In speeches at a memorial ceremony yesterday, Japanese representatives focused on the growing military alliance with the United States. In events planned to lead up to Aug, 15, the 60th anniversary of Japan's surrender, Japan is expected to focus largely on events in which its civilians were victims: the Tokyo firebomb raid, the battle for Okinawa and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Iwo Jima is revered in the United States, the battle is largely ignored in Japan. But Japanese politicians these days, and the Foreign Ministry, don't.' That's a massacre, isn't it? We have to say this. 'One hundred thousand people died in one night. 'That firebombing is unforgivable,' Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo and an ardent nationalist, said Thursday at a news conference there. On March 10, three weeks after the battle started here, B-29 Superfortress bombers hit Tokyo with a huge firebomb raid that killed about 100,000 people, almost all civilians. bombing raids on Japan's main islands.įrom this island, aircraft spotters could warn Tokyo of approaching bombers, and fighter planes from Iwo Jima could try to intercept bombers.

The Japanese fought tenaciously because this teardrop-shaped island 700 miles south of Tokyo was crucial for U.S. The tunnel network was so impenetrable that the last two Japanese soldiers did not surrender until November 1949, more than four years after the war ended. soldiers killed in two years in Iraq.Ībout 22,000 Japanese defenders were killed, including 1,600 after the island was declared 'secure' by military authorities at the end of March 1945. In the 35-day fight for this 8-square-mile volcanic island, 6,821 Marines were killed, more than four times the number of U.S.

Iwo jima today tunnels