[The Battle of Okinawa Is Trampled on: Urgent Interview] (9) Akira Kubota (80), Chairman of the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum Friendship Association, Won't Send His Students to the Battlefield: the Origin of Postwar Peace Education

I was born three months before the US military landed. Both my father and mother were elementary school teachers, but my father was taken by the defense force. My mother fled the battlefield with me on her chest and my two-and-a-half-year-old brother on her back. We hid in a large grave, but when the US military approached, we were chased out by the Japanese military. We ran away from the US military's naval gunfire, and when my mother noticed, …