Iwo Jima Is Now "Iwo To"

i think its a good idea to revert back to its original name. but if the clint eastwood film hadnt of come out just now maybe the japanese would of held of re-naming for a tad longer

Islands discovered by Europeans and named by Europeans. As for the first inhabitants they only arrived in 1889 – a mere 50 years before the Pacific War. Why not it’s original name “Sulphur Island”?

Iwo['sulphur']-jima['island'] and neighbouring islands were already known to European navigators by Cook’s time and according to James Burney, who accompanied Cook on his last two voyages :

…were discovered by Bernardo de la Torre in the San Juan, in 1543, and named Las Volcanes…They were seen in the last voyage of Captain Cook; and the Fortuna or Farrallon, which is the middle one of the three (named in the present charts Sulphur Island) was found to be in a latitude 24″ 48′N; and longitude from Greenwich 141″20′E…which is 3’45′ more East than the longitude given to Fortuna in the table of Bueno, and is a ground for the correction of the situations of the islands near it. A chronological history of the discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean

We have this 1779 account from Cook’s expedition, but he himself had been killed earlier in the year by Hawaiians:

The earth, rock, or sand, for it was not easy to distinguish of which its surface is composed, exhibited various colours, and a considerable part we conjected to be sulphur, both from its appearance to the eye, and the strong sulphureous smell which we perceived, as we approached the point. Some of the officers on board the Resolution, which passed nearer the land, thought they saw steams rising from the top of the hill. From these circumstances, Captain Gore gave it the name Sulphur Island. The Voyages of Captain James Cook Around the World

It is interesting that an island that is so symbolically associated with Japan, by both us and the Japanese (at least in 1945) was. so far as appears to be known, discovered and originally named by Europeans – a fact which is now all but forgotten.

[1] Both names Ioto and Iojima mean ‘sulphur island’, they are alternative readings for the two characters which comprise the island’s name when written in Japanese logograhic script. The ‘w’ in Iwojima is not pronounced in modern Japanese.