Umikaji Terrace Senagajima

This guide to Umikaji Terrace on Senaga Island near Okinawa starts with a discrepancy: prewar surveys measured this hill eleven meters higher than it stands today. It traces what United States Navy crews did to the island after taking it for an ammunition depot in nineteen forty five, the forty households evacuated, and the decades the site spent as a sealed, blacked-out magazine through the Cold War before local opposition forced its return. A nineteen seventy aerial photo shows the whole island painted black for camouflage.