Cape Kyan

This guide to Cape Kyan in Okinawa opens at dawn on June twentieth, 1945, as a scattered remnant of Japan's Thirty-Second Army digs into the cane fields behind this cliff after three weeks of retreat from the Shuri hills. General Mitsuru Ushijima's forces, along with tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians swept along with them, find the coastline ahead is a wall of rock dropping straight into the sea. The guide follows that final stand at the island's southern dead end, and what the cliff came to mean to the people who survived it.