A lesson from 2 aging warriors: War brings only heartache
BY SATOSHI OKUMURA AND HIDESHI NISHIMOTO,
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
2008/8/15
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Takagi, left, and Tsuchida
Kiyokazu Tsuchida's war ended in April 1947.
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He and 33 fellow soldiers had been holed up in dark, sweltering caves in the island nation of Palau in the southern Pacific without knowing of Japan's defeat nearly two years previously.
Tsuchida, now 88, says they subsisted on rats, while repeatedly asking themselves if reinforcement troops would ever arrive, and if they would live to see their homeland again.
Nobuaki Takagi's struggle ended in May 1943 when he fell unconscious in a banzai suicide attack on Attu Island, known as the "island of annihilation" in the northern Pacific.
Takagi, now 86, survived after being taken captive by invading American forces. He was one of the only 27 survivors of some 2,600 troops of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed on the island in the Aleutian chain.
As Japan marks the 63rd anniversary today of its surrender in World War II, former soldiers such as these, who are now elderly men, say they pray young people will listen to their stories in the hope that future generations never experience the horror of war.
Even now, both men question Japan's reasons for waging war.
"We should never engage in such a war again," says Tsuchida of Chikugo, Fukuoka Prefecture. "I hope young people will listen to our experiences without thinking the war was just a thing of the distant past." (219 words)
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