JAPAN: Island Paradise

Romantic Man dreams of being marooned on a desert island with one ideal woman. Romantic Woman dreams of being marooned with a wide choice of men. Last week a comely 32-year-old Okinawa-born widow named Kazuko Higa arrived in Tokyo for a burlesque tour, during which she planned to tell Japanese audiences what it was like to be marooned alone for five years with 31 men. It was not, she implied, all that it might be.

Kazuko was living alone with her second husband, Kikuichiro, on tiny (2 mi. by 5 mi.) Anatahan Island in the Marianas when the survivors of three bombed Japanese ships swam ashore in 1945. For three years the couple lived with the castaways, until one day Kazuko’s husband was murdered. “I felt lonely,” says Kazuko, and she took up with one of the castaways. After 20 days of bliss, her lover was drowned. She went to live with another, the man who had killed her husband. “At first I repelled him coldly, but a weak woman is no match for the strength of a man.” But, she says, “I couldn’t really love him,” so a third castaway obligingly killed him.

While Kazuko moved from one lover to another, Imperial Japan made its peace with the U.S. The U.S. Navy tried to tell the castaways on Anatahan about this development, but they refused to believe it. Just a trick, they said, and went on training their few machine guns on the beach. In 1950, however, Kazuko decided that anything was better than trying to please more than two dozen men. She slipped away from her current love, signaled a U.S. patrol boat cruising near the beach and surrendered. Her menfolk held out for another year and then surrendered themselves.

Their subsequent stories to newsmen that six men had died fighting for her favors annoys Kazuko greatly. “Actually,” she said with indignation last week, “only two died because of me. One was shot and the other was stabbed.”