Then a teacher at Naha National School (elementary school)

It was spring of 1944. I was working as a teacher at the Naha National School after having recently graduated from the Girls’ Normal School Teacher's Course. Soldiers arrived at the school from around June, and in July our summer holidays were replaced by work carrying tiles to be used in the construction of barracks near the airfield in Oroku. 　 It wasn’t too long before we received instructions from the prefectural government that our pupils should be evacuated from the island. Our principal said that he needed some young teachers without ties to be in charge the evacuation, so he asked me to go with them. He was just doing his best to follow the Japanese government's policy of having as many children as possible be evacuated from the island. 　 To try to encourage their children to go, the teachers went around each of the houses of pupils whose families weren’t going to evacuate. Most of my pupils and their families agreed to be evacuated. They trusted me, trusted a young teacher whom they’d always looked up to like an older sister. I've always regretted the fact that all thirteen of the children who applied to be evacuated on my recommendation lost their lives on the Tsushima Maru. 　 The exact departure date hadn't been announced to us. On 20 August 1944, the day before we left, it was announced at a regular teachers meeting that we would be going the next day, so we instructed the pupils to assemble at 4:00am that next morning. 　 Even before sunrise on 21 August, in the meeting area there were several thousand people - pupils and their families. After the sun came up we still had to wait several hours in that empty open space with no water to drink. It was the middle of summer, and several children collapsed with heat exhaustion. It was such a miserable experience, especially for those who were about to be separated from their families. It was terrible that they had to say good-bye to their children in such awful circumstances. The Tsushima Maru eventually departed well into the afternoon. I remember that it was such a huge ship. We climbed up a stairway attached to the stern of the ship. It was almost like climbing up to the upper floors of a tall building. From there we went down into the ship’s cargo hold. There were partitions down there in the hold to divide the school evacuees from the family evacuees. In the cabin space in the cargo hold, we told the boys to sleep on the lower level and girls on the upper level of the bunks. The bunks only had a very small space between them, and the kids hit their heads on the boards above them when they sat up. That night the children were served their favorite meal - curry rice. In the cabin area, they sang or lay down on the beds. Some of them went up on to the deck. The children were enjoying their first night on the ship. 　 Before we went to bed, the captain, or maybe it was a soldier, told us that the ship was heading for Nagasaki as fast as it could. It seems that they changed the route to Nagasaki because of the danger involved on the planned course to Kagoshima. However we were attacked near Akuseki island, so they may have changed course again. 　 The next day, 22 August 1943, we had an evacuation training exercise after breakfast. During the training, the girls evacuated using the stairs, but the boys had to climb down rope ladders. Afterwards, we were told to stay up on the deck, especially that night. The senior pupils were all on the upper deck. A typhoon that was approaching brought rain that night, so the pupils on deck hid under covers stretched over the cargo to shelter from the rain. This meant that we were unable to check the number and locations of pupils on the deck. That night, I was in the medical room with four or five pupils looking after one of their classmates who was struggling with appendicitis. 　 In the medical room, I was sitting on a chair beside the bed when I was knocked over and fell to the floor. I realized that I had sand all over my body from a fire extinguisher bag that had also fallen on the floor and burst. I knew immediately that the ship had been hit. The lights had gone out, but I woke up the pupils who were still asleep and I told them to go up on deck and prepare to leave the ship. Then I put the sick pupil over my shoulder and carried him up to the deck where I put him in a lifeboat that was about to be launched. From there I went back to the cabin where my pupils were. It was already half full of water and I could hear the groaning noise coming from the shuddering of the sinking ship. I was still on the ship when it went under. Once I was in the water, I struggled desperately to get to the surface, and fortunately, someone spotted me and pulled me up. I grabbed hold of the edge of a raft until someone pulled me up onto it. It was about two meters square, and was made from some thick pieces of bamboo bound together with steel wire. The raft was bouncing up and down on the ocean, so I had to grab those wires to stay on the raft. In an attempt to encourage each other we called out our family or friends’ names until our voices went hoarse, and said, “It will be fine, we'll be rescued. We just need to wait for the sunrise.” I saw a teacher singing a song on another raft - one of the black silhouettes drifting on the dark ocean. 　 I felt sick and fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning the other rafts had all vanished, leaving nothing floating on the ocean around us. There were now seven or eight people left on our raft, though there had been 15 or 16 on it before I fell asleep. 　 After a while, we saw an airplane twice up in the sky. The first time it went by without responding in any way to the boy who was waving his shirt up to them. The second time, it dropped something blue down into the sea. This made us think that we would be rescued soon, but there was no sign of any ships even after the sun went down. We were utterly disappointed and overtaken by a mood of hopelessness. I was so exhausted that I started to hallucinate. I imagined that I saw the faces of my mother and my grandmother up in the air. 　 The next day, we were rescued by a small fishing boat and were taken to Yamakawa port in Kagoshima. There were many people waiting for us on the pier. I stayed in the hospital to help take care of the pupils who had survived the sinking of the Tsushima Maru. Then I met my mother who had been evacuated from Okinawa before me. After that I moved to Miyazaki Prefecture with the pupils, and came back to Okinawa after the war. 　 While the sinking of the Tsushima Maru was kept secret by the military, and was not announced until the end of the war, people in Okinawa heard rumors and came to ask my father or my relatives on the island what they knew. This was still before the October 10 1944 first major air-raid on Okinawa, so those people had no idea how such attacks might happen at sea, and they seemed puzzled as to why a teacher had survived but the pupils’ lives could not be saved. 　 My father later told me that the families of victims came to understand what had happened in the attack on the Tsushima Maru. They came to understand the ghastliness of the war at sea by experiencing the horrible nature of the battle on the island that unfolded after the tragedy of the Tsushima Maru.

Mitsuko Itokazu: There is a belief in Okinawa that the soul of dead will join the gods on the 33rd year from its death. Ms. Itokazu mentioned this belief and told me that on the 33rd anniversary of the tragedy she decided to talk about her experience on the Tsushima Maru. At the interview she said, “I was on the ship when it was sinking, and was fortunate enough to survive when many other people onboard lost their lives. I see it as my mission to tell the truth about the Tsushima Maru. 　 ” I was impressed that her recollection of the tragic events was so clear. Because of its clarity and the fact that it was described one of the adult survivors of the tragedy this is one of the most important records of the Tsushima Maru tragedy.