Okinawa Faces Difficulties Maintaining War Memorials

June 21, 2018

Itoman, Okinawa Pref.- Okinawa Prefecture, which marks its war remembrance day on Saturday, faces increasing difficulties maintaining memorials for about 200,000 victims of World War II as their keepers are aging.

The remembrance day, a public holiday in the southern Japan prefecture, is the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest ground battle in Japan during the war.

A prefectural government survey in 2012 found that 39 of the 440 war memorials in the prefecture were difficult to maintain due to the absence of owners and inheritors and other reasons.

In 1971, an alumni group of the defunct Kainan junior high school built a memorial in the Okinawa city of Itoman to mourn for students who were mobilized for and died in the war. The group has since held a memorial service every year.

In June last year, however, the group gave the memorial to the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Foundation after concluding that its aging membership made it difficult to continue to take care of it.

"We asked the foundation (to maintain the memorial) as we're becoming unable to get around," Chosei Ota, 90, head of the alumni group, said. "I also think it may be good to integrate war memorials."

The foundation manages 91 memorials in Okinawa, including those for war victims from other prefectures across the country. Nine of them were handed over from groups of former soldiers and other people.

"As time goes by, there are fewer and fewer memorial managers," said Kenji Uehara, head of the foundation's secretariat.

In fiscal 2016, the welfare ministry launched a program to provide municipal governments up to 250,000 yen in subsidies to cover the costs of relocating a war memorial with no clear owner that is feared to collapse.

But under the program, there have been only three applications so far, including from the city of Kurume in Fukuoka Prefecture. No application has been submitted from Okinawa.

"We'll consider using the program if it's improved and made more convenient," a war memorial keeper said. Jiji Press