What to learn and inherit from the Battle of Okinawa : Suggestions from the narratives of the postwar generation working to inherit its memories

Okinawa, which remembers the harsh ground warfare involving noncombatants in 1945 and still hosts vast US military bases, has been positioned as an important place for postwar peace education in Japan. However, as the time approaches when we will not be able to listen to any war survivors, we must reexamine how memories of the Battle of Okinawa have been accepted and how to preserve those memories in the future in the context of peace education. Therefore, in this paper, I attempt to respond to the questions raised above while considering the problem of conventional peace education and its future, based on interviews with people of the postwar generation who are taking action to inherit the memories of the Battle of Okinawa