Former Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters

In 1944 the Imperial Navy dug a command post into a hill in what is now Tomigusuku, using picks and hoes: about four hundred and fifty metres of tunnel at a depth of fifteen metres, with a staff room, a code room, a medical room and sleeping quarters. Around four thousand men were inside it at the end.

On 13 June 1945 the commander, Rear Admiral Ota Minoru, sent a final message to Tokyo asking that the people of Okinawa be given special consideration for what they had endured — it is one of the most quoted documents of the battle — and then he and his staff killed themselves in the tunnels. The scarring from the hand grenades is still on the walls of the staff room. About three hundred metres of the tunnel is open. It is a difficult forty minutes and it is one of the few places on the island where the battle is physically present.