WHEN the moment came, the Rev Shigeaki Kinjo remembers, there was no hesitation among the villagers of Tokashiki island. The village chief was the first to start with a heavy branch broken off a tree. There were no guns and the grenades had been used up, so other men made do with clubs or rocks.

The Protestant clergyman said: “Our father was not there, so my elder brother and I had to do my father’s job,” Mr Kinjo said. “We were boys of 16 and 18 years old. We had to kill my mother and my younger brother and sister.”

It was 60 years ago, and all across the islands of Okinawa ordinary civilians were doing the same. As the US Marines made their slow advance in the bloody 2½-month battle, tens of thousands of people killed their wives, sons, daughters, parents and grandparents, and themselves, rather than face capture.

They did so in the belief, inculcated by military propaganda, that those who survived would be raped and killed by the American and British devils. The weapons they used were provided by the Japanese military and often, according to survivors, they were forced by soldiers to participate in so-called group death.

But as the nation marked the anniversary of the end of the battle with a ceremony in Okinawa yesterday, controversy was raging about the deaths.

Right-wing academics, who have already stirred up a row with a book playing down Japanese atrocities in Asia, say that the forced suicides are a myth, invented by survivors greedy for postwar compensation.

The claims have provoked fury in Okinawa, a culturally distinct region of Japan, where at least 94,000 civilians died.

Tokashiki, 15 miles from the main island of Okinawa, fell in March 1945 and, well before the American invasion, its small Japanese garrison was preparing for defeat. Mr Kinjo, now 76, said: “An NCO summoned village officials and young men, and gave them two grenades each. They said, ‘Use one against the enemy and the other for yourself.’ This was nothing other than direct pressure from the military.”

On the night before the invasion the villagers were ordered towards the battlefield rather than away from it. “This was the outstanding characteristic of the battle,” Mr Kinjo said. “The idea of one destiny shared by the military, the administration and civilians. They were to live together and to die together.”

After the village chief began clubbing his wife and children with a branch, the others did the same. “I didn’t exchange a word with my elder brother. We just did it. My mother said nothing, she just cried, and we were crying. My only clear memory was at the last moment we used a rock. By the time I killed my younger brother and sister, the details of what I did or how I did it became so vague with the shock.”

The campaign to prove that forced suicides were a myth is led by Nobukatsu Fujioka, a right-wing academic who visited Tokashiki last month. He said that survivors of the battle were concocted to secure compensation from the Government. Among present-day Okinawans there is widespread resentment of their treatment by the mainland, not least because of the continued presence of 47,000 US military personnel on the island.

Nobuyoshi Takashima, a professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, said: “Okinawans were part of the military defence of the island, and they had no choice but to follow.”

THE CAMPAIGN

• April 1, 1945: Invasion begins; April — June 170,000 US troops and 1,213 warships plus British forces engaged
• June 21: Japanese resistance ceases
• US military deaths: 12,520; 36 warships, 763 aircraft lost
• Japanese military deaths: 94,136; 7,400 taken prisoner
• Civilian deaths: 94,000—150,000
• Okinawa: 161 islands spanning 800 miles

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