Some recent stories about Okinawa have followed the same faulty manual. At least two articles have made the claim that "Okinawa was the only inhabited part of Japan where ground fighting took place in the closing days of World War II."
True, the few civilians who remained on Iwojima were not exactly "inhabitants." However, not all the inhabitants had been evacuated from the Chishima (Kuril) islands, which were part of Hokkaido when invaded by the Soviet Union.
And many civilian residents were caught up in the fighting on Karafuto (southern Sakhalin), which had been part of Japan's prefectural territory since 1943 and is listed in some statistics ahead of Hokkaido as the 48th prefecture.
One of the most important postwar decrees was Civil Ordinance No. 438 of 1952 "concerning the disposition of nationality and family register matters regarding Koreans, Taiwanese, and others, in conjunction with the effectuation of the Treaty of Peace." Article 1 deals with Korea and Taiwan as lost nonprefectural territories. Article 2 concerns Karafuto and Chishima as lost parts of the prefectural territory.
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