Iwo Jima

• 1. Introduction

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  Iwo Jima, an island with no official residents, is getting bigger. At the beginning of November 2023, a run of continuous eruptions pushed a brand-new islet above the waves nearby. It kept growing. Japanese speakers call it Niijima, which simply means new island. It is now large enough to be seen from space.

  The ground beneath this speck of land in the Pacific is anything but still. Yet most of the world knows the place for something that happened on its slopes in the winter of 1945, and for a photograph taken there.

  So what is the island actually made of, and why does its name cause so much argument? Who lived here before the war, and what happened to them? How did a flat, sulfurous island become the site of one of the Pacific War's hardest fights? And who, if anyone, is allowed to come back today?

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• 2. A Name Misread

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  The spelling Iwo Jima began as a mistake that stuck. When the Spanish explorer Bernardo de la Torre passed the area in 1543, he did not give the single island a name of its own. Later writers sometimes credit him with calling it Sulphur Island, but the lost records of his voyage suggest he only labelled the whole group. He called them Balcones, probably because an eruption was under way as his ship sailed through.

  The English name came later. In 1779, the British officer John Gore knew of the earlier Spanish accounts and recorded the island as Sulphur Island.

  Japanese speakers had already arrived at the same idea in their own language. The island became Iwōtō, written with characters meaning Sulfur Island. The final character, which means island, is normally read as shima. When another word comes before it, shima shifts to jima. A garbled version of the name, Iwo Shima, grew out of that shift, and it fed the English forms Iwojima and Iwo Jima.

  The error was reinforced during the Second World War. Japanese naval officers who came to fortify the island ahead of the American invasion used the mistaken form themselves.

  In ordinary modern Japanese the sound w has dropped away, leaving Iōtō. That spelling was formally adopted after Japan's orthography reform of 1946. Former residents had long objected to the old reading, and the Clint Eastwood films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima revived their complaints. After formal debate, the Geographical Survey Institute announced on the 18th of June 2007 that the official pronunciation would return to Iōtō.

  There is one more wrinkle. The same characters, read as Iōjima, name a different island in Kagoshima.

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• 3. Restless Ground

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  Iwo Jima looks strangely plain for a volcanic island. Mount Suribachi rises at the southern tip, named after a Japanese grinding bowl, and it is the only obvious volcanic feature. The rest is flat. That is because the island is merely the raised centre of a larger caldera that lies drowned beneath the sea.

  The visible island sits on a plateau about 15 metres below the surface, probably shaped by waves. That plateau is the top of an underwater mountain between 1.5 and 2 kilometres tall and 40 kilometres wide at its base. Two neighbours complete the Volcano Islands group. North Iwo Jima lies 80 kilometres away, and South Iwo Jima lies 59 kilometres away.

  The dated eruptions begin around 760 BC, give or take 20 years. A large blast with pyroclastic flows and lava destroyed a forested island that had stood here before. Then come the witnessed events. On the 28th of March 1957, a phreatic eruption struck without warning 2 kilometres northeast of Suribachi. It lasted 65 minutes. Fifty minutes after it ended, a second crater, 30 metres wide and 15 metres deep, opened by collapse.

  In September 2001, a submarine eruption from three vents built a pyroclastic cone 10 metres across. In November 2015, volcanologists placed Iwo Jima first on a list of ten dangerous volcanoes. They said there was a one in three chance of a large eruption from one of those ten this century.

  The ground itself is rising. Gore's surveyors recorded a beach at sea level in 1779. By 2015 it stood 40 metres up. The beach where American troops landed in 1945 was 17 metres above the water by that same year. The uplift runs between 100 and 800 millimetres a year, averaging 200.

  The island's area tells the same story. It measured 19.3 square kilometres in 1911 and 20.3 in 1945. By 2014 it was 23.73, and by 2023 it had reached 29.86.

  Then, on the 11th of July 2022, came the first magmatic eruption in over 1000 years, just offshore. Officials who visited found eruptions every five minutes, throwing up water columns tens of metres high. Rocks washed ashore were still as hot as 120 degrees inside.

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• 4. Sulfur Island Before the War

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  Bernardo de la Torre sailed the carrack San Juan de Letrán past these islands between the 25th of September and the 2nd of October 1543. He was trying, and failing, to cross the Pacific east to New Spain. He was also hoping to reinforce Ruy López de Villalobos, whose expedition faced stiffer Filipino resistance than expected. Low on water, he turned back south toward the Moluccas.

  Spanish ships kept passing for the next century without settling or claiming the islands. Even so, the treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza placed the Volcano Islands inside the Spanish sphere of influence. The Japanese learned of the island in the late 16th century.

  Gore's visit in 1779 was later misread as a fresh discovery. The December 1786 supplement to The New London Magazine reported that his crew had found a barren hill, apparently a crater, with a strong smell of sulfur.

  By the time of a census in June 1943, the island held 1,018 civilians, 533 men and 485 women, in 192 households across six settlements. Daily life was small and spare. There was a primary school, a Shinto shrine and a single police officer. A mail ship came from Haha-jima once a month, and a Nippon Yusen ship called every two months.

  The economy rested on sulfur mining, sugarcane and fishing, and every grain of rice had to be shipped in from the Home Islands. A Japanese Navy garrison already held the southern end of the island. Civilians were barred from it and dealt with the sailors mainly through trade.

  During 1944, Japan built up the island's defences in expectation of an American invasion. In July of that year, the civilians were forcibly evacuated to Honshu. None have settled permanently since.

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• 5. Thirty-Six Days

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  The American invasion code-named Operation Detachment began on the 19th of February 1945. Its aim was practical. Marines were to seize the island's airfields so that P-51 fighters could escort bombers all the way to Japan. Damaged heavy bombers returning from the Marianas, meaning Guam, Saipan and Tinian, would also gain a place to land. Until then, Japanese fighters had harried the American raids.

  The defenders were ready. Their positions included vast bunkers, hidden artillery and 18 kilometres of tunnels. About 21,000 Japanese soldiers held the island. The attack was the first on the Japanese Home Islands.

  One early objective was Mount Suribachi. On the 23rd of February, the fourth day of the battle, Joe Rosenthal photographed six Marines raising the American flag on its peak. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography that same year.

  Taking the mountain did not end the fight. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi still commanded the equivalent of eight infantry battalions, a tank regiment, two artillery battalions and three heavy mortar battalions. Another 5,000 gunners and naval infantry stood with them. Most Japanese soldiers fought to the death.

  On the night of the 25th of March, Kuribayashi led a final counterattack with about 300 men. The following morning the island was declared secured. According to the U.S. Navy, the 36-day assault cost more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers, over 19,000 were killed and only 1,083 were taken prisoner.

  For scale, the 82-day battle of Okinawa cost over 62,000 American casualties. The 40-day Battle of the Bulge cost almost 90,000. The U.S. Navy has since named three ships USS Iwo Jima. The first, hull number CV-46, began construction in early 1945 but was cancelled that August. The second served from 1961 to 1993, and the third was commissioned in 2001.

  The fighting did not stop with the declaration. About 3,000 Japanese soldiers remained alive in the caves and tunnels. Some hid by day and came out at night to search for food. Those who surrendered were often surprised to be offered water, cigarettes or coffee.

  Two men from Lieutenant Toshihiko Ohno's unit, Kōfuku Yamakage and Rikio Matsudo, held out the longest. They surrendered on the 6th of January 1949, three and a half years after the battle.

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• 6. Occupation and the Nuclear Question

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  On the 26th of June 1968, the United States handed Iwo Jima back to Japan. Until then, the American military had occupied the island, and the U.S. Navy had built and run a naval base there. The Bonin Islands returned to Japan in the same handover.

  An unresolved claim hangs over those years. Between 1956 and 1959, American forces are said to have stored at least one nuclear weapon on Iwo Jima. Some nuclear components reportedly stayed on the island until 1966.

  The claim comes from authors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who worked through heavily redacted declassified documents. They are Norris, Arkin and Burr. Their conclusion was that nuclear weapons were present on Chichi Jima and on Iwo Jima. They also argued that bombs kept on the Japanese mainland lacked their plutonium or uranium cores. In their words, this maintained "the technicality that the United States had no nuclear weapons 'in Japan.'"

  Washington has never accepted the charge. On the 12th of December 1999, Under Secretary for Defense Policy Walter Slocombe told The New York Times, "Our position is that there have been no violations of our obligations under the security treaty and related arrangements."

  Iwo Jima was one of several islands said to have hosted such weapons while under American occupation.

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• 7. A Base Without Residents

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  Central Field, the airstrip at the heart of Iwo Jima, is 2,650 metres long and 60 metres wide. It carries the codes IWO and RJAW. Since the handback in 1968, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has run it as a naval air base. Its crews handle support, air traffic control, fuelling and rescue. Commercial airliners on transpacific routes between Northeast Asia and Saipan or Guam rarely use it for emergency landings.

  The base also serves the Bonin Islands. A detachment of JMSDF Air Wing 21 supports emergency medical flights from Chichijima and Hahajima to Honshu, and Iwo Jima is sometimes a relay point. The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force keeps about 400 troops on the island and handles explosive ordnance disposal. Two abandoned World War II airfields lie nearby. One is North Field. The other is an unfinished Japanese strip to the south.

  The U.S. Navy's Carrier Air Wing Five also uses the field for carrier landing practice. To justify that use, the Navy nominally retains a disused 1,639-acre communication facility under the Status of Forces Agreement. A U.S. Coast Guard LORAN-C transmitter was transferred to Japan in 1993 and demolished in 1994.

  On paper, the island sits 1200 kilometres south of Tokyo on Honshu, yet it falls under the Ogasawara Subprefecture of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Officially, nobody lives there. Soldiers register their addresses in Ayase in Kanagawa or Sayama in Saitama, for voting, tax and social security.

  Civilian access is limited to people visiting graves, those attending memorial services, base construction and cafeteria workers, and scientific officials. Because of the military installations, Iwo Jima is left out of both Ogasawara National Park and the World Heritage natural site covering the Bonin Islands.

  The land is still privately owned in part. As of 1991, six individuals held it, together with the Village of Ogasawara and the Government of Japan. At least eight others held leases on village land. The North Kanto Defense Bureau of the Ministry of Defense pays the rent.

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• 8. Reunion of Honor

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  The first large reunion on Iwo Jima took place in 1970, on the 25th anniversary of the battle. The Fifth Marine Division Association sponsored it, and both American and Japanese veterans came. Yoshitaka Shindō, grandson of General Kuribayashi, attended. So did the widows of Kuribayashi and of Colonel Takeichi Nishi, who joined American veterans at events in Tokyo.

  The 19th of February 1985, the 40th anniversary of the landing, brought veterans of both sides back to the sands. They met a few metres from where the Marines had come ashore. A granite plaque was unveiled that day. It says the two groups met again on those same sands, "this time in peace and friendship," and prays that their sacrifices "will always be remembered and never be repeated."

  The plaque is inscribed on both sides. The English faces the landing beaches, and the Japanese faces inland, toward the ground the defenders held.

  Joint ceremonies followed in front of the monument in March 1995, in 2000, in March 2005 and on the 21st of March 2015. The 2007 service drew extra attention because it coincided with the release of Letters from Iwo Jima. Shindō, by then a Japanese lawmaker, attended with Yasunori Nishi, son of Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi. The colonel was an Olympic gold medalist equestrian who died commanding a tank unit on the island. Active Marines have also visited on occasion for professional military education.

  The islanders evacuated in 1944 have their own claim on the place. Now in their 80s and older, they have asked repeatedly to return to what they call a special place tied to happy and sad memories. Volcanic activity has kept those requests from being granted, though former islanders and their families are sometimes allowed to visit ancestors' graves.

  They and their descendants are now interviewing other former residents and writing down memories. They are also assembling a digital archive of photographs, so that younger generations will know Iwo Jima was once a home.

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