80 years after World War II, Okinawa’s battle sites are still giving up bones and bombs changelly

The “bone digger” slides into a thin crevice on a hill in the Okinawan jungle. He’s a slight man, nimbly fitting his frame through the cave entrance, carefully avoiding the sharp limestone roof while navigating the crumbling stone and dirt on the cave floor.

He crouches as the lamp on his forehead shines on the dirt at his feet and scratches the soil with a gardening tool, looking to turn up the remains of people who hid in caves like this one during the World War II Battle of Okinawa.

This is the life’s work of the bone digger, Takamatsu Gushiken. He spends much of his free time in caves like this in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, trying to bring closure to one of the most fierce and deadly battles of the Pacific war.

I ask him why he does this work. He pauses and shrugs.

“They are human, and I am human too,” he says softly, looking down, his voice breaking with emotion.

Gushiken shows me what he’s found at this site so far — portions of a skull from the area of the ear, smaller bones, maybe from a foot, he says, and even smaller ones, possibly from a child or infant. He’s found a bullet, too, and theorizes what might have happened at this spot eight decades ago: A mother and child hid as the battle raged outside. As US troops were trying to clear caves of hidden Japanese defenders, the two civilians, like so many on Okinawa, were caught in the crossfire.

They would be among the estimated 240,000 people killed or missing in the Battle of Okinawa, from the landing of the US invasion force on April 1, 1945, to the Americans’ declaration of victory on June 22.

That number includes as many as 100,000 civilians, 110,000 Japanese troops and Okinawa conscripts, and more than 12,000 American and allied troops, according to the National World War II Museum in Louisiana.

Those lives were lost in a hellscape of overwhelming American firepower. US forces used 1.1 million 105 milimeter howitzer rounds on the island, expended more than a half million mortar rounds, and fired more than 16 million machine gun rounds and 9 million rifle bullets, according to the museum.