Peace Memorial Park

This guide to Peace Memorial Park on Mabuni Hill in Okinawa opens with a question posed by the black granite walls curving around you: how do you carve two hundred forty-one thousand names into stone and still leave room for more. It traces the Battle of Okinawa that ended on this hill in June 1945, when organized Japanese resistance collapsed and civilians faced the cliffs beyond the walls after being warned that capture meant worse. Listed together without distinction are Japanese, American, Korean, Taiwanese and British names, a design unveiled in 1995 called Everlasting Waves of Peace.