Armed with shovel, headlight and mosquito coil, spry and nimble former boy scout Takamatsu Gushi-ken climbs steep slopes deep into the hot and humid forests in the outskirts of the southern city of Itoman in Okinawa.
His mission: to unearth the remains of the missing dead from the 82-day Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The intense fighting is said to have been the bloodiest in the Pacific theatre during World War II, with as many as 200,000 casualties. Tens of thousands remain unaccounted for.
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