Himeyuri Monument and Himeyuri Peace Museum

On the night of 23 March 1945, 222 students and 18 teachers from the Okinawa Normal School's women's division and the Okinawa First Prefectural Girls' High School left their school in Asato and walked to the Okinawa Army Hospital at Haebaru. The two schools went by the nickname Himeyuri, and after the war the girls became known as the Himeyuri Student Corps. The hospital was a hillside of nearly 40 dug caves. The students nursed wounded soldiers there, and fetching food and water or burying the dead meant going outside under fire. No law allowed the girls to be sent to the front.

In late May the hospital retreated south to Ihara and split up among six caves. On the night of 18 June the students were told the corps was dissolved and sent out into the American encirclement. Of the 240 mobilized, 136 died, and 117 of those deaths came after that order. The monument stands over the Ihara Third Surgery Cave, where about 100 nurses, soldiers, students and civilians were sheltering when an American attack early on 19 June killed more than 80 of them. The names on the monument number 227, because 91 other students and teachers of the two schools also died in the battle.

Survivors broke a long silence to found the museum on 23 June 1989. Its rooms move from school life before the war to the army hospital, and then to testimony films recorded when the survivors were in their sixties and seventies. A memorial room holds the photographs of the 227 dead and a full-size model of the Ihara Third Surgery Cave. Most people spend 30 minutes to an hour, and some stay two or three.