SAIPAN — Dan King has spent decades doing what most historians won’t: sitting across from the enemy and asking them what happened.
The Texas-based author and historian visited Saipan this week as part of a broader Pacific tour that will take him to Guam, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He stopped by Good Morning Marianas to talk about his five-book series on World War II, all drawn from first-person interviews with Japanese veterans, and to share the story behind his latest work, “The Iron Graves of Saipan.”
“All I knew was our side,” King said, describing what first drove him toward Japanese perspectives on the war. “It’s like walking along the beach and finding a coin. Nobody just puts it in their pocket. They want to flip it over and see the other side.”
King has now interviewed 105 Japanese veterans, including Navy sailors, Army infantry, submarine crews, pilots and tank commanders. “The Iron Graves of Saipan” focuses on the 9th Tank Regiment, which fought on both Saipan and Guam. Of the men sent from Manchuria to defend the Marianas, King said only four percent survived the battle to return to Japan.
One of them was Mr. Shimoda, a tank crewman whose story anchors the book and whose postwar journey King called a full-circle story. Shimoda returned to Saipan in 1972 and discovered one of the regiment’s tanks sitting in a dump. He fought for years to have it removed and eventually succeeded in recovering two other tanks buried at the Tanapag Landfill in the mid-1970s. One is now at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the other at a temple near Mount Fuji where young tank crews once trained.
King first connected with Shimoda through an unlikely chain of events. While working as a technical consultant on the 2002 film “Windtalkers,” King insisted the production use historically accurate markings for the Japanese tanks depicted on screen. Months later, he received an email from a man in Osaka who said an elderly friend, a Saipan tank survivor named Shimoda, had seen the film in a theater, recognized the markings and shouted out loud. Shimoda then invited King to dinner.
“I thought that a veteran might see it,” King said. “I never would have dreamed that a survivor, a tank crewman, would see the movie and then want to talk to me.”
King lived in Japan for 10 years, working at a Toyota factory in the Nagoya area, and said the experience shaped his understanding of how the two countries arrived at war and how they found their way back. He described a supervisor at Toyota whose father and brother were killed at Nagasaki, yet who treated King, an American, with consistent kindness and protection on the factory floor.
“He could have, should have hated my guts,” King said. “But he treated me just like any other employee. Even a little better.”
His other books include “The Yalu River Boys,” drawn from his father’s experience as a B-29 gunner shot down over North Korea in 1951 and held in a Chinese-run concentration camp; “The Last Zero Fighter,” based on interviews with Japanese pilots who flew at Pearl Harbor, Midway and Guadalcanal; “A Tomb Called Iwo Jima”; and “Blossoms from the Sky,” about kamikaze pilots who survived the war when it ended before their missions came.
King said he made a promise to every veteran he interviewed. “I will not add any flair to your story. I will not edit out anything you tell me honestly,” he said. “I’m not writing an anti-Japan book. I’m not writing a pro-Japan book. I just want true history.”
During the interview, host Brad Ruszala mentioned a Japanese tank in the boonies near Gualo Rai, discovered in 2012 and still largely intact but for its main gun, which was cut off by scavengers within the last decade. Ruszala said he has visited the site. King, who said he is trying to document every tank remaining on Saipan, was surprised it had not been documented. The two planned to coordinate a visit before King departs the island March 26.
King is currently on Saipan with Ambrose Tours, leading a group that includes some of the last surviving American veterans of Iwo Jima, who will travel there next week for what will be King’s 17th visit to the island.
All five of King’s books are available on Amazon.
