Okinawa, Himeyuri-no-To
Continuing a series of unused cards, captioned mostly in Japanese and Chinese, but with key identification also in Roman lettering. Apart from being the name of a film, Himeyuri-no-To is described online by one skeptical observer like this: “Himeyuri no Tō (literally, Tower of the Lilies) memorialises the Himeyuri students, a large corps of local students and their teachers drafted by the authorities to help in the war effort. For the most part, this meant serving as nurses to the wounded in make-shift field hospitals erected, if that is the apt word, in caves. Perhaps it is something about the primitivism of the use of caves by a modern war machine that makes the whole scenario feel so futile, so doomed and absurd”. Okinawan people, and Japanese persons generally, may well see this differently. Grade: 1