Battle of Okinawa survivors still cursed by PTSD 80 years on

Survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have taken years to overcome their trauma.

The aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill on fire following a Japanese air strike near Okinawa. Picture: Getty Images.

Tsuruko Uchihara was in her early fifties, an active and contented teacher and mother, when she was struck by a mysterious and overwhelming pain.

It began as a burning sensation in her right foot. Then it spread up her leg and throughout her body. The intensity made her cry out loud. Soon she was unable to get out of her bed.

The doctors were baffled. After four fruitless surgeries and 30 years as an invalid, she was in despair.

Then she met a psychiatrist who asked her about the terrible days of June 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, when Ms Uchihara was 15.

She recalled how her family had been caught in the fighting between the Imperial Japanese Army and the invading US marines. How they had fled the slaughter by night, and the moment of horror when she inadvertently trod on a corpse.

“I stepped on its head, its chest, its legs,” Ms Uchihara, 95, said. “I apologised. I prayed for forgiveness. I stepped on it with my right leg, the same leg that had the pain. And I began to think the strange pain in my leg was caused by the war.”

The burning sensation did not have a physical cause – it was the psychosomatic expression of the terror, dread and shame experienced all those decades before. It had lurked in Ms Uchihara’s memory, to manifest 40 years later in a woman outwardly unaffected by her exposure to violence.

Tsuruko Uchihara, 84, who experienced the Battle of Okinawa at the age of 14. Picture: supplied

Her experience is far from unique.

Over the past 15 years, nurses and psychiatrists in Okinawa have identified more than 100 cases of what they term late-onset, post-traumatic stress disorder. Its surviving sufferers, all close to 90 or older, are being treated for deep mental suffering caused by events 80 years ago.

“Scabs form on the wounds,” Ryoji Aritsuka, the psychiatrist who pioneered the study of the disorder in Okinawa, said. “But the scabs tend to fall off and the wounds gape open.”

The Battle of Okinawa came to an end 80 years ago this week with the total defeat of the Japanese forces and the suicide of their commanders. More than 12,500 US troops died in the battle, along with some 94,000 soldiers of the Imperial Army who followed orders to fight to the death. The biggest victims were Okinawan civilians, of whom up to 150,000 died.

Eleven Okinawan civilians who were huddled in this hillside cave were rescued when a passing US Marine patrol heard a baby crying. Picture: US Marine Corps

Japanese soldiers forced Ms Uchihara and her family of eight out of the cave they were sheltering in. They staggered on, hiding in the fields of sugarcane. They stuffed rags into the mouth of Ms Uchihara’s baby niece to prevent her giving them away with cries.

“I saw fragments of flesh hanging from the branches of a banyan tree,” she said. “Inside the house was the swollen body of an old man, dead, with his eyes wide open. A machinegun fired, so we jumped into a ditch filled with water. It was the middle of the night when I stepped on the corpse.”

Against their expectations, the family all survived. Ms Uchihara married and raised two daughters. Everyone who survived the battle had memories of terror and loss but almost none of them spoke up.

“To talk about the war was a taboo,” said Dr Aritsuka, who moved to Okinawa from northern Japan. “Local doctors never brought it up.”

Twenty years ago he began seeing elderly patients suffering from an unusual kind of insomnia, which had no obvious causes. He read about similar symptoms among survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. When he questioned his patients, they had the same thing in common – unarticulated memories of the battle.

Often the trauma resurfaced after a change in life, such as retirement, that left them with time to think back on the past. Ms Uchihara’s pains began after her daughters left home. One woman in her sixties became haunted by the killings of family members. Whenever she spoke of them, she was overcome by psychosomatic coughing.

“One man kept waking in the night,” Dr Aritsuka said. “He was having dreams of his younger sister, who was shot with a machinegun and died a day later.”

Marines wait on the crest of a hill in southern Okinawa, as they watch phosphorous shells explode over Japanese soldiers dug into the hills. Picture: Keystone/Getty Images

Okinawa was the only one of the Japanese home islands to experience a land battle. Dr Aritsuka uncovered studies that found rates of schizophrenia 3.6 times higher than on the mainland.

A nursing professor, Fujiko Toyama, supervised a survey of 400 people at a daycare centre for the elderly, which found 40 per cent of those who had lived through the battle had PTSD, a higher rate than combat soldiers.

Dr Aritsuka discovered, though, that even in patients of advanced age, PTSD could be treated. Psychiatric drugs help, as do various kinds of therapy.

After decades of suffering, Ms Uchihara, while in her eighties, began attending a gathering of other old people. All had lived through horrors but none had spoken of them. Within two years, the pain in her limbs had receded.

“It helped to talk with other people who suffered with the same experience,” she said. “When Dr Aritsuka said that I had PTSD it was a relief. I felt that I had been recognised. I was able to ease my pain.”

Additional reporting: Kyoko Onoki

THE TIMES