I Replied: ‘Yes I am Ready to Die.’

Surviving a World War Two Pacific massacre

I went to Tarawa looking for the bodies of a group of men from Aotearoa New Zealand who had been executed by the Imperial Japanese.

Instead an 83-year-old man told me of his survival. It was 1999 when I flew in the 2200 kilometres from Fiji to Kiribati, one of the world’s vastest ocean nations, astride the Equator and the International Dateline. Tarawa is the capital, with an islet, 154 hectare Betio, scene of one of World War Two’s strategic battles. Thirteen months before the Americans arrived to defeat the occupying Japanese, 17 New Zealand coast watchers who had been captured, were beheaded. Their bodies were buried on Betio, never to be found.

Today Betio is densely populated but military detritus is commonplace. The US military are frequently on the atoll, sifting through the sands looking for human remains from their 1943 battle. 

Former cabinet minister Raion Bataroma had been my host and guide on Tarawa and one Sunday he was keen for me to meet an old man with a great story. Betio is among the world’s most crowded urban settlements so finding any one involved much questioning and pointing in various directions. In a small open sided traditional fale, sat 83-year-old Kabunare Koura. Certainly he looked well weathered and battered, but he was healthy enough, adding he still cut toddy, although not from high coconut trees any more. He had fathered nine children, and at the time of my meeting he had 20 grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

His deeply lined face breaks into a smile and he laughs easily and loudly; and you wonder how he can after what he saw.

“The past is gone,” he says.

Kabunare Koura. Pix Michael Field

His Sunday afternoon conversation was translated by Raion, although it was not always a literal translation.