Himeyuri Peace Museum

This guide to the Himeyuri Peace Museum near Itoman follows the Himeyuri, or Lily Corps: over two hundred teenage students and teachers pulled from two Naha girls' schools in early 1945 and turned into battlefield nurses, sawing off limbs without anesthesia as the Battle of Okinawa closed in around their cave hospitals. It traces them to June eighteenth, when commanders issued a dissolution order sending the students out into a battlefield with no safe lines left to cross. Survivors themselves, decades later, built the museum you're standing in to keep the story alive.