Takamatsu Gushiken hunts caves in Okinawa's jungles for the bones of those who died in the WWII Battle of Okinawa, one of the war's bloodiest. He considers the bones silent witnesses of Okinawa’s wartime tragedy. As a volunteer cave digger, or “gamahuya” in his native Okinawan language, he has unearthed the remains of several hundred people. Excavation is not his goal. He wants the bones to be identified and returned to their families. He criticizes the government’s DNA matching efforts as “too slow, too little and too late.”
