Japanese Go stones from Guy’s Cave on Saipan
- Ted Oxborrow
- Apr 20
- 10 min read
Updated: Apr 24
The following is a memo of provenance of donated WW2 artifacts to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.
The purpose of this memo is to provide the museum archive with the provenance for the vintage Japanese Go stones from Guy’s Cave on Saipan.
Among the Tinian and Saipan artifacts we donated in 2019, the unique, antique Go stones are the most ‘emotionally connected’ to our family. For that reason, Landon, we appreciate your ‘curator’s eye’ in selecting the stones for exhibition in the Brinkman building. As the following backstory will explain, the stones tell a gripping story about the condition, courage, and dreams of individual human beings caught on both sides of horrific war. Your thoughtful exhibition of the stones will, we believe, continue to have a far reaching educational impact on certain museum visitors.
In a similar way that your Paper Crane exhibit shares an inspiring and poignant World War II glimpse into Sadako Sasaki’s life, the following narrative will relate the sensitive battlefield juxtaposition between two human beings: an 18-year-old Marine trained to kill (or be killed) and a trembling 3-year-old Japanese orphan in the arms of that Marine at the base of Saipan’s Suicide Cliff on July 1,1944.
Equally, Sadako’s Paper Cranes and Guy’s Go stones are particularly relevant to HWA’s mission to preserve the legacy and sacrifices of ordinary citizens and soldiers during the extraordinary events of World War II.
GO STONES FROM “GUY’S CAVE”
(The following information is taken from Jill Oxborrow’s Saipan Journal)
2019 – Visiting a long-held family storage unit in Carson City, Jill Oxborrow opens one of seven battered and musty cardboard boxes labeled “TINIAN/SAIPAN ARTIFACTS”. Most of the relics are wrapped in 50-year-old Guam Daily newsprint. But Jill isn’t interested in the ‘Ogata’ canteens or bayonets from her Father-in-law’s 1964 Tinian expedition. She’s looking for her special collection of antique Go Stones from ‘Guy’s Cave’ on Saipan. The family has agreed to donate the battlefield artifacts to the Wendover Museum and Jill will retain a few of the stones as a tactile memory of a very special event in her life.
1980 - Guy Gabaldon has decided to return to Saipan with his young wife, Ohana, and family. The Oxborrow’s meet the Gabaldon’s at the airport. The two families quickly discover common interests and immediately become close friends. Yoshio Gabaldon and Trevor are classmates at Mt. Carmel Catholic School. They’re also ‘boonie-stomping’ partners on Saipan and Tinian throughout the 80’s. The two families are constantly together sharing dinners, watching movies, swimming at the Grotto, and volunteering at Ted’s self-funded ‘Saipan Museum’ where Guy becomes a major contributor and board member. After sitting through multiple Saturday matinée showings of HELL TO ETERNITY at Matsumoto’s Theater in Chalan Kanoa, many eleven-year-old boys on Saipan can quote Jeffery Hunter’s lines.
1981 - Governor Pete Tenorio throws an honorary dinner for Guy, officially welcoming him back to Saipan. House Speaker Benigno Fitial asks Ted Oxborrow, a consultant for Congressman Joe Lifoifoi, to research and write a CNMI Legislative Resolution for Gabaldon. Interviewing Attorney John Schwabe of Lake Oswego, Oregon (then Colonel Schwabe, G-2 intelligence, Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division and Guy’s commanding officer on Saipan and Tinian in 1944) Ted learns the following:
‘Guy was a brave kid and a hell of a good Marine scout. He killed the enemy effectively yet, working alone, he saved civilian Japanese lives on Saipan and Tinian. The numbers have been debated, no one at the time was keeping count after 900, least of all Guy, but at G-2 we knew it was way over a thousand on Saipan and Tinian combined. The final estimate is between 1,300 and 1,500.
The only World War II Marine to have returned to Saipan and made it his home, Guy is an island celeb. CNMI Chief of Police Antonio Benevente offers Guy a Detective post at the police department (Guy respectfully declines).
1982 – Guy Gabaldon is a man of many talents and impressive courage at fifty-six. An accomplished bush pilot, he flies his de Haviland Beaver 200 miles north of Saipan to uninhabited Pagan Island with a plan to open an Outward-Bound style Boys Camp; in Mexico, Guy previously owned and operated a successful scallop fishing enterprise with 22 boats and 7 aircraft, so his purchase of three large Korean fishing trawlers on Saipan to start a fishery is a natural, if risky, business venture; he’s a prolific writer for the Commonwealth Examiner, and the Marianas Variety; and he fearlessly exposes money laundering schemes and fraud within the CNMI Government.
Guy does not see himself as a hero by any means, and he isn’t one to hold onto the past, but a specific wartime memory prompts him to ask Ted and Trevor Oxborrow for help. Thirty-eight years earlier, near the last days of the Saipan campaign, amid battlefield chaos and civilian suicides, Guy coaxed more than 20 Japanese women and children to surrender to him from a cave on the north end of the island. He tells the Oxborrow’s he wants to revisit that specific cave.
Founder and President of Ted Oxborrow & Associates, Research & Writing Consultants, Garapan, Saipan, Ted and his team have completed multiple contracts for Japanese and American WW II veteran associations to conduct battlefield surveys, organize and host Japanese and American veteran reunions, and lead Ministry of Health ikotsu shūshū (bone collecting) missions on Saipan and Tinian. Guy knows of Ted’s 20-year familiarity with Saipan’s jungle terrain.
The going is slow along the uneven coral and volcanic rubble at the base of ‘Suicide Cliff’. Despite a debilitating coronary condition and the suffocating humidity in the canopied jungle, Guy is intent. He methodically examines possible apertures and false leads along the base of the vertical wall reaching 200 feet skyward. After several hours of searching, Guy sticks his head into a vertical volcanic fissure for a long examination, then shouts, ‘THIS IS IT!’
Ted and Trevor wriggle through narrow columns and over moss-covered rubble to squeeze through the tiny vine-draped entrance. Guy waits outside. The moldy cavern floor is littered with unexploded ordnance and human bones. Following a brief perusal, father and son agree to return asap with head lamps and spelunking gear for a thorough survey.
Seated on a fallen tree trunk outside the cave in 1982, Guy’s tells Trevor and Ted about a Sensō Koji (war orphan) he has never forgotten and why he is compelled to return to this particular cave.
‘In the beginning I get myself assigned to G-2 Intelligence. I’m supposed to interrogate prisoners, but no prisoners are being captured. Japs prefer suicide. So I go out at night on my own to get prisoners. Catch hell from Schwabe for insubordination until I bring-in five on the first night. Six the next night. From then on I have free range. At the end of the campaign I’m watching civilian women throw their children off Suicide Cliff, then jump. Civilian families are forced by Jap soldiers from their homes to march to the north end of the island’. They believe the Jap soldier. They’ll be raped, cut-up in pieces, and eaten by American devils. I know civilians are hiding in caves so I scout ahead of the mop-up platoons by myself. I yell inside this cave right here. COME OUT…...I PROMISE YOU’LL BE PROTECTED. I’m ready for armed Japs to come out, but one-by-one ragged women appear, bent over, bowing to me. Some alone. Some shuffle past me with children. I herd em’ over here, away from the entrance. STAY TOGETHER. I yell another warning to anyone still inside. I say I’m gonna’ blow the entrance shut so come out now.
As if transported back in time, Guy stands up, cups his mouth with both hands and yells in Japanese at the cave entrance:
‘Te o agete! Haiyaku! Koroshitakunaida’
His voice is emotionally charged. A few birds in the high Tangan Tangan branches are startled and fly away. The jungle is silent as Guy continues:
‘I hear a child crying in the cave. I go in ready for action. Could be a trap. I pick-up a little girl. She hangs tight to my shirt. I fire off a couple rounds as I back out. She stops crying. She won’t let go of my shirt so I blow the entrance with her hanging on. Two grenades. I motion for the women and children to follow me. A woman tells me they’ve been in the cave for a week’.
Trevor leads a shortcut through the Tangan Tangan toward Marpi road. Guy stops for a rest. Reenacting the 1944 scenario, Guy pantomimes carrying the naked, shivering toddler close to his chest. He demonstrates how he balances his M1 Carbine 30 in his right arm, constantly motioning his pitifully thin ‘prisoners’ to stay close together in a line. No lagging behind. Ted and Trevor listen to Guy’s spoken memories as he points left, then to the right.
‘All this area right here is a battle zone. Bullets flyin’. Grenades exploding. A tank is blasting flames into a cave behind me, probably the one I took the kid from. A squad of crouched Marines is moving toward me over here. Bug-eyed. Probably on their first patrol.
Remembering the stupefied looks on the Marine’s faces as he leads his prisoners past them without a word, Guy laughs. Driving back toward San Roque village, Guy points out the location where he convinced the driver of a deuce-and-a-half to carry his mob 8 miles south to the interrogation camp at Chalan Kanoa. Off-loading short of the camp, Guy leads his line of women and children through the camp gate. Noticing the baby in Guy’s arms, the dumbstruck Marine guard calls Guy a “pied piper”. Each day thereafter, on his way to the front lines, Guy stops at the camp to check on his little orphan girl and hand out chocolate bars to his waiting koji.
July 24, 1944 – “Jig Day”. Guy is shipped out with the 2nd Division reserves to back up the 4th Division landing on Tinian. Guy never sees his orphans again.
July 26, 1982 – Armed with a headlamp, extra batteries, gloves and a trowel, Jill Oxborrow joins her husband and son in Guy’s Cave. Near the south wall of the expansive main cavern, Trevor discovers a narrow down-spiraling passage which ends eighteen feet below the floor of the main chamber in a 40’ x 40’ subterranean room. Trevor names it ‘The Basement’. The heat is oppressive. The air is stagnant. Debris indicating an extended habitation is everywhere: fractured rice bowls, dented aluminum tea pots, brass fittings on a rotted leather briefcase reflecting gold in a flashlight beam, multiple jika-tabi footwear, a silver Kiseru smoking pipe, glass syringes, chubby Nakaya fountain pens, and, oddly, several gas mask canisters. Trevor calls up the shaft to his parents.
‘C’mon down. I’ve found something’.
Jill slides into the tunnel on her back, feet-first. The Basement feels almost comfortable after the claustrophobic tunnel. Patiently she begins a methodical examination of the nooks and crevices, troweling away damp soil. A tooth of her digging tool hooks on a ball of decayed linen. Wrapped with obvious care, the fabric contains a set of antique Go stones. Jill is familiar with the sophisticated Japanese board game, similar in strategy to chess. During the Meiji era (1868-1912) the white stones were traditionally fashioned from Hitachi clam shell, the black stones from Nachighuru slate. The stones were traditionally handed down from generation to generation as heirlooms.
Rubbing a well-worn stone between her thumb and forefinger, Jill senses a spiritual bond with the woman who had carried the stones to this dank spot in The Basement. What were her thoughts as she squeezed down that constricted tunnel? She must have been terrified, and yet she held onto the Go stones. Why? Was she a teenager holding tight to a precious inheritance? Was she a grandmother with arthritis safeguarding her only remaining connection to the past? Was she huddled in this putrid bunker beside a relative or a friend, or was she alone, crammed among panicked strangers?
Jill extinguishes her headlamp to better imagine the hoplessness the woman must have felt in the dark as she attempted to find a comfortable sitting position, waiting-out the unknown as the thunder of war rattled the Basement walls. Delicately, at some point, as the hours and days passed, the woman might have wrapped her heirloom treasure in the Azumadaki fabric torn from her skirt. Then, as if an angel of mercy had suddenly called in Japanese from the cave entrance above, the owner of the stones excitedly followed the other women up through the tunnel and out onto the battlefield to see a lone American soldier, speaking Japanese, telling her to stay close. Telling her she won’t be harmed. Telling her to follow him for food and clean clothing…..only then realizing she’d left her precious stones behind as she witnessed the explosive collapse of the cave entrance. How utterly heartbreaking that loss must have been.
Holding the stones in the darkness, unable to hold back her tears, Jill feels the woman’s grief as she is led across the battlefield by a young soldier carrying a naked koji, 38 years ago.
Later that day at Guy and Ohana’s house in San Antonio village, Jill explains the significance of the Go stones. She presents them to Guy. Noticing Jill’s emotion, Guy insists that Jill keep the stones in memory of a special women. A woman he probably made eye contact with, maybe spoke to as he led her away from her precious heirloom on her way to repatriation and a new life.
June 19, 1957 - Guy’s story is documented on the Ralph Edward’s Television show, This is Your Life. Guy’s experiences on Saipan are highlighted, however Guy’s role in the Battle for Tinian isn’t mentioned.
August 1, 1960 - Allied Artists releases the biopic war movie, HELL TO ETERNITY, accurately portraying Guy’s cunning and bravery on Saipan.
Guy is unhappy with Ted Sherdeman’s fictitious bar scene, added to the story in order to contractually promote Patricia Owens, “The girl with the high compression motor”. To control film running time, Guy’s role in the consequential Battle for Tinian is edited out and replaced by the lengthy (Hollywood-required) whiskey-and-wild-women sequence.
Director Phil Karlson, nevertheless, is happy with the finished product. He calls Hell to Eternity “one of the most important pictures that I may ever make because it’s the true story of the Nisei and what happened in this country”.
Guy Gabaldon conducts a Saipan Museum Board Meeting in 1981. Jill Oxborrow, Secretary (on Guy’s left), Jim Kirby, Treasurer (across from Guy in aviator glasses), Florence Selepeo, President (on Jim’s left). photo by Ted Oxborrow
Comentários