Popular Spot for Japanese Visitors : Saipan: Peaceful Beaches and War Memories

As the tour bus wound its way up the steep dirt road, Kiyoshi Ono, 72, gazed out the window at the lovely sea below, where decades ago Japanese men, women and children willingly jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to U.S. troops.

Ono fought for Japan’s imperial army in Manchuria, another outpost of his country’s ill-fated World War II empire. But dozens of his schoolmates died on these now-peaceful beaches, and so, 44 years later, Ono, a gas-station owner in central Japan, had come to pay his respects.

“I wanted to commemorate the spirit of my friends,” he said, as the tour bus, loaded with videocamera-toting Japanese tourists, bumped along Saipan’s roads to yet another reminder of the time when Japan ran this island as a thriving sugar-cane plantation.

Sun-Blessed Island

Today, this sun-blessed island far out in the Pacific is American, part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. But there is still something very Japanese about the place.

Other countries have planted their flags here: Spain officially discovered it in 1521, Germany bought it in 1899, the United States took it in battle in 1944. But it is Japan’s rule, from 1914 to 1944, that lingers.

“ Nihongo wakaru? (Do you understand Japanese?)” asked Saipan’s affable governor, Pedro P. Tenorio, who drives a new Japanese car as his official vehicle. Tenorio learned Japanese in school when Saipan was under Tokyo’s imperial rule, and he can still easily converse in the language.

Japanese colonialism here was mild. Thus, there is little hostility here toward present-day Japanese. About 13,000 Japanese civilians lived here before the war, vastly overshadowing the native Micronesian population.

Prime Escape Spot

Today, Saipan is a prime escape spot for Japanese eager to shed their country’s drab weather and overpopulated concrete cities.

About three hours and 1,300 miles by direct flight from Tokyo, Saipan’s beaches are lined most of the year with Tokyo businessmen and their families rushing to soak up a little sun and clean air and crowding the tax-free stores to bring home suitcases of Lacoste shirts, Chanel perfume, Rolex watches and fine Scotch.

A special flight catering to Japan’s affluent, unattached singles takes off from Tokyo’s Narita Airport for Saipan every Friday night after work and returns them to Tokyo just in time for work Monday.

Roughly 176,000 tourists came to Saipan last year, and about 145,000 of them were Japanese. In deference to them, most stores have signs or menus in Japanese and English. They also carry an interesting mix of American, Spanish, native Chamorros and Japanese food.

Many people speak Japanese, though often a slightly formal and old-fashioned version of it left over from the colonial period.

4,000 Died in Campaign

For Americans, Saipan is a name that conjures up the Pacific campaign of World War II. About 4,000 Americans died to capture this island, which was vital to Japan’s Pacific strategy and which put American bombers within range of Japan for the first time.

But there are few big monuments here to American war dead. A major memorial has been authorized by Congress, but money has not been appropriated.

In general, Saipan still seems a distant Pacific locale for most Americans, Tenorio said. Few American tourists visit here. In 1984, local officials made a tour of the United States in an effort to lure more American investment, but little came of the effort.

Japanese businesses, though, have come to build hotels, golf courses and other tourist facilities. Recently, about two dozen textile factories from Taiwan and other rapidly industrializing Asian economies set up shop in Saipan too, coming here in part so that they can sew “Made in the USA” labels into their clothing before shipping it to the U.S. mainland for sale.

Vivid History

But for many Japanese, Saipan is still a vivid part of history, a reminder of their past imperial greatness and folly, and of the 50,000 soldiers and civilians who lived and perished here when the United States took the island after three weeks of bloody fighting in June and July of 1944.

Signs of the old Garapan plantation town constructed by Japan’s Pacific Development Co. can be found amid the jungle. A steam engine that used to haul sugar cane has been preserved.

There are ruins of an old Japanese prison, where one legend has it that pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart was imprisoned after she disappeared in 1937 while attempting her round-the-world flight near the Equator.

Remnants of Japan’s defeat have been carefully, almost lovingly, preserved, often by Japanese private donations. At Banzai Cliff, where hundreds of Japanese civilians--sometimes with infants in arms--jumped into the roiling sea after imperial army propagandists told them they would be massacred by the American troops, a sculpture of parent and child has been erected.

At the Last Command Post, where imperial army commanders led the final effort to hold Saipan and then committed suicide, a sign explains the island’s wartime history with detailed maps.

Suicide Cliff

At Suicide Cliff, where hundreds more civilians flung themselves to the rocks and certain death 800 feet below, a peace memorial now stands.

The only sign of a U.S. presence in these places is an American flag, stuck into the cliff high above.

Japanese tourists go to all these spots, filling bus after bus every day: salaried office workers, who faintly remember the war; young secretaries and college students, for whom it is nearly ancient history; old soldiers such as Kiyoshi Ono, who want to lay their memories to rest.

At Banzai Cliff, where the sea was once filled with so many bodies that U.S. soldiers in boats begging people not to jump could not get through, they clap their hands and bow their heads in moments of silent prayer for the dead.

In front of the Last Command Post, with its rusted artillery guns and tanks bearing freshly painted Japanese flags, they pose seriously for photographs, and they scramble up into the cave where Japanese commanders killed themselves.

“It is very emotional for me to look at these historical places,” Ono said. “For many years I wanted to come.” With that, he grew quiet, thinking about his and Japan’s past.