At the end of World War 2, not a few Japanese soldiers never got the word that Japan had surrendered – or they just plain ignored the word they got. Some had been marooned on isolated islands that, without a war going on, nobody cared about. Others refused to believe the news, and faded into the woods to carry on the war and await rescue.
During the seventies – I remember a few of the stories as a kid – the last of these men were being coaxed out of the jungle (or, in some cases, carried out).
In the US, they were punch lines; I remember some of them from when I was a kid in the seventies.
In Japan, on the other hand…
The last, and most famous of these holdouts, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Army, died last week at 91. He led a small detachment of holdouts in the Phillipine jungle for 29 years.
Lieutenant Onoda, an intelligence officer trained in guerrilla tactics, and three enlisted men with him found leaflets proclaiming the war’s end, but believed they were enemy propaganda. They built bamboo huts, pilfered rice and other food from a village and killed cows for meat; they were tormented by tropical heat, rats and mosquitoes, and they patched their uniforms and kept their rifles in working order.
Onoda emerges from the jungle 40 years ago.
They weren’t a punch line in the Philippines:
Considering themselves to be at war, they evaded American and Filipino search parties and attacked islanders they took to be enemy guerrillas; about 30 inhabitants were killed in skirmishes with the Japanese over the years. One of the enlisted men surrendered to Filipino forces in 1950, and two others were shot dead, one in 1954 and another in 1972, by island police officers searching for the renegades.
The last holdout, Lieutenant Onoda, officially declared dead in 1959, was found by Norio Suzuki, a student searching for him, in 1974. The lieutenant rejected Mr. Suzuki’s pleas to go home, insisting he was still awaiting orders. Mr. Suzuki returned with photographs, and the Japanese government sent a delegation, including the lieutenant’s brother and his former commander, to relieve him of duty formally.
He returned to a hero’s welcome, to a nation that – according to today’s media conventional wisdom – was hungry for some sort of meaning as Japan’s recovery from war-shattered nation to prosperity gathered steam.