“Japanese people find great comfort when the remains of the Japanese are buried in our homeland,” Yamazaki said.
The families have formally petitioned the Japanese government to have the remains returned, Anchorage television station KTVA reported. Yamazaki was among a delegation of Japanese soldiers’ descendants who attended a 75th anniversary celebration this month in Anchorage. Army buried the Japanese soldiers’ bodies with care, built a memorial, set up a grave post and paid respects to the spirits, said Nobuyuki Yamazaki, whose grandfather died on Attu. I felt I was not supposed to come back, because those who went to war were not supposed to come back, and that’s what we were taught.”Īfter the battle, Dover said things went back to normal for the American soldiers - except one thing: “Somebody had to bury those Japanese.”ĭuring the war, the U.S. I thought I survived because I was not lucky. “But I never thought I was lucky to be alive. “I felt so relieved to be home,” he said. His family already had a funeral and grave for him. He was captured and sent to several mainland POW camps - including in Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago - before he returned home to Japan’s Iwate prefecture in 1947. “I was going to die, I thought,” he said.īut as he headed out to fight, he collapsed, likely because he hadn’t eaten in days. Tomimatsu Takahashi told Japanese public television network NHK in 2010 he was being treated for a bullet wound when the order for the final charge came. It was the first official case of “gyokusai,” a Japanese euphemism for annihilation or mass suicide in the name of Emperor Hirohito, which increasingly occurred in other Japanese battlefields. “Savage fighting rages throughout the day and into the following night.Ībout 200 Japanese soldiers died in the assault, and the remaining 500 or so held grenades to their bellies and pulled the pins. “Japanese soldiers surprise American forces on Attu with a fanatical charge out of the mountains,” recounts an Associated Press chronology of WWII events in 1943. The Japanese staged a last-ditch, desperate offensive May 29 at Engineer Hill. It was the only WWII battle fought on North American soil.
soldiers were killed.Īmerican forces, many poorly outfitted for Alaska weather and trained in California for desert combat, recaptured Attu 11 months after the Japanese took it and a nearby island, Kiska. Nearly all the Japanese forces, estimated at about 2,500 soldiers, died with only 28 survivors. The battle for the Aleutian island was one of the deadliest in the Pacific in terms of the percentage of troops killed.
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