I cannot comment on forcing women to be suicide bombers, but, yes, the Japanese military did commit atrocities on Okinawa. Japanese scholar Saburō Ienaga describes what happened to civilians when fighting reached what he describes as "non-combatant residential areas".
From reading his book , it seems to me that masse shootings of civilians were not the primary "atrocity of choice". Rather, civilians were mostly forced to give up supplies to the army and commit suicide (an honorable death). Violators were shot, though, but it's not as if the military just decided to kill everyone themselves, from the first. Small difference to the locals, I imagine.
Civilians used by Allied troops to parlay with the Japanese were also killed. Some locals were even prevented from picking their own gardens. Okinawa wasn't the only place to see this kind of behavior, either. For instance, on Saipan the U.S. advance in one area forced Japanese civilians to a cliff. The Japanese military ordered them to commit suicide by jumping off in full sight of U.S. troops.
Back to Okinawa, though, and Saburō Ienaga:
Garrison commander Akamatsu Yoshitsugu of Tokashikijima, Kerama archipelago, Okinawa ordered local inhabitants to turn over all food supplies to the army and commit suicide before U.S. troops landed. The obedient islanders, all 329 together, killed each other at the Onna River with razors, hatchets, and sickles. U.S. forces occupied nearby Iejima and used some of the local people to take surrender appeals to Akamatsu's unit on Tokashikijima. Akamatsu's men killed the emissaries and many members of the island's self-defense unit for allegedly violating orders. On another Okinawan island, Zamami, unit commander Umezawa ordered the island's elderly and children to commit suicide in front of the memorial to local war dead from the Sino and Russo-Japanese Wars. The remaining islanders were forbidden to pick any potatoes or vegetables. Thirty persons who violated the order were starved or shot. On the main island of Okinawa, many civilians were killed as suspected spies. Local people who fled to the main defense trenches were ordered to retreat "because of military necessity." The civilians were forced out of the trenches right into heavy American fire. As the fighting drew to an end, civilians hid with the military in caves at the southern tip of the island. When a frightened child cried out, a soldier grabbed it from the mother's arms and strangled the child to death in front of everyone. It was a grim warning against making any noise that would reveal their location to the U.S. forces.
Source:
The Pacific War, 1931-1945 A Critical Perspective On Japan's Role in World War II by Saburō Ienaga. Pantheon Books. Originally published in 1968. English translation 1978. Page 185.
Here are the sources Ienaga himself drew from for this one paragraph. One thing that really impressed me with this book are the extensive footnotes, drawing from lots of primary sources. Yes, good history books should have citations, but there were just a lot. It's a great jumping off point for the whole subject if you're interested. You could spend a lot of time following up this relatively small book (257 pages, very easy to digest) by rooting around the 46 pages of notes in the back.
Sherrod, On to Westward
Okuyama Yoshiko, Gyokusai no shima in ikinokotte (Survivor from the Island of Honorable Death)
Kamachi, Okinawa senshi
Urasaki, Kieta Okinawa-ken
Matsumoto Katsumi, "Nihonhei ga Okinawajin o koroshita" (Japanese Soldiers Killed Okinawans), Gendai no Me, November 1964
Yoshikawa, Okinawa no saigo
Ishida Ikuo, "Okinawa to Nippon" (Okinawa and Japan), Bungei, October 1967.
Ishida Ikuo, "Okinawa no dansō" (Okinawa Escarpment), Tenbō, November 1967.
Hello everyone,
Unfortunately, we have already had to remove a number of poor quality responses in this thread, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compound the issue. In this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, and as such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed.
Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!
I open with the caution that I am an armchair historian and this is a recent area of interest for me, but given the dearth of other acceptable responses, I’ll take a shot. The history and backstory of Okinawa heavily influenced Okinawan civilian involvement in WWII, but first to answer your question: thousands of Okinawan civilians were killed during the American and Japanese fighting there, often literally caught in the crossfire. There are documented references to Okinawan civilians being killed outright by Japanese soldiers (like the ones in /u/Kiltmanenator’s comment), especially if they were suspected of having any involvement with the American forces. There are also documented references to the Japanese army giving hand grenades to civilians so that they may commit suicide, rather than be “captured” by American forces (and, of course, take out as many Americans as they could in the process).
Now, for some of the backstory: Okinawa was an independent nation with an extended and complex history long before being annexed by Japan in 1847. Immediately before annexation as a Japanese prefecture, Okinawa and neighboring islands composed the Ryukyu Kingdom, a relatively neutral island nation with excellent trade relations and its own cultural identity and language. Japanese takeover was accompanied by heavy Japanese cultural influence and, increasingly towards WWII, military indoctrination of civilian populations. A few weeks into the American/Japanese battle on what had become Okinawa, the central Japanese government gave the order to ban the speaking of the Ryukyuan/Okinawan language – anyone caught speaking it was presumed to be a spy; estimates of civilians killed because they were caught speaking it and declared spies sit around 1,000. The extreme militarization of Okinawan civilians by the central Japanese government, especially through school systems, led to many civilians obeying Japanese military orders and believing the military’s claims that suicide was far preferable to capture: “For a long time, the Japanese Imperial Army announced that, on other islands, the women had been raped and killed, and the men were tied at the wrists and tanks were driven over them” (2). Thousands of civilians killed themselves as a result of these warnings.
This is a very incomplete picture at best, but I hope it somewhat answers your question. I'll add a further note that the sourced histories of Okinawa's involvement in WWII vary greatly depending on who is writing them; a few of the sources I list call out the revisionist approach that Japanese historical texts and textbooks take to the whole matter. American sources are also called out by others for embellishment or avoidance of "difficult" subjects.
Sources: