Former Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters

Navy construction troops dug these tunnels by hand with picks and hoes in 1944. Concrete and timber braced the vaulted passages, which ran for about 450 m and were meant to ride out naval bombardment through a long siege. Some 4,000 men sheltered in them. About 10,000 Japanese navy personnel were on Okinawa when the battle began, and about 8,300 of them were on the Oroku Peninsula. There were no wells or kitchens inside, so men went out to the village well about 200 m away to fetch water, and many never came back.

Ota arrived on Okinawa on 20 January 1945 and died here on 13 June. A week before his death he sent a telegram to the Navy Vice Minister reporting how the people of Okinawa had fought, because he feared that their part would otherwise be forgotten. The text hangs at the entrance to the museum beside his photograph. Inside the tunnel, the walls of the staff officers' room still carry the marks of the grenades with which officers took their own lives.

The tunnels lay abandoned after the war. People from the village of Tomigusuku gathered the remains first, and later the Okinawa Kaiyukai of former navy men took over. Ota's remains and those of his staff were recovered only in 1952. In March 1970 about 300 m around the commander's room were restored and opened, and the remains collected here now lie with other war dead at the National Okinawa War Dead Cemetery in Mabuni. A memorial built in 1958 in the shape of a warship stands at the top of the park, and the plaza in front of it looks across to Shuri and the towns of the south.