Author: Alfredo Casuso

Kushiro: Walking with Ainu History and Swimming Deer 

— David Eugene Perry

24 September 2026: Ahoy! Alfredo and I set foot in Japan for the first time in 26 years with a walk about Kushiro on a glorious warm day.

From Westerdam, we took a short 15-minute shuttle ride into central Kushiro, where we set off on foot. Almost immediately, Kushiro gave us one of the more unexpected sights of the trip: an Ezo sika deer swimming across one of the inner-city waterways. A large stag with a handsome rack of antlers, he appeared perfectly healthy and completely untroubled by his aquatic commute.

Later we saw a second deer swimming in the channel. This one appeared to have some sort of netting caught around his antlers. We hoped he wasn’t in distress, but standing there as visitors with no obvious way of contacting the Japanese equivalent of the SPCA, there was little we could do beyond watch and hope he made it safely to shore.

Deer are common throughout this part of Hokkaido and are surprisingly strong swimmers, so seeing one in the water is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. Still, two swimming deer in one morning in the middle of the city was certainly not something we expected.

Our walk eventually took us to the Kushiro City Museum, dramatically situated beside Lake Harutori. The museum covers the natural and human history of eastern Hokkaido, including the wildlife of the Kushiro wetlands, archaeology, and the story of the region’s Indigenous Ainu people.

The Ainu exhibits were particularly interesting.

The Ainu are the Indigenous people of northern Japan, with their own language, spiritual traditions, clothing, foodways and culture. Their traditional homeland is most closely associated with Hokkaido, though historically Ainu communities also extended north into Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.

Their ancestry is closely connected with the ancient Jōmon peoples, hunter-gatherer communities who inhabited the Japanese archipelago for thousands of years. The Jōmon are especially famous for producing some of the world’s earliest known pottery.

Beginning roughly during the first millennium BCE, migrations from the Asian continent brought wet-rice agriculture and what archaeologists call Yayoi culture to much of Japan. Over many centuries, these populations mixed, contributing substantially to the ancestry of today’s Japanese population.

Hokkaido, however, followed a somewhat different path. Rice agriculture did not initially replace hunting, fishing and gathering there in the same way it did farther south. Cultures descended from the Jōmon developed while also trading and interacting with communities around the Sea of Okhotsk and with people farther south in Honshu. From those long and complex interactions emerged the culture we now recognize as Ainu.

The Ainu lived in villages, or kotan, often situated along rivers where fishing, hunting and trade were central to daily life. In the Kushiro region, Ainu communities lived along the Kushiro River and throughout the surrounding wetlands.

The museum’s exhibits explore traditional Ainu hunting and gathering, clothing, food, beliefs, ceremonial objects, transportation and oral traditions. Among the objects associated with Ainu life are distinctive boats built for river and coastal travel, reminders of just how important the waterways of eastern Hokkaido were to transportation and survival.

For much of modern Japanese history, however, Ainu culture was not celebrated.

During Japan’s modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries, government policy emphasized assimilation. Traditional Ainu practices were suppressed or discouraged, land was taken over for Japanese settlement, and the Ainu language declined dramatically.

Public attitudes and official policy began to change gradually, particularly late in the 20th century.

A major step came with the 1997 Ainu Culture Promotion Act, which marked a shift toward preserving and promoting Ainu culture. In 2008, Japan’s Diet formally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people. Then, in 2019, a new law gave that recognition statutory force and expanded efforts to support Ainu culture and communities.

Today there is much greater public interest in Ainu history, language, art and traditions, though that recognition is relatively recent compared with the many centuries of Ainu history in Hokkaido.

All of this history came during what was otherwise a very contemporary Japanese walking experience — including our inevitable stop at 7-Eleven.

Anyone whose idea of 7-Eleven comes from the United States is in for a surprise.

In Japan, the ubiquitous konbini is part convenience store, part miniature supermarket, part café and part neighborhood service center. There are remarkably good sandwiches, rice balls, noodles, salads, prepared meals, desserts and coffee, along with ATMs, parcel services, bill payment, ticketing, photocopying and printing.

Japanese convenience stores also benefit from extraordinarily efficient distribution systems. Fresh food is delivered frequently, allowing stores to remain compact while still offering an enormous range of prepared meals and everyday necessities.

The Japanese version of 7-Eleven became so successful that the relationship eventually reversed: the Japanese company that developed the country’s 7-Eleven operation ultimately acquired control of the American business.

What began as an American convenience-store concept was transformed in Japan into something distinctly Japanese.

So our first morning back in Japan after 26 years managed to encompass quite a lot: a sunny waterfront, two swimming deer, thousands of years of Jōmon and Ainu history, a walk across Kushiro, and a reminder that even a trip to 7-Eleven can tell you something about the country you’ve just arrived in.

After our walk and museum visit, we took the short shuttle ride back to Westerdam where alongside the ship had sprung up a small village of local food trucks and trinket vendors. All in all a pleasant day for our first stop back in Nippon.

THE FORGOTTEN BATTLE  ·  ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, 1943

MAY 11–30, 1943  ·  ATTU ISLAND, ALASKA

Snow in the Pacific

The Battle of Attu was the only World War II land fight on North American soil—and one of the bloodiest in the Pacific relative to the number of men engaged.

Most people who can name Midway or Iwo Jima have never heard of Attu. That is not an accident. The island sits at the far western end of the Aleutian chain, closer to Kamchatka than to Anchorage, wrapped in fog and williwaw winds. In May 1943, American and Japanese soldiers fought there for nineteen days in snow, mud, and near-constant storm. Veterans later called it the Forgotten Battle. It should not stay forgotten.

U.S. troops coming ashore at Massacre Bay, May 1943. The Japanese did not contest the beaches in strength.

Why Japan took American soil

On 7 June 1942—exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, and one day after they occupied nearby Kiska—Japanese troops landed unopposed on Attu. The islands were a northern flank for the Midway operation and a wager that a foothold in the Aleutians might threaten Alaska, worry the West Coast, or pull U.S. ships away from the Central Pacific.

There was almost no one to resist them. Attu’s only settlement was a small Unangax̂ (Aleut) village at Chichagof Harbor. Japanese forces captured the roughly forty remaining residents along with the island’s schoolteacher and radio operator and shipped them to internment on Hokkaido. Sixteen of the villagers died of disease and starvation. After the war they were not allowed to go home. 

Washington judged the destroyed village too expensive to rebuild and relocated the survivors to Atka.

For nearly a year the occupation sat on the edge of American maps while the real war ran through Guadalcanal and New Guinea. That delay would cost both sides.

Operation Landcrab

Allied planners first thought of hitting Kiska, then chose Attu because it looked more weakly held. Early intelligence guessed a few hundred Japanese. By April 1943 the estimate was about 2,400. The 7th Infantry Division—trained in California for desert warfare—drew the assignment. Weather pushed D-Day from 7 May to 11 May.

About 12,500 to 15,000 U.S. troops landed, backed by naval gunfire and Canadian reconnaissance and fighter-bombers. Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki commanded a Japanese garrison of roughly 2,500–2,600. He had already pulled his men off the beaches and into the high ground.

The landings came at two points: Massacre Bay on the south and Holtz Bay on the north. The Japanese did not fight for the sand. The fight began inland, in tundra and snow, on ridges that disappeared into fog.

Map of the May 1943 recapture of Attu. Northern and southern landing forces closed on Chichagof Harbor.

The weather was the other army

Attu is the only place American and Japanese forces fought in Arctic conditions. Williwaws, freezing rain, and ground that never dried produced more U.S. casualties than Japanese fire. The winter clothing issued to the 7th Division was not enough. Men lived for weeks in wet boots. Trench foot, frostbite, and exposure put more than 2,100 soldiers out of action.

Supply planes often could not find units in the fog. Some companies went days without rations. Soldiers scavenged Japanese clothing and food when they overran a position—and risked being shot by their own side if they were seen in enemy uniforms. Both armies were scoured by winds that could exceed a hundred miles an hour. 

Men who could not walk crawled, because stopping meant freezing.

American soldiers carrying a wounded man across Attu’s snowfields. Weather injured more U.S. troops than combat.

The last charge

By late May the surviving Japanese were squeezed into a pocket around Chichagof Harbor. On the night of 28–29 May, Yamasaki ordered that wounded men who could not walk be killed—including patients in the field hospitals—and led the remaining able-bodied troops, several hundred of them, in one of the largest banzai charges of the war.

They broke through the front line and reached rear-area support troops. Hours of hand-to-hand fighting followed. Yamasaki was killed. Almost all of his men died in the charge or by suicide, often with grenades held to the chest. Only 28 Japanese were taken prisoner. None were officers. Isolated holdouts kept fighting into July; a few lasted until September.

A Japanese medic, Dr. Paul Nebu Tatsuguchi—an American-trained Seventh-day Adventist physician—left a diary that has become the most intimate Japanese account of the battle. His last entries describe starvation, the killing of the wounded, and his own coming death. He was killed when U.S. troops overran the hospital on 29 May.

“The last assault is to be carried out. All the patients in the hospital are to commit suicide. Only 33 years of living and I am to die here…. Good-bye, Taeki, my beloved wife, who loved me to the last.”

— Dr. Paul Nebu Tatsuguchi, 28 May 1943

What it cost

Figures commonly cited by the National Park Service, drawing on historian John Haile Cloe:

Relative to the size of the garrison, Attu ranks just behind Iwo Jima among Pacific battles. For the Americans, weather casualties exceeded combat casualties. The Army redesigned cold-weather boots, clothing, tents, and rations after Attu—the first large combat-related exposure crisis of the war.

What followed

Japan announced the loss of Attu on 30 May.The garrison on Kiska was secretly evacuated by sea in late July under cover of fog. When a large Allied force, including Canadians, landed in August—Operation Cottage—the island was empty except for booby traps and dogs. Friendly fire in the fog still killed men on an island with no enemy left.

Attu never became the unsinkable aircraft carrier Japan hoped for. It did become a U.S. air base for raids toward the Kuriles. Lessons from the landing—joint Army-Navy work, amphibious technique, Japanese close-combat tactics—were applied later across the Pacific.

The battlefield and airfields were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985. Attu is now part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and has been uninhabited since the Coast Guard closed its LORAN station in 2010. Remains recovery has continued in fits and starts; limited excavations as recently as 2024 found additional Japanese dead.

American troops in the tundra near their tents. Isolation, fog, and wet cold defined the campaign as much as enemy fire.

Why it still matters

Attu sits at an awkward intersection of American memory. It was the first time since 1812 that the United States had to retake its own soil from a foreign army. It was also a catastrophe for a Native community that never went home. The weather that wrecked the 7th Division’s feet is the same weather that still keeps most visitors off the island.

The fight did not decide the Pacific War. Midway and Guadalcanal did more. But Attu showed, earlier than most Americans realized, what island fighting against a Japanese garrison that would not surrender would cost—and it showed it in snow rather than jungle. The ratio of dead to the number of men engaged is the part that should stay in the record. So should the names of the Unangax̂ who were taken from Chichagof Harbor and never returned.

The island is quiet now. The craters are still in the tundra. That is the whole story, if anyone goes looking.

Notes

This essay draws on the U.S. National Park Service account of the Battle of Attu, John Haile Cloe’s Aleutian campaign research, the National Historic Landmark nomination for the Attu battlefield, and standard campaign summaries (History.com, Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Army historical notes). Casualty figures follow Cloe as cited by NPS. Code name: Operation Landcrab. Commanders: Maj. Gen. Albert E. Brown and later Brig. Gen. Eugene M. Landrum (U.S.); Col. Yasuyo Yamasaki (Japan).

Battle of Attu  ·  A history essay     ·