A Bell for Oshiro : Souvenir in U.S. Since World War II Heads Home to Japan

As a timid Japanese-American bride of S. sailor 30 years ago, Yoshiko Harris said nothing when she first noticed that the 900-pound brass bell hanging in the Port Hueneme naval museum had come from her native Okinawa.

But she dreamed of someday sending it back.

On Thursday, Harris, now 57, was one of about 50 American and Japanese citizens at a ceremony marking the return of the four-foot-high bell to Oshiro, a small Okinawan farming community in the village of Ozato-Son.

Members of the 147th Naval Construction Battalion had pilfered the bell at the end of World War II as a trophy of the bloody battle that culminated in the United States taking the island.

But the Japanese at Thursday’s ceremony made no recriminations, and the Americans gave no apologies.

“Armies have been taking back things since the beginning of time,” said Vincent Transano, the base historian and Seabee Museum director. “That’s where museums come from.”

Although Capt. David Nash, the commanding officer of Port Hueneme Naval Construction Battalion Center, presided graciously over Thursday’s ceremony, he uttered no regrets about how the bell came to the United States.

Similarly, the mayor of Ozato-Son and other village officials who traveled to California for the ceremony did not mention that it is a group of Japanese companies, not the U. S. government, that is paying to fly the bell back home.

George Sankey, president of the Okinawa Assn. of North America, a group of Okinawans and descendants of the islanders, explained the villagers’ attitude:

“They’re happy to have received it. They want to keep it as quiet as possible until they have received it. Then they will complain.”

Before they took it, however, the villagers doused the bell with sake and brushed it with a tree branch, part of a traditional purification ceremony.

With the bell still smelling faintly of liquor, it was trucked to Los Angeles International Airport, where a Japanese airline will fly it home.

Back in Oshiro, a community of about 900 people, the bell will be returned to the red-roofed bell house to call meetings, announce funerals and weddings and alert villagers to emergencies.

Sankey said such bells used to be common in Japanese villages until the war, when most of them were melted to make bullets.

Oshiro, along with the rest of Okinawa, a 70-mile-long island at the southern tip of Japan, was invaded by the United States on Easter Sunday, 1945, starting a three-month battle that claimed an estimated 100,000 Japanese and 12,000 American lives.

After the U. S. victory in the battle, the island did not return to Japanese control until 1972.

The bell has been at Port Hueneme’s Seabee Museum since 1960, when someone, presumably a member of the 147th battalion, donated it.

Museum officials have no records of how it got to the base or where it was kept between 1945 and 1960, but speculated that a member of the battalion may have stored it at his home.

Harris first saw it in 1962, when her husband was at Port Hueneme. She recognized the Japanese inscription identifying it as belonging to the Oshiro youth association on Okinawa.

She also noticed the date the bell was cast: Sept. 4, 1935.

“I felt strongly about it because it was my birthday,” she said. “All these years, I came in once a month to check it out” and make sure it was safe. “I always hoped that someday, someday. . . .”

But nothing happened until after Harris’ husband retired from the Navy and--coincidentally--got a civilian job as curator of the Seabee Museum.

Last summer, Yoshiko Harris happened to meet Ozato-Son high school administrator Eitoku Zimame, who was visiting Oxnard. After Harris showed him the bell, he returned home with the news for the village mayor and the ball started rolling.

The village eventually made a formal request to get the bell back and quickly got the approval of the U. S. Navy curator, who controls all such artifacts at base museums, Transano said.