Okinawa, Day 6: Naval HQ and Shuri Castle

We managed to squeeze in two more sights before we caught a plane back to Seoul. The first, the former Japanese Naval Underground Headquarters, was a sobering reminder of the terrible costs of the Battle of Okinawa. in 1944, the Japanese Army Corps of Engineers (and also many other troops) Japanese dug a complex of tunnels and underground rooms by hand with pickaxes and hoes. When it became clear that the Japanese would be unable to win the war, Admiral Ota, the commanding officer, and nearly 4,000 soldiers committed suicide in those chambers. We could see shrapnel marks in the rock caused when dozens of soldiers killed themselves by huddling in one room and setting off a grenade. I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of it. It's perhaps most unsettling when you realize that most of the men who died were just teenagers, students who were conscripted into the war effort.

The entrance tunnel to the former Japanese Naval Underground HQ 

We also made a quick stop at Shuri Castle on our way to the airport. It’s mostly been reconstructed after having been destroyed during World War II, so we only stayed a short while.