What Japan's Best General Wrote His Wife About Fighting Americans

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]In December 1944, a Japanese general sat in a sweltering cave on a volcanic island writing a letter to his 10-year-old daughter. Outside, American bombers circled overhead. His garrison was digging 18 kilometers of tunnels through sulfur choked rock. Everyone on the island knew they were going to die, but the general wasn't writing about courage or glory or dying for the emperor. He was writing about homework.

[00:00:29]Build up your strength, study hard, and do exactly what your mother tells you to do," he wrote. "That will really put my mind at ease." He signed it. Daddy at the front. This general's name was Tatamichi Kuribayashi. He was about to turn a barren sulfur island into the most lethal killing ground American Marines had ever faced. But here is what makes his story unlike any other Japanese commander of the Second World War. Kuribi Bayashi had lived in America. He had studied at Harvard. He had driven a Chevrolet across the country and toured the automobile factories of Detroit. He had watched American industrial power with his own eyes. And he had spent years warning Tokyo that Japan could never win a war against the United States. Nobody listened. So when they sent him to die on Ewima, he wrote 41 letters to his wife Yoshi. letters filled not with bravado, but with kitchen repair diagrams, apologies for dying, and instructions for raising children he would never see grow up. Those letters survived. They were published decades later. They inspired Clint Eastwood to make a film. And they revealed the mind of a man who understood his enemy better than almost any Japanese officer alive and used that knowledge to kill more Americans than any Pacific island battle in history. This is the story of General Kurabayashi's letters from Ewoima.

[00:02:01]Damichi Kuribayashi was born on July 7th, 1891 in Nagono Prefecture into an old samurai family whose service stretched back to the 15th century. The family had fallen on hard times by the time he was born, failed business ventures, devastating fires in 1868 and 1881, the samurai lineage intact, but the wealth gone. His father worked in lumber and civil engineering. His mother maintained what was left of the family farm. Young Kuribayashi excelled at school, particularly in English.

[00:02:36]Classmates remembered him as a literary enthusiast who once organized a strike against school authorities and barely escaped expulsion.

[00:02:46]He was gifted in poetry, composition, and public speaking. And here is the detail that changes everything about his story. His first ambition was not to become a soldier at all. He wanted to be a foreign correspondent. He passed examinations for both a prestigious college in Shanghai and the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. His teachers urged the military path. He chose the sword over the pen. But that literary instinct, that observer's eye, would follow him all the way to his final letters from a sulfur island. He graduated from the Army Academy in 1914, specializing in cavalry. In 1923, he finished second in his class at the Army War College and received a military saber from Emperor Taiisho himself. That same year on December 8th, he married a woman named Yoshi, the daughter of a landlord from Nagano. They would have three children, a son named Taro, born in 1924, a daughter named Yoko, and a youngest daughter named Takacoako, whom Kuribi Bayoshi would call Tako Chan in letter after letter until the very end.

[00:04:01]Standing 5'9 in tall, unusually tall for a Japanese man of his era, and described as husky with a mild demeanor, Kuribayashi didn't look like a warrior.

[00:04:13]One biographer noted he had the correct comprehension of reality and refused to be aed by precedent. That comprehension of reality was about to be sharpened by an assignment that would change his life. In March 1928, Captain Kuribi Bayashi departed Japan for the United States. Most Japanese officers of his generation chose postings in Germany or France. Kuri Bayashi chose America. And he didn't just visit. He immersed himself completely.

[00:04:46]Over approximately 2 years, he traveled the country with an intensity that bordered on intelligence gathering disguised as tourism. He studied at Harvard University taking courses in English, American history, and politics.

[00:05:01]He trained with American cavalry units at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Riley, Kansas, where he befriended Brigadier General George Van Horn Mosley. He lived with an ordinary American family in Buffalo, New York. American officers taught him to drive. He bought a Chevrolet and motored across the vast country that would one day send its sons to kill him. Throughout this period, he wrote illustrated letters home to his young son, Tero. Charming drawings of himself sprawled on Harvard's lawns, watching a clock tower, walking through Buffalo, playing with American children, a four-year-old American girl named Paty, who frequented his apartment, neighborhood children riding tricycles, himself studying hard late at night.

[00:05:49]Years later, Terrell recalled, "He always composed easy letters in order to let me read them without any help from others. He used to enclose some sketches.

[00:06:00]But one visit shaped everything that followed." Kuri Bayashi toured Detroit's automobile plants. He watched the assembly lines. He studied the connections between civilian industry and military production.

[00:06:14]And decades later he would recall the experience with chilling precision.

[00:06:19]I saw the plant area of Detroit. He said by one button push all the industries will be mobilized for military business.

[00:06:27]He understood something most Japanese military leaders refused to accept.

[00:06:32]America wasn't just a nation with a large army. It was an industrial machine that could manufacture war on a scale Japan could never match. After America, Kurabayoshi became Japan's first military attached to Canada, spending two more years in the English-speaking world. When he returned to Tokyo, he carried a warning he would repeat for the rest of his life, growing more urgent as war fever gripped the capital.

[00:07:00]The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight, he said.

[00:07:05]Its industrial potential is huge and fabulous, and the people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the American fighting ability. Nobody listened.

[00:07:18]Now consider the terrible irony of what happened next. The military planners in Tokyo ignored every warning Kuribashi gave. They launched a war against the nation he had spent years studying. And when that war turned against Japan, when island after island fell to American forces advancing toward the homeland, they looked around for someone to command the most hopeless defense of the entire Pacific War. They chose the man who had told them this would happen.

[00:07:50]On May 27th, 1944, Kuri Bayashi was named commander of the 109th Division.

[00:07:57]12 days later, he received orders signed by Prime Minister Hake Tojo himself to defend Ewima. Emperor Hirohito granted him the rare honor of a private audience before his departure. Tojo reportedly told him, "Only you among all the generals are qualified and capable of holding this post." Some historians suggest a darker possibility.

[00:08:21]Kuribayashi's outspoken warnings that Japan's war against America was unwinable had made him politically inconvenient.

[00:08:30]Sending him to Ewima was at least in part a way to silence a voice that embarrassed the men who had ignored it.

[00:08:38]Ewima in the summer of 1944 was an 8 square mile volcanic island of black sand and sulurous rock approximately 650 mi south of Tokyo. It had no civilian population. It produced no food, no usable water, and almost no natural resources. Its strategic value was purely aeronautical. American B29 Superfortress bombers flying from the Maranas on their way to Japan had to fly within range of Eoima's fighter aircraft. The island's airfields also allow Japanese fighters to intercept the bombers and report their routes in advance. In American hands, Ioima would serve as an emergency landing field for B-29s in distress and would provide a base for long range fighter escorts.

[00:09:33]Its capture would tighten the noose around Japan. For Japan, its loss would mean the outer defenses of the homeland had been breached. When Kurabayashi arrived, he found an island already under regular American air and naval bombardment. His garrison eventually totaled approximately 21,000 men, roughly 14,000 army and 7,000 navy, including some of the most experienced combat units remaining to Japan. His official title, Commander 109th Division, understated his actual authority. By the time the battle began, Kuribayashi commanded all Japanese forces on the island. He immediately understood two things that his predecessors on other islands had never grasped. The first was that the beaches could not be held. Every Japanese island defense before Ewima had positioned its main strength near the beach, concentrating firepower to destroy the invader at the waterline.

[00:10:35]Kurabayashi had studied what happened at Terawa, Saipon, and Pelleo. He knew that American naval gunfire and carrier air attacks had obliterated every beach defense before the Marines landed. The fire was so heavy and so sustained that no garrison positioned near the beach could survive it. The Marines would come ashore regardless of what waited at the waterline. The only question was what waited inland.

[00:11:05]The second thing Kuribi Bayi understood was that the garrison was going to die.

[00:11:11]There would be no reinforcement, no resupply, no rescue. The Imperial Japanese Navy had been effectively destroyed at Le Gulf in October 1944.

[00:11:24]The Japanese Air Force could no longer contest American air superiority over the Pacific approaches.

[00:11:31]Ewima was going to be isolated from the moment the American fleet appeared. The garrison's mission was not to survive.

[00:11:40]It was to make the conquest of Ewima cost the Americans so dearly that the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands would seem prohibitive.

[00:11:50]Kuribashi designed his defense around these two realities. He prohibited the bonsai charge. This was one of the most radical orders any Japanese commander of the Pacific War had issued. The bonsai charge, the mass assault at close quarters, intended to overwhelm the enemy through shock and self-sacrifice, had been the defining tactical expression of Japanese military culture since the Russo Japanese War.

[00:12:18]It was an assertion of spiritual force over material weakness, a declaration that a Japanese warrior's willingness to die was worth more than an enemy's firepower advantage. Kurabayashi saw it as a waste. Every bonsai charge in the Pacific War had produced the same result. Japanese soldiers died in large numbers. American casualties were modest and the position fell shortly afterward.

[00:12:43]Anyway, the tactic destroyed the garrison faster than attrition would have done, produced no lasting effect on American combat power and eliminated the trained soldiers whose value lay in their ability to hold prepared positions and exact a continuing price in American blood. He ordered his officers and men to fight from prepared positions. Each soldier was ordered to kill at least 10 Americans before dying. not to die gloriously in a charge, but to stay alive, keep fighting, extract the maximum cost, and make every American advance forward a measured expenditure of American lives. To make this possible, he built a fortress underground. The construction effort at Eoima was one of the most extraordinary military engineering achievements of the entire Second World War.

[00:13:36]Working with inadequate tools in volcanic rock that exhaled sulfurous steam, Kurabayashi's garrison dug approximately 18 kilometers of tunnels connecting bunkers, artillery positions, ammunition storage areas, medical facilities, communication centers, and fighting positions. The tunnel network ran at multiple levels, allowing defenders to move between positions unseen, to reoccupy positions that had been cleared from above, and to survive the naval bombardment that Kuribayoshi knew would precede the assault.

[00:14:12]Some tunnels were large enough for vehicles, others were barely large enough to crawl through. At certain points, the temperature inside the tunnels reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit from geothermal activity. Men worked in these conditions because Kurabayashi ordered it and because they understood what he was building. He positioned artillery and mortars not on the beach, but on the high ground of Mount Surabbachi in the south and the Modyama Plateau in the north. positions that could fire on the beach from multiple angles simultaneously while being protected by the tunnel network. He laid fields of fire so that every point on the beach was covered by at least two separate positions. He built bunkers with multiple exits so that when Americans destroyed one entrance, the defenders could escape through another, reoccupy adjacent positions, and resume a firing from a different location. It was a defense designed to be impossible to destroy.

[00:15:17]And it was designed by a man who understood exactly what he was building it against. All of this was constructed during the months of American bombing that preceded the invasion. American planners requested 10 days of naval bombardment before the landing. They received three. The cost of that decision made on scheduling grounds that prioritized the campaign's overall timeline would be paid entirely by the Marines on the beaches. Throughout the construction, Kuribayoshi wrote to Yoshi. The letters that survived are unlike almost anything else written by a senior military commander in any language during any war. They do not describe strategy or tactics or the noble sacrifice of the garrison.

[00:16:05]They describe the leaking faucet in the kitchen at home. They contain careful diagrams of how to repair the water pipe under the sink drawn by a general with the precision of an engineer.

[00:16:19]They ask about the children's schoolwork. They worry about the price of vegetables in Tokyo. They describe the heat and the sulfurous smell and the rats and the loneliness with the same precision that Kuribayashi brought to fortification planning. One letter instructs Yoshi that if she finds the house too difficult to manage alone, she should sell the annex and use the money to support the children. Another contains instructions about where important documents are stored. Another apologizes repeatedly for the hardship his death will cause her. He never pretended he was coming home. He apologized for dying the way a man apologizes for an inconvenience he has caused but cannot prevent. In a letter about the tunnel construction, he wrote with what reads as dark humor from a man who had no illusions that the rock was very hard and the sulfur very unpleasant and the men were working extremely well.

[00:17:18]He did not write about glory. He wrote about work. Among the letters is the one to his daughter Taco Chan about homework. It is the most ordinary letter a father ever wrote. Build up your strength. Study hard. Do what your mother says. That will put my mind at ease. From a cave in a sulfur volcano where he was building a fortress to die in, he wrote about homework.

[00:17:44]The American assault on Ewima began on February 19th, 1945.

[00:17:50]The landing force consisted of the third, fourth, and fifth Marine divisions. Approximately 70,000 Marines supported by a fleet of over 800 ships.

[00:18:00]Naval gunfire and carrier aircraft had bombarded the island for weeks.

[00:18:05]Commanders expected the landing to take 10 days. The initial landing appeared almost too easy.

[00:18:13]The first waves hit the beach with modest resistance. Marines advanced up the black volcanic sand toward the first terrace. Then the firing began from every direction simultaneously. From bunkers the naval bombardment had not destroyed. From tunnel positions that had survived weeks of aerial attack.

[00:18:34]From artillery positions on Surabbachi to the south and the plateau to the north. The garrison opened fire.

[00:18:42]The beach became a killing ground of precisely the kind Kurabayashi had designed. Marines caught on the open sand with nowhere to go. Machine guns crossing fields of fire. Artillery zeroed on every point. Mortars firing from positions invisible from the beach.

[00:19:01]The battle that followed lasted 36 days and produced casualties that shocked even the most battleh hardened American commanders. American total casualties reached approximately 26,000 to 28,000.

[00:19:16]Roughly 6,800 were killed, including 5,931 Marines and 881 Navy personnel. Over 19,000 were wounded. Infantry casualty rates in the fourth and fifth marine divisions reached 75%.

[00:19:34]More Marines died on Eoima than in all of the First World War. The battle produced 27 Medal of Honor recipients, the most for any single engagement in American military history.

[00:19:47]14 of the 27 were awarded postumously.

[00:19:51]The famous photograph of the flag raising on Mount Surabachi taken on February 23rd, 5 days into the battle, was published on the front page of newspapers across America.

[00:20:04]General Holland Smith called it the most significant shot of the entire Pacific War, but Kuribayashi had planned for Suribachi to fall. It was the outlying defense. The real killing ground was the plateau to the north where his main tunnel network waited. The Marines who celebrated the flag raising had barely begun the battle. Japanese casualties were near total. Of the approximately 21,000man garrison, roughly 20,000 were killed.

[00:20:37]Only 216 were captured during the battle itself. Most knocked unconscious or too wounded to resist. Two holdouts survived in the tunnels until January 6th, 1949, nearly 4 years after the war ended.

[00:20:54]Ewima was the only major Pacific battle where total American casualties exceeded total Japanese casualties. In the final days, Kurbayashi sent his last cable to Imperial General Headquarters. He wrote a death poem. Tokyo censored it. He had written the word Kanashiki. So sad. They changed it to suggest bitterness and defiance. But Kurabayashi was not ashamed. He was grieving. There is a difference.

[00:21:24]On the night of March 25th to 26th, approximately 200 to 300 Japanese survivors launched a final attack.

[00:21:32]Marine Corps history acknowledged it was not a bansside charge, but an excellent plan aiming to cause maximum confusion and destruction. The attackers silently slashed tents, bayonetted sleeping Marines and Army Air Force's personnel, and lobbed grenades in a three-pronged assault. 53 Americans were killed and more than 120 wounded before the attack was stopped in hand-to-hand combat.

[00:22:00]Kuribayashi is believed to have died during or just before this final assault. He had removed all insignia to fight as a common soldier. He had previously ordered two soldiers to follow him with shovels to bury his body immediately upon death. He considered it shameful for his remains to be found by the enemy. His body was never recovered.

[00:22:24]General Holland Smith spent an entire day searching for it, intending to give Kurabayoshi a military burial with full honors. He failed. Of all our adversaries in the Pacific, Smith said afterward, "Kuribbeayoshi was the most redoubtable." What happened to the family he left behind? Yoshi was 40 years old when her husband died. She had been raised as a lady and had never worked. In the devastated post-war years, she raised three children alone.

[00:22:56]At one point, she was selling cuttlefish on the street to survive.

[00:23:01]Despite this, she sent both her son and her daughter to university. Dr. Tako later said, "My mother had been brought up as a lady, and even after getting married, she had been taken care of by my father. She had never worked in her life before, but she still managed to raise us during the terrible years after the war. In 1970, Yoshi represented Japanese families of war dead at a lunchon in Tokyo with American veterans.

[00:23:31]She thanked them for their friendship and received a standing ovation. She attended reunion of honor ceremonies on Ewima in 1985 and 1995. Her grandson remembered her as elegant and never angry and he noted never genuinely laughing either. Yoshi died in 2003 at the age of 99. She had outlived her husband by 58 years. Suntaro became an architect and spent years interviewing garrison survivors to reconstruct his father's final days. He died in 2005.

[00:24:09]Daughter Takaco briefly worked as a film starlet before becoming head of a kindergarten. When a biographer told her that her father had been thinking about her right up to the end, she replied simply, "Yes, he was, and thanks to him, I have had a happy life." She died in 2004.

[00:24:30]Her son, Yoshi Takashindo, became a prominent member of Japan's House of Representatives, serving nine terms.

[00:24:37]When Clint Eastwood visited his office during pre-production research, Shindo shared what kind of man his grandfather was. The family's preservation of Kuribayashi's 41 letters produced Kumiko Kakahashi's prize-winning book, So Sad to Fall in Battle, and inspired Eastwood's 2006 film Letters from Iwojima, starring Ken Watanab as Kuribayashi. Shot almost entirely in Japanese on a budget of $19 million, the film earned four Academy Award nominations and was named best film of 2006 by the National Board of Review.

[00:25:13]Today, Ioima, officially renamed Ioto in 2007, hosts annual reunion of honor ceremonies where American and Japanese veterans and their descendants meet in peace. The 80th anniversary ceremony in March 2025 was historic. The first time a Japanese prime minister, Ishiba Shageru, visited the island and participated. Only six surviving American veterans of the battle attended. Of approximately 21,000 Japanese soldiers killed, roughly 10 to 12,000 remains have never been recovered. Recovery continues to this day. Yoshiharu Konai whose father died on Iwojima has been collecting remains for over 20 years at the age of 80.

[00:26:01]Kuribayashi's spirit is enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

[00:26:07]His former grave at Mku Ji Temple in Matsushiro Nagano contains no remains.

[00:26:14]Kurabayashi's tragedy is inseparable from his insight. He understood American power with a clarity that tortured him.

[00:26:23]He had driven through it in a Chevrolet, studied it at Harvard, watched it assemble automobiles in Detroit. When war came, he fought the nation he had warned against fighting, using knowledge gained from the very people he was now killing. His letters revealed not a fanatic, but a deeply rational man performing an irrational duty with terrifying competence. Tokyo censored his death palm and changed its meaning.

[00:26:50]But the original word kanosiki tells you everything. Not bitterness, not defiance, just a quiet, devastating sadness. He turned a sulfur choked volcanic island into a fortress that held for 36 days against the most powerful military machine in human history. And his last private words were not about glory. They were about kitchen drafts. and asking his wife to live long enough to raise their children. If this investigation gave you something to think about, hit the like button.

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