money and gave it to me to hold on to it. I was the oldest daughter, so he told me to count it and gave it to me, not my mother — he gave it to me. I looked and thought I saw a tank passing by. There was some kind of rumor going around that the tank was going to roll over everyone who was still alive. I was so scared. I cried every day back then.
“One of my relatives had a sister with children. She told us not to worry, to go ahead without them, that she’d always keep them by her side. So we left. Those children died too.”
By the time the American military called for the surrender of Japanese troops at Cape Kyan in Itoman and everyone came out of the caves in Ginowan, there were only four people left in the woman’s family.
A long time ago, a friend of mine from Tokyo was visiting Okinawa. One day after work, I took him to Cape Kyan, where the Okinawans who had been trapped there jumped to their deaths, into the sea, one by one.
My friend exclaimed at the sight of the beautiful blue ocean stretching as far as the eye could see.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Wouldn’t they want to swim in such a blue sea, not jump to their deaths?”
“The entire sea was pitch black then,” I said. “American battleships covered the whole surface of the water, their guns pointed directly at the Okinawans.”
My friend fell silent.
“I guess it makes sense they felt like they couldn’t escape,” he said when we got back to the car. “There’s so much I don’t understand.”
Eventually the woman and her mother were taken to a POW camp in Kayo, Nago, and then to a POW camp in Nodake, Ginowan. After being released, she and her mother constructed a barracks on the former site of their home, which had been destroyed, and began to rebuild their life there. For the woman, that was the beginning of the postwar era.
Two years after the war ended, the woman’s fiancé returned. But he was so emaciated that people didn’t even recognize him. Nevertheless, the woman married him, nursed him back to health, cultivated the land, grew chrysanthemums, and sold them to Kadena Air Base to support herself. The woman referred to herself as a “kanpo no kuenkusa,” meaning “the wreckage left behind after the monster [the naval bombardment] devoured all the human beings.”
Listening to the history of the war and its aftermath, I realized the woman had been on the run for over three months.
“How did you deal with your period?” I asked.
“Diapers, right, Grandma?” her nephew said.
But the woman shook her head. “It basically stopped. Maybe because of the constant bombs.”
“Did it come back after you returned?” I asked.
“Not really,” she replied.
Since then, I have visited the same woman’s house many times. Once, I took my nephew, niece, and daughter to visit her during carrot-harvesting season. The woman told the children to go into the field and pick the carrots themselves, watching from the porch with delight. As I was about to go home, she gave me some money to buy snacks for the children.
“No, I can’t take this,” I said.
“Why not? Take it!” she replied.
“Yes, take it!” her nephew chimed in. “She’ll get mad if you don’t! Hell, I’ll get mad too!”
At last, I caved in, gathering the children and telling them to say their thank-yous.
On the way home, I stopped at an ice cream shop, thinking I should spend the money on something memorable. I told the children they could choose any ice cream flavor they wanted, since it was Grandma’s treat.
“Do you want to share with me, Mommy?” Fuka asked.
“No, you can have one all to yourself,” I said. “It’s a present from Grandma.”
My daughter’s eyes grew wide.
“The whole thing, for me?” she said.
Later that night, she drew a picture of a giant ice cream cone.
My daughter’s memory of that day probably consists entirely of leafy carrots and strawberry ice cream. That inviting field of soft, tilled soil was what the woman had remade after the war, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain its significance to my daughter. In the end, time passed, and I didn’t explain anything to her at all.
I still don’t know how to explain what war is to my daughter — that war is when so many bombs rain down it alters the very terrain of the earth, when children die one after another, when a mother dies telling her children that they will always be together, when hunger and fear halt menstruation. And that the grandmother, after experiencing all those things, lived on anyway, tilling the soil, remaking the land.
Since the beginning of the year, US military planes have been flying constantly overhead, the roar from their engines often exceeding a hundred decibels. I’ve often thought about taking a video and posting it on social media, but I’ve never been able to. When the planes approach, the whole house shakes, and my daughter gets scared. When it’s really bad, she starts to cry. So I can’t leave her side when the planes are flying overhead, not even to take a short video.
I will continue to be there for my daughter when she cries. I will never take her to that promenade with the polluted water again. And I won’t let her drink the tap water here from now on. And yet — I wonder if all these decisions I’ve made are really just a series of small compromises. Will I look back one day on my decision to stay in Okinawa and realize it was a mistake? Will there come a day when I’ll regret not leaving sooner?
I wonder when I will be able to tell my daughter, her eyes wide with fear, that war was something that happened a long time ago, that it is ancient, ancient history.
Even now, spring water is gushing out of the natural caves. I wonder if one day I’ll be able to take my daughter to watch the kingfishers flying over the shimmering water, and tell her that there is nothing to be afraid of, that the water here is very clean.
