Not Yet Home
——A certain diary is in a box on the far side of the Pacific

1. No one knows how to read his name ⚪️ Unverified

Inside the notebook's cover, in pencil, is “Maruta Toshimichi (丸田年道).” The surname “Maruta” is certain. The problem is the given name: there is not a single piece of evidence for how “年道” is read.

Neither the Kamifurano town record, nor the death notice, nor the 2005 Yomiuri Shimbun report carries a reading. The American catalog, unable to read the name at all, wrote “No Name.” “Toshimichi” looks like the natural reading, but that is only our modern guess; it could be “Toshitsune,” or another reading. What he was actually called, no one can now confirm.

So this channel calls him by his surname, “Maruta,” alone. To decide his name on our own would be the opposite of one of the few courtesies still possible toward this man.

Source: Kamifurano town, “Exploring Our Homeland” No. 23 (memoir of the younger brother, Maruta Yoshimitsu, 2005) / the death notice / Yomiuri Shimbun morning edition, 10 August 2005. None carries a reading — the very absence of furigana is the basis.

2. In truth, it was a unit meant for Midway 🟢 Confirmed

The “Ichiki Detachment” Maruta was in originally had nothing to do with Guadalcanal. It was a unit built to occupy Midway Island.

In May 1942 the detachment left Ujina, Hiroshima, and even trained for the Midway landing on Saipan. But on 5 June, the navy suffered a crushing defeat at Midway, losing four carriers. The island it was to land on was no longer within reach. The unit that had lost its destination was made to wait on Guam for more than two months; it was said to be scheduled to return home, partly to conceal the operation's failure.

Maruta's entries about “swimming for the first time” and “gazing at the thirteenth-night moon” are from these limbo days on Guam. Then in August, when the Japanese lost the Guadalcanal airfield, this unit — the one that happened to be nearest — was thrown into retaking it. To an island right beside the sea where he had learned to swim.

Had the navy won at sea. Had the return order come a day earlier. Maruta's notebook might have closed in an entirely different place.

Source: Kamifurano No. 23 (the brother's memoir also states the Midway-to-Guadalcanal recall) / Institute for Defense Studies, War History Series / the service record of Ichiki Kiyonao (28th class of the Military Academy; May 1942, detachment commander of the Midway occupation force). The Japanese official war history (pub. 1971) and the family memoir (2005) agree.

3. The commander's reputation flips 180 degrees after the war 🟡 Disputed

The advance force was led by Colonel Ichiki Kiyonao (former surname Katō; from a family of court physicians of the Iida domain in Nagano). He died on this island on the same 21 August as Maruta, and was promoted to major general on that same date. His reputation is split in two within military history.

The old view = “reckless”: he had his men charge a machine-gun position head-on in a night attack, and destroyed himself. The long-told postwar image of “the commander wiped out in a banzai charge.”

The recent reassessment = “an intelligence failure”: the fault lay with the Imperial GHQ and higher command that decided to commit them in the first place. On 13 August, the Japanese in the southeast theater judged that “the U.S. force on Guadalcanal is not a strong one” and ordered a rapid recapture. In fact the advance force was sent — a mere 916 men — against U.S. Marines defending in strength of some ten thousand. Committing a small force piecemeal, with the enemy underestimated — the blame lies less with the colonel on the ground than with those who wrote that paper (the order). That is the rereading.

The one who put this reassessment squarely forward is Sekiguchi Takashi, Who Destroyed the Ichiki Detachment? — The Guadalcanal Campaign and Imperial GHQ's Wanderings (Fuyō Shobō, 2018; later Kōjinsha NF Bunko, 2025). The title itself is a question. Incidentally, the U.S. Marines recorded this unit as “elite troops” in their observations. The image of a “reckless rabble” did not, at least, appear to the enemy's eyes.

Further, how Colonel Ichiki himself died is not settled either. Even the Japanese official war history writes “the detailed circumstances of his death are unknown.” He is said to have taken his own life, or to have fallen while directing the fight, but almost no one who witnessed it survived.

Maruta's line “Complaint is what the weak give voice to” was written under this commander. The reputation of those who gave the orders may waver, but the fact that a twenty-four-year-old was sent there does not.

Source: the service record and death of Ichiki Kiyonao = descriptions based on the Japanese official war history / U.S. Marine observation / “circumstances of death unknown” = confirmed by directly obtaining primary texts, 2026. Study: Sekiguchi Takashi (a military historian trained at the National Defense Academy). Order original: 17th Army-related order = JACAR Ref C25080307200 (Institute for Defense Studies, August 1942). The debate continues to this day — we do not assert a conclusion.→ To the 28th Infantry Regiment / Ichiki Detachment page

4. Between the night the diary ended and the hour of death 🟢 Confirmed

The notebook's last entry is 20 August.

Night, on the march. One enemy plane flew over.

The hour of death given in the notice is 21 August, 2:50 a.m.

Killed in action in fighting near the lower Nakagawa river district of Guadalcanal, from a penetrating gunshot wound to the head.

These two are not a contradiction. They are only a few hours apart. On the night of the 20th, marching, he wrote one line in the notebook, then went straight into the night attack, and fell soon after the date changed — so it reads. The Ichiki Detachment launched its night attack on the Marine positions just after 10:30 p.m. on the 20th; the fighting continued into the small hours of the 21st.

That is, Maruta went into that battle just after writing the last line of his own diary. The notebook stops at the 20th because there was no longer time to write the 21st.

Source: the diary's last entry (town transcription No. 23) / the verbatim death notice (quoted in the same No. 23). The timing of the fighting agrees with the war-history account in the previous item.

5. “Where he fell” and “where he wrote” are different 🟢 Confirmed

The death notice records the place of death as “near the lower Nakagawa river district of Guadalcanal.” “Nakagawa” is the name the Japanese army gave to the area of the Ilu River (the American Tenaru).

The last line of the notebook, meanwhile, was written on the march from the landing point at Taivu Point toward the airfield. From Taivu Point to the Ilu River mouth, where the battle was, is a road pushed west over two days and nights.

So what we can trace on the map is where he wrote (the line of landing and march), not the place he fell. The notebook closes a few kilometers short of the end. The map's endpoint is the diary's endpoint, not the endpoint of a life. We want to keep that clearly separate.

Source: the place name in the death notice (No. 23) / the landing point of Taivu Point and the line of advance (war-history account, matching the U.S. Marine observation).

6. The enemy translated this notebook — and in that workplace was a young Keene 🟢 Confirmed

That Maruta's notebook can still be read is due to an ironic reason. Because the U.S. army did not throw away the paper of Japanese soldiers picked up on the battlefield. Diaries and letters were clues to operations. So all written paper was gathered, numbered, translated into English, and put in boxes. Maruta's notebook, too, became one volume of the Marines' “captured Japanese documents.”

Within this enterprise of “the enemy translating Japanese soldiers' diaries in vast quantity” was Donald Keene, who would later become a leading figure in the study of Japanese literature. As a young naval language officer, he was assigned to translate captured diaries. Keene later wrote:

I hid such diaries, though it was forbidden, intending to return them to the diarists' families, but my desk was searched and the diaries were confiscated. This was a great disappointment.

(from “Chronicles of My Life,” Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 36–37)

On the enemy's side too, there was a person who read a Japanese soldier's diary, was moved, and wished to return it to the family. That wish was blocked by regulations.

One honest line to draw. There is no evidence that Keene translated Maruta's notebook itself (given the timing and his posting, it is in fact unlikely). What we set side by side here is not “he handled the same volume,” but Keene's words as one person inside “the same enterprise of enemy translation that put Maruta's notebook in a box.” Whose diary was read, and by what kind of hands — that is what we mean to convey.

Source: Keene's autobiography “Chronicles of My Life” (2008) pp. 36–37 (original obtained and confirmed verbatim) / the rule “captured documents sent to Washington” etc. from the preface to “Travelers of a Hundred Ages” (1989). The capture route of Maruta's notebook = town transcription No. 23 (Marine file, BOX 42-5). We do not assert a direct connection between Keene and Maruta.

7. The greatest discovery is that no war is written here 🟢 Confirmed

Last, this is really the most interesting. Open this notebook as a “war record,” and you'll be let down. Most of its pages are not fighting, but ordinary days on a southern island.

• He wrestled.
• He gathered shellfish.
• He was amazed at all the toads, lizards, scorpions.
• In swimming practice, he could swim for the first time in his life (22 June).
• Gazing at the thirteenth-night moon, he prayed for his parents' health at home (28 June).
• On a day of squalls, he thought of the northern fields: “At home, about now, they must be in the middle of the chrysanthemum harvest” (8 July).

A farmer's second son from Kamifurano, Hokkaido, made a soldier by conscription, learns to swim for the first time in a southern sea, sees the moon and thinks of his parents. Japanese soldiers were trained into the habit of diary-keeping. So what remained is not brave resolve, but one young man's honest life. The line “Complaint is what the weak give voice to,” too, sits quietly within this run of daily life.

It is a war diary, and yet most of it is not war. That, I think, is the greatest thing this one notebook tells us.

A war diary, and what's written is sumo, shellfish, and the moon. …That this “ordinary” survived is unbearably precious to me.

Source: the diary text (the original, copyright term expired, town transcription No. 23). That the diary is filled with records of daily life is confirmed across the whole transcription.