Talk:Iwo Jima

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Home Island or not?

One existing paragraph (in "Pre-1945") includes:

"an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with poor economic prospects, Iwo Jima had to import all rice and consumer goods from the Home Islands."

A closely following paragraph (in "Battle of Iwo Jima") includes:

"The battle [American invasion of Iwo Jima] was the first U.S. attack on the Japanese Home Islands"

Is Iwo Jima included in "the Home Islands" or not?

I suspect the latter quote is incorrect, that the author was just lazy in saying that the Japanese considered the invasion almost tantamount to an invasion of the Home Islands. I have not made this change because I have no personal knowledge of the Japanese attitude to Iwo Jima.

222.152.169.218 (talk) 05:12, 26 September 2019 (UTC)Martyn

The exact scope of the Japanese Home Islands is rather vague. In general, it either means the main four (five if including the Okinawa Main Island) islands of Japan, or alternatively every island in Japan except islands located in Okinawa Prefecture. In a legal sense, there has also been various definitions, such as: "Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu islands are the Home Islands and islands adjunct to the Home Island are isolated islands'" (according to ja:離島航路整備法), "Japanese territory excluding Okinawa is the Home Islands" (according to ja:沖縄の復帰に伴う特別措置に関する法律). In a historical sense, the pre-ww2 term 'Mainland Japan' or naichi in Japanese, was synonymous to the Home Islands. Naichi included present day Japanese territory (including disputed ones) and the southern half of Sakhalin. More recently, the transfer of Okinawa and the Bonin Islands (laying south of Iwo Jima) from the US to Japan was described as the 'Return to the Home Islands'(ja:本土復帰). So to give a short answer, Iwo Jima is and isn't part of the Home Islands, depending on context. Kind regards, Hms1103 (talk) 09:10, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

missing...

The article on the Iwo Jima rail says the Island once had forests. This article doesn't mention them, at all. A sad omission. Maybe RS don't cover this aspect of the Island very well. The Iwo Jima rail article cites references that either were never online, or have gone 404. The references I looked at say the deep dome of lava, under the Island, keep expanding, pushing land out of the sea... that land that was at beach level when benchmarks were installed, is now over 100 feet above sea level. Apparently the Island is one of the top volcanic sites overdue for a huge blowout. This should also be in the article. Geo Swan (talk) 22:45, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

This issue was raised quite a while ago, so I don’t know how much the article has changed in these respects, but it’s forested past and a few more of these things are currently mentioned under Geography -> Eruption History, but don’t really expand much on the topic.

I agree on how the islands significance for vulcanism research/observation is under-emphasized. SkSlick (talk) 23:47, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

DoN't uSe CaMeL cAsE oK~

There's extensive discussion in the archives of trying to get the page moved to Ioto (which will never be the COMMON ENGLISH name until the WWII generation's grandkids are gone and probably not even then) or Iōtō (which will never be the COMMON ENGLISH form ever but might show up more and more in political and scholarly use). Even when they were thinking about using Iwoto, no one ever discussed the current page's "IoTo"... because it's so obviously completely wrong. I assume it's from a Japanese editor or overenthusiastic teenager trying to "helpfully" show where the characters are but that's not how any of this works. It's not ToKyo. It's not ShangHai. It's not IoTo.

Pick any of Iōtō (correct fwiw), Ioto, Io To, Io-to, or Io-To but don't try to turn the islands into an ioPhone. — LlywelynII 22:35, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Sources for future article expansion

• Eldridge, Robert D. (2014), Iwo Jima and the Bonin Islands in U.S.–Japan Relations: American Strategy, Japanese Territory, and the Islanders In-Between (PDF), Quantico: Marine Corps University Press.

This is a fantastically clear, well-researched, and careful work—as far as the initial sections anyway—and should probably be used for almost all of the historical sections up to the name change.

• Iwo Jima in 45 Eruptions.

This just seems to be a blog entry but it also seems very well done, certainly better than the current article even patched up. It could possibly be used to search for the right sources to include more of the right details in the article if Eldridge doesn't cover them.

• O'Rourke, Patrick Jake (June 2004), "Sulfur Island", The Atlantic, Washington: Atlantic Monthly.

This is a personal essay but fantastically well-written and includes details for its era that could be helpfully included.

• Caldwell, Thomas (14 March 1995), "Iwo Jima: Island Nobody Wanted", Official site, Washington: United Press International.

This is kind of the opposite: it seems serious but is so ridiculously lazy and hackish he talks about De le Torre as Detores and makes up various details to the actual account. It could, however, point towards some details about the battle and aftermath (get real sourcing elsewhere though: this isn't an RS) and be used as an example for some of the various mistakes people have just repeated from one another over the years. — LlywelynII 10:01, 25 January 2023 (UTC)