By Nazario Rodriquez Jr
Horizon news Staff

TWO weeks ago, we were invited to witness the dive-digging operations undertaken by the Joint Prisoners of War and Missing and Action Accounting Command (JPAC). The operation is to recover the remains of eight US Air Force crew men after their B-24-J Liberator plane crashed in Aimeliik waters after it had been hit by the Japanese on Sept. 1, 1944.
In contrast last week, the Belau National Museum informed us of book donations from Japanese tourists about World War II.
The books and other items were actually about Palau during the South Seas Government, which was administered by the Japanese Imperial Army that established its capital in Koror. The South Seas Government included its territories from Saipan, to Palau, Yap, Chuuk to as far as Pohnpei.
The donated books and other items were owned by a Japanese civilian employee under the South Seas Government, who saved them on the way home from Palau to Japan when the war broke out.
Three of his siblings revisited Palau to donate those valuable collections.
We had the chance to meet the siblings, who said that they were in Koror from 1941-1943. They are Shinichi Ogawa (who was born in 1935 and was five years old when he came to Palau), elder sister Ine Mayeda (1932) and Mieko Isayama (1938).
Both Ogawa and Mayeda and another elder sister, who just passed away recently, studied in the Japanese exclusive school during that time.
They recalled that Koror was a very peaceful place to live in at that time.
In fact, the books that they have brought were pictures of big houses in Koror, of Japanese Army officers with their wives and children, photographs of Palauan residents and pre-war activities like.
Through Japanese researcher and interpreter Maki Mita, Ogawa started to explain that their visit was to meet two locals, who became their childhood playmates in those times. These were Tiakl and Hatsue, who were the only Palauan native children that they knew during their stay.
This was because Tiakl and Hatsue were permitted to stay in the administrative house, located at the Koror Elementary School, as part of a training for them after school and were paid a little money and learn to speak the Japanese language.
These were vivid memories of their three-year stay in Palau.
Last year, Ogawa and his sisters came here for the first time since the war broke out in 1944 to look for Tiakl and Hatsue and donate memorabilia to the BNM of what they call as compensation for the war and as part for their government’s effort or program for the Pacific people.
Before planing in this time, they bought presents for Tiakl and Hatsue, who eventually married a long time ago later like kimono for Hatsue and a watch for Tiakl and other items for the children.
Upon arrival, they just learned that Hatsue already passed away recently.
Mayeda, who is now living with his Japanese husband in Sacramento, California for the past 48 years, said Koror at that time was very quite and very beautiful, very progressive and very safe.
When the war broke out, the Ogawas boarded the one of nine ships that carried civilian employees back to Japan. Three of the nine ships were able to survive while the others capsized after being attacked by US warplanes and ships on their way home.
The Ogawas boarded the Saipan Maru. The other two ships that made it to Okinawa were the Palau Maru and the Yamashiro Maru.
One of the items that their father was able to bring home to Japan was a school report card at the Palau Daiichi Kokumin Gakko, the Japanese exclusive school they attended too.
Their father decided to bring the report card as an evidence, said Ogawa, who is now a retired school principal after 72 years in the service in Fukuoka, their hometown.
During their journey back home, their father also brought a talking bird (cuckoo-too), which Ogawa said lived for 23 years.
Ogawa, Mayeda and Isayama just left Palau on Friday night and promised that when there’s a chance, they will visit Koror again.
When I see World War II remains in Peleliu, Angaur, Ngardmau and in Meyuns, I always thought of the similar sites that left by Japan in my hometown in the Northern tip of the Philippines. It reminds me of the tragic history that our place went through. The Japanese established garrisons in every town in our province, which was a very progressive place during the war as can be seen by historical photographs. But like in Palau in World War II, the towns in our province were razed to the ground by invading American forces. I remember US military officers went digging for their fallen comrade one day in the 1970s. The man that pointed the location of the grave was my grandfather. These and many other stories about WWII, as Robert B. Asprey said in ‘War in the Shadows: The guerilla in history" puts it "No war in history solved so much and yet so little as World War II. No war so suddenly defeated ambitions of either victors or vanquished. No war opened such a Pandora’s box, not to release winds but, rather, hurricanes of political, social and economic change, which hurled existing structures into turmoil, confusion, and battle – what Cyrill Falls, a longtime student of war, has aptly called sequelae – morbid condition following upon disease."