Last Japanese soldier to survive World War II Battle of Peleliu’s final words of warning

Keiji Nagai, who died last month, endured one of the bitterest battles between US Marines and the Imperial Japanese Army of the entire war

In life, he mostly avoided talking about his experiences – but when he did, his interviewer found something that changed him: an appeal for peace

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Napalm dropped by a US fighter aircraft erupts on Peleliu's Umurbrogol Mountain, where Japanese soldiers were entrenched. Photo: US Marine Corps History Division

Published: 7:00pm, 14 Dec 2019Updated: 11:23pm, 14 Dec 2019

When Keiji Nagai spoke of the horrors he had witnessed, a shadow fell over his eyes. His interviewer, Kentaro Saeki, said it was like the second world war veteran was seeing it all over again: the fighting, the bloodshed, the deaths of his friends.

Nagai, who died in November at the age of 98, was the last of just 34 Japanese who survived the vicious Battle of Peleliu, which claimed more than 12,000 lives and whose scars can still be seen on the Pacific island – now part of the Republic of Palau – that gave the conflict its name.

It was April 2015 when Saeki, a senior correspondent for Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, first met Nagai, who was already in his 90s at the time.

“I interviewed him for a television programme on the day that [Japan’s then] emperor and empress travelled to Peleliu to pay their respects to the dead,” Saeki said.

Kentaro Saeki, left, with the late Keiji Nagai at his home in Ibaraki prefecture in Japan. Photo: NHK WORLD-JAPAN

It would be the first of 10 or so meetings between the pair – meetings that coloured the seasoned journalist’s understanding of a catastrophic war that the old soldier had witnessed first hand.

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