Me, a Sashiba (Grey-faced Buzzard), and an Octopus Trap
Mr. Keikichi Yamazato
Birth year：1943
Birth place：Miyakojima City
Families during wartime and my scars
I was born in 1943, in Nikadori on Miyako Island. My father was a farmer, but the people in our community called him “Sensei” (teacher) for some reason. I thought it was curious that he should be called that, as he wasn’t a teacher. I asked the people in the community why, and apparently it was because he made various contributions to the region. He had also been one of the board members for the local council and acted as an administrator for our community.
At the time of the October 10 air raids, I was just three years old, so I don’t remember much about that time. I only remember being injured. I was hit by a bullet from a machine gun. Sweeping machine gun fire from a U.S. military aircraft hit our house twice. The U.S. military at that time was apparently under strict orders to shoot anything that moved. Our house was near a hill, and there happened to be someone there, on the hill. The aircraft aimed at them, but the bullets flew into our house. One bullet went right through our storm shutter and hit me, another hit our home altar, and a third hit our woodshed. That’s what my parents told me. According to my mother, there were Japanese army personnel in the Nikadori air raid shelter ditch then, and my parents took me over to them. Though the military didn’t normally provide care for civilians, they did treat my wounds there, my mother told me. My injury from that time remains with me. The bullet from the machine gun grazed my arm and a scar remains on my back as well. I was still small, being a child, and was sleeping in the ichibanza (main room) when the bullet from the machine gun hit me, and I apparently screamed and cried. My family was eating lunch in the living room at the time, and they hid themselves the instant they heard the bullets. I don’t think that they were actually able to hide themselves in time, but they somehow made it through safely. I was the only one hit and was injured in three spots on my back and on my arm. I believe that I survived because the bullet hit me right in front of my spine. I was pretty lucky.
I don’t have any memory of when Miyakojima underwent the air raids, but apparently my father and others were made to work refilling the holes left in the airfield runways by the bombs the U.S. planes dropped. The wreckage of a Japanese army tank was left on the beach after the war ended. I think that it may have been hit by one of the U.S. attacks.
Memories of sashiba and takotsubo
When I was young, we ate lots of sweet potatoes. We would also pluck the wild grasses that grew naturally and put them in our soups. Green onion-like vegetables, for example. We also ate guava and mulberries, and caught and ate cicadas, grasshoppers, and lizards too. To us, sashiba (grey-faced buzzards) were a delicacy. The bird is a protected species now, but I don’t think it was back when I was in school.
One day, I went into the mountains all alone and caught two of them, but that was the first and last time I ever managed to do so. I caught them with my bare hands. It was night and dark out, but I caught a glimpse of one in the light from the village. I slowly climbed up the tree to grab it, but on my first try I mistakenly grabbed just one of its legs and it clawed at my arm with its other leg. It was an important catch, so there was no way I was letting go. My second catch went much better. That was the first and last time I was able to do it. For a week, the bird I had caught became a sort of toy for me. I tied a rope to its legs, and let it wear itself out trying to get away. Once it exhausted all its energy about a week later, we ate it in our soup. We mixed it in with our rice, and it was delicious. The yellow fat from the bird floated to the top of our soup, and it tasted wonderful.
I went out another day to try and catch more sashiba. There were pine groves along the shore near our house, but there were also a number of graves, and it was scary with no lights around. The birds would fly in from the sea, so I moved several meters away from my friends and climbed up into a pine tree. No matter how long I waited, none of my prey came. I was about to go home, but as I turned around, I fell from the tree, right into a trench fitting a single person. This was a sort of trench from the war we called “takotsubo” (octopus traps), and I thought I was done for. I managed to crawl my way out, but I was chest-deep in there and if it had been any deeper, I think I would have really been in danger, out there in the dark of night.
Miyakojima when I was young
I would also go to catch fish at the shore. Whenever I went out with my friends to cut feed for the goats, I always brought my water goggles with me. Back then we used to call them “mi-kagan” goggles. When I heard a sound of an explosion from the sea (from blast fishing) I would run over to where it had come from. There would be fish both live and dead that had been thrown out onto the land and I would take the fish the fisherman didn’t pull in, bringing them home with me to eat. Striped jack would often get washed up on shore. They used homemade bombs for blast fishing. They would take gunpower from ammunition, pack it into bottles, and toss these homemade explosives into the sea. There were two types of explosives, one that was square-shaped and one with a round core. There was lots of ammo around the shore. People collected scrap metal all over the area back then. There was a sort of scrap rush around the entire island. We were only little kids at the time, but we would pick up chunks of iron we found for some pocket money. There were merchants who purchased scrap back then, so we would take our scrap to them and sell it. And that would be some pocket money for us. It was something we all enjoyed a lot.
I grew up in a large family. I was the sixth son. Our breakfast was two bundles of somen noodles. We just had a few sparse noodles floating in our soup, transparent from a lack of ingredients. Our meals were first-come first-served, so I always sat by the pot. There were big cans of food, rations from the U.S. forces. I think they were cans of spinach or something. When I was still very young, a ship carrying rice grounded and sunk near Higashi Hennazaki cape. There was also an accident with a ship sent out to reclaim the rice load. Back then rice was priceless, and many people went out to get it from the shipwreck.
There was a water shortage on Miyako Island at that time. There were things in the fields to collect rainwater, but rainwater didn’t collect in them. We would sometimes have to drink the water that pooled in the tracks left by horse-drawn carriages. I would scoop it up in my hands to drink, thinking that drinking it was better than drinking nothing. I never got sick from it, which was quite fortunate. I think kids were just physically stronger back then.
Roundworms and deworming
In those days, relatives would butcher a pig in their backyards for the new year and other celebrations. When we dissected the pigs, we would find tiny white eggs (from parasitic worms) on the meat. As we would be boiling the meat, we thought it would be fine, and so ate it all anyway. At that time, people from the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands showed a film at the Miyako Ryukyuan-American Cultural Center that told about the dangers of roundworms. One day, after playing by the sea, I ran around, trying to dry myself off. We were at a place where older women would gather to pray. My friend picked up a fallen incense stick and pretended to smoke tobacco. A roundworm suddenly popped out of her nose, surprising me. At school back in the old days, seaweed was used to kill off any roundworms that might be in the body. I can’t really remember the name. We had to drink a soup made by boiling this seaweed. In any case, we would drink that soup, and kill off the roundworms. After we drank it, we were given candy drops, which were really delicious. That was the first candy drop I ever got. We got those sweet drops as a reward for taking that bitter soup.
School life back then
My school had a thatched roof and no floor, just the bare ground. We would kick up dirt as we walked on it. Only short walls separated each classroom, so you could hear each other. There were three classes in the building. We would sometimes play around, collecting scrap paper from the trash, filling it with dirt from the ground beneath our feet, and tossing it over into the other classrooms. This left our desks covered in dirt and trash. We did that kind of thing a lot.
One time there was an outbreak of a virus, an infectious disease affecting plants and vegetables. The school made efforts to control it. Our teachers brought us out to the fields and had us scrape it off.
I attended Hirara Junior High. I can’t remember if it was originally a well-constructed school, but it suffered extensive damage from a typhoon. From there we were divided in two. We started having morning and afternoon classes. This continued until a new school was finished.
From there I went on to attend an agriculture and forestry high school, but I don’t really have any detailed knowledge about farming. We made compost at school. The school’s farm field was located near the school building. The school’s “Farm Field No. 2”was near the airport and we brought the compost out to it. It was a big farm around 18 hectares in area. We grew sugarcane there, and during harvest season I would go without a lunch, eating the sugarcane as I harvested it.
Working for a port company after graduating high school
For a year after graduating high school, I lived a relatively easy-going life in my hometown, but I felt that I couldn’t just keep doing that. I decided I wanted to work in a more recognized profession. We were still under U.S. occupation back then, and I wanted to engage in work that involved typing in English on a typewriter. At that time, the Association of War-Bereaved Families had typewriting classes in Naha at a vocational-training facility. Anyone who had lost someone in the war was eligible, so I asked my father for permission to go to Naha, which I was granted, and so I learned how to use the typewriters. Those techniques were extremely useful at my place of work.
I found a job at a port transport service company at Naha Port. As the area was still under U.S. army occupation, all shipping documents and customs reports had to be drafted in English. As shipments via sea to the Japanese mainland were dealt with as foreign cargo, a customs report and a bill of lading (BL) for the bank had to be drafted. Typing in English was extremely useful for producing these documents. No matter how small the shipment, any ships bound for the mainland had to be reported to customs, and permission had to be granted from customs as well. At that time, there were people in Naha making profits through tax exemption. You could take three bottles of whiskey from Okinawa to the mainland so people would bring whiskey over and sell it at a high price. According to some of the ship crew, there were even people who saved up enough to build a house by selling whiskey. The most difficult part of my work at the port was transshipment of cargo. They would often load cargo from one ship to another. For example, bringing pineapple from Yaeyama, or Miyako Jofu textiles from Miyako. But if the paperwork required for transferring to ships bound for Osaka did not arrive in time, or the cargo was not loaded onto the ship because of a mistake by the person in charge, it was a major problem. Miyako Jofu textiles in particular sold for 300,000 yen per unit, or 3 million yen per case. When sending a high-priced item like this, even one ship being late could result in cargo not arriving for up to a week, presenting a problem. The Americans would often go to Taiwan and come back to Okinawa with Taiwanese furniture they purchased. They came to us at the port companies for customs procedures. They would ask about the procedures to get these items through customs, but it was challenging as that sort of thing was handled differently than ordinary procedures, and I needed to explain things in English, which I wasn’t used to. This was the hardest thing for me.
A message for young people
In any case, today we live in an age of plenty. When I was young, all we had to eat for breakfast was rice and somen soup. And when I say “somen” here I’m referring to just a small amount of noodles. I’m worried if kids today could even survive if our supply of food suddenly stopped. I think that we need to teach children at schools today about life during food shortages during and after the war so that they learn about the importance of the food they have. Mr. Keikichi Yamazato spent his childhood on Miyakojima, and went to the main land of Okinawa after high school graduation, where he worked at a port company in Naha. After the war, he engaged in Okinawa logistics-related work for many years, from the time of the U.S. military occupation until he reached the mandatory retirement age.
Mr. Keikichi Yamazato spent his childhood on Miyakojima, and went to mainland Okinawa after high school graduation, where he worked at a port company in Naha. After the war, he engaged in logistics-related work in Okinawa for many years, from the time of the U.S. military occupation until he reached the mandatory retirement age.
Families during wartime and my scars
I was born in 1943, in Nikadori on Miyako Island. My father was a farmer, but the people in our community called him “Sensei” (teacher) for some reason. I thought it was curious that he should be called that, as he wasn’t a teacher. I asked the people in the community why, and apparently it was because he made various contributions to the region. He had also been one of the board members for the local council and acted as an administrator for our community.
At the time of the October 10 air raids, I was just three years old, so I don’t remember much about that time. I only remember being injured. I was hit by a bullet from a machine gun. Sweeping machine gun fire from a U.S. military aircraft hit our house twice. The U.S. military at that time was apparently under strict orders to shoot anything that moved. Our house was near a hill, and there happened to be someone there, on the hill. The aircraft aimed at them, but the bullets flew into our house. One bullet went right through our storm shutter and hit me, another hit our home altar, and a third hit our woodshed. That’s what my parents told me. According to my mother, there were Japanese army personnel in the Nikadori air raid shelter ditch then, and my parents took me over to them. Though the military didn’t normally provide care for civilians, they did treat my wounds there, my mother told me. My injury from that time remains with me. The bullet from the machine gun grazed my arm and a scar remains on my back as well. I was still small, being a child, and was sleeping in the ichibanza (main room) when the bullet from the machine gun hit me, and I apparently screamed and cried. My family was eating lunch in the living room at the time, and they hid themselves the instant they heard the bullets. I don’t think that they were actually able to hide themselves in time, but they somehow made it through safely. I was the only one hit and was injured in three spots on my back and on my arm. I believe that I survived because the bullet hit me right in front of my spine. I was pretty lucky.
I don’t have any memory of when Miyakojima underwent the air raids, but apparently my father and others were made to work refilling the holes left in the airfield runways by the bombs the U.S. planes dropped. The wreckage of a Japanese army tank was left on the beach after the war ended. I think that it may have been hit by one of the U.S. attacks.
Memories of sashiba and takotsubo
When I was young, we ate lots of sweet potatoes. We would also pluck the wild grasses that grew naturally and put them in our soups. Green onion-like vegetables, for example. We also ate guava and mulberries, and caught and ate cicadas, grasshoppers, and lizards too. To us, sashiba (grey-faced buzzards) were a delicacy. The bird is a protected species now, but I don’t think it was back when I was in school.
One day, I went into the mountains all alone and caught two of them, but that was the first and last time I ever managed to do so. I caught them with my bare hands. It was night and dark out, but I caught a glimpse of one in the light from the village. I slowly climbed up the tree to grab it, but on my first try I mistakenly grabbed just one of its legs and it clawed at my arm with its other leg. It was an important catch, so there was no way I was letting go. My second catch went much better. That was the first and last time I was able to do it. For a week, the bird I had caught became a sort of toy for me. I tied a rope to its legs, and let it wear itself out trying to get away. Once it exhausted all its energy about a week later, we ate it in our soup. We mixed it in with our rice, and it was delicious. The yellow fat from the bird floated to the top of our soup, and it tasted wonderful.
I went out another day to try and catch more sashiba. There were pine groves along the shore near our house, but there were also a number of graves, and it was scary with no lights around. The birds would fly in from the sea, so I moved several meters away from my friends and climbed up into a pine tree. No matter how long I waited, none of my prey came. I was about to go home, but as I turned around, I fell from the tree, right into a trench fitting a single person. This was a sort of trench from the war we called “takotsubo” (octopus traps), and I thought I was done for. I managed to crawl my way out, but I was chest-deep in there and if it had been any deeper, I think I would have really been in danger, out there in the dark of night.
Miyakojima when I was young
I would also go to catch fish at the shore. Whenever I went out with my friends to cut feed for the goats, I always brought my water goggles with me. Back then we used to call them “mi-kagan” goggles. When I heard a sound of an explosion from the sea (from blast fishing) I would run over to where it had come from. There would be fish both live and dead that had been thrown out onto the land and I would take the fish the fisherman didn’t pull in, bringing them home with me to eat. Striped jack would often get washed up on shore. They used homemade bombs for blast fishing. They would take gunpower from ammunition, pack it into bottles, and toss these homemade explosives into the sea. There were two types of explosives, one that was square-shaped and one with a round core. There was lots of ammo around the shore. People collected scrap metal all over the area back then. There was a sort of scrap rush around the entire island. We were only little kids at the time, but we would pick up chunks of iron we found for some pocket money. There were merchants who purchased scrap back then, so we would take our scrap to them and sell it. And that would be some pocket money for us. It was something we all enjoyed a lot.
I grew up in a large family. I was the sixth son. Our breakfast was two bundles of somen noodles. We just had a few sparse noodles floating in our soup, transparent from a lack of ingredients. Our meals were first-come first-served, so I always sat by the pot. There were big cans of food, rations from the U.S. forces. I think they were cans of spinach or something. When I was still very young, a ship carrying rice grounded and sunk near Higashi Hennazaki cape. There was also an accident with a ship sent out to reclaim the rice load. Back then rice was priceless, and many people went out to get it from the shipwreck.
There was a water shortage on Miyako Island at that time. There were things in the fields to collect rainwater, but rainwater didn’t collect in them. We would sometimes have to drink the water that pooled in the tracks left by horse-drawn carriages. I would scoop it up in my hands to drink, thinking that drinking it was better than drinking nothing. I never got sick from it, which was quite fortunate. I think kids were just physically stronger back then.
Roundworms and deworming
In those days, relatives would butcher a pig in their backyards for the new year and other celebrations. When we dissected the pigs, we would find tiny white eggs (from parasitic worms) on the meat. As we would be boiling the meat, we thought it would be fine, and so ate it all anyway. At that time, people from the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands showed a film at the Miyako Ryukyuan-American Cultural Center that told about the dangers of roundworms. One day, after playing by the sea, I ran around, trying to dry myself off. We were at a place where older women would gather to pray. My friend picked up a fallen incense stick and pretended to smoke tobacco. A roundworm suddenly popped out of her nose, surprising me. At school back in the old days, seaweed was used to kill off any roundworms that might be in the body. I can’t really remember the name. We had to drink a soup made by boiling this seaweed. In any case, we would drink that soup, and kill off the roundworms. After we drank it, we were given candy drops, which were really delicious. That was the first candy drop I ever got. We got those sweet drops as a reward for taking that bitter soup.
School life back then
My school had a thatched roof and no floor, just the bare ground. We would kick up dirt as we walked on it. Only short walls separated each classroom, so you could hear each other. There were three classes in the building. We would sometimes play around, collecting scrap paper from the trash, filling it with dirt from the ground beneath our feet, and tossing it over into the other classrooms. This left our desks covered in dirt and trash. We did that kind of thing a lot.
One time there was an outbreak of a virus, an infectious disease affecting plants and vegetables. The school made efforts to control it. Our teachers brought us out to the fields and had us scrape it off.
I attended Hirara Junior High. I can’t remember if it was originally a well-constructed school, but it suffered extensive damage from a typhoon. From there we were divided in two. We started having morning and afternoon classes. This continued until a new school was finished.
From there I went on to attend an agriculture and forestry high school, but I don’t really have any detailed knowledge about farming. We made compost at school. The school’s farm field was located near the school building. The school’s “Farm Field No. 2”was near the airport and we brought the compost out to it. It was a big farm around 18 hectares in area. We grew sugarcane there, and during harvest season I would go without a lunch, eating the sugarcane as I harvested it.
Working for a port company after graduating high school
For a year after graduating high school, I lived a relatively easy-going life in my hometown, but I felt that I couldn’t just keep doing that. I decided I wanted to work in a more recognized profession. We were still under U.S. occupation back then, and I wanted to engage in work that involved typing in English on a typewriter. At that time, the Association of War-Bereaved Families had typewriting classes in Naha at a vocational-training facility. Anyone who had lost someone in the war was eligible, so I asked my father for permission to go to Naha, which I was granted, and so I learned how to use the typewriters. Those techniques were extremely useful at my place of work.
I found a job at a port transport service company at Naha Port. As the area was still under U.S. army occupation, all shipping documents and customs reports had to be drafted in English. As shipments via sea to the Japanese mainland were dealt with as foreign cargo, a customs report and a bill of lading (BL) for the bank had to be drafted. Typing in English was extremely useful for producing these documents. No matter how small the shipment, any ships bound for the mainland had to be reported to customs, and permission had to be granted from customs as well. At that time, there were people in Naha making profits through tax exemption. You could take three bottles of whiskey from Okinawa to the mainland so people would bring whiskey over and sell it at a high price. According to some of the ship crew, there were even people who saved up enough to build a house by selling whiskey. The most difficult part of my work at the port was transshipment of cargo. They would often load cargo from one ship to another. For example, bringing pineapple from Yaeyama, or Miyako Jofu textiles from Miyako. But if the paperwork required for transferring to ships bound for Osaka did not arrive in time, or the cargo was not loaded onto the ship because of a mistake by the person in charge, it was a major problem. Miyako Jofu textiles in particular sold for 300,000 yen per unit, or 3 million yen per case. When sending a high-priced item like this, even one ship being late could result in cargo not arriving for up to a week, presenting a problem. The Americans would often go to Taiwan and come back to Okinawa with Taiwanese furniture they purchased. They came to us at the port companies for customs procedures. They would ask about the procedures to get these items through customs, but it was challenging as that sort of thing was handled differently than ordinary procedures, and I needed to explain things in English, which I wasn’t used to. This was the hardest thing for me.
A message for young people
In any case, today we live in an age of plenty. When I was young, all we had to eat for breakfast was rice and somen soup. And when I say “somen” here I’m referring to just a small amount of noodles. I’m worried if kids today could even survive if our supply of food suddenly stopped. I think that we need to teach children at schools today about life during food shortages during and after the war so that they learn about the importance of the food they have. Mr. Keikichi Yamazato spent his childhood on Miyakojima, and went to the main land of Okinawa after high school graduation, where he worked at a port company in Naha. After the war, he engaged in Okinawa logistics-related work for many years, from the time of the U.S. military occupation until he reached the mandatory retirement age.
Mr. Keikichi Yamazato spent his childhood on Miyakojima, and went to mainland Okinawa after high school graduation, where he worked at a port company in Naha. After the war, he engaged in logistics-related work in Okinawa for many years, from the time of the U.S. military occupation until he reached the mandatory retirement age.