Japanese soldier who hid in jungle for 29 years dies.

[mojaveman]

A Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for three decades, refusing to believe the war was over until his former commander returned and ordered him to surrender, has died in Tokoyo at 91.

He wasn't the only one either, I remember reading about a number of them who hid out until a long time after the war was over.

http://news.yahoo.com/japan-wwii-soldier-hid-jungle-until-1974-dies-091014526.html

[Richard]

Remained at his post from 1945 until officially releived of his duties in 1974.

And so it goes...

Richard

Hiroo Onoda, Soldier Who Hid in Jungle for Decades, Dies at 91
NYT, 17 Jan 2014

Hiroo Onoda, an Imperial Japanese Army officer who remained at his jungle post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, refusing to believe that World War II was over, and returned to a hero’s welcome in the all but unrecognizable Japan of 1974, died Thursday at a Tokyo hospital, the Japanese government said. He was 91.

Caught in a time warp, Mr. Onoda, a second lieutenant, was one of the war’s last holdouts: a soldier who believed the emperor was a deity and the war a sacred mission; who survived on bananas and coconuts and sometimes killed villagers he assumed were enemies; who finally went home to the lotus land of paper and wood that turned out to be a futuristic world of skyscrapers, television, jet planes, pollution and atomic destruction.

Japanese history and literature are replete with heroes who have remained loyal to a cause, especially if it is lost or hopeless, and Lieutenant Onoda, a small, wiry man of dignified manner and military bearing, seemed to many like a samurai of old, offering his sword as a gesture of surrender to President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, who returned it to him.

And his homecoming, with roaring crowds, celebratory parades and speeches by public officials, stirred his nation with a pride that many Japanese had found lacking in postwar years of rising prosperity and materialism. His ordeal of deprivation may have seemed a pointless waste to much of the world, but in Japan it was a moving reminder of the redemptive qualities of duty and perseverance.

It happened with a simple command. As related in a memoir after he came home, Lieutenant Onoda’s last order in early 1945 was to stay and fight. Loyal to a military code that taught that death was preferable to surrender, he remained behind on Lubang Island, 93 miles southwest of Manila, when Japanese forces withdrew in the face of an American invasion.

After Japan surrendered in August, thousands of Japanese soldiers were scattered across China, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Many stragglers were captured or went home, while hundreds went into hiding rather than surrender or commit suicide. Many died of starvation or sickness. A few survivors refused to believe the dropped leaflets and radio announcements saying the war had been lost.

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 tricks. They built bamboo huts; ate bananas, coconuts and rice pilfered from a village, and killed cows for meat. Tormented by tropical heat, rats and mosquitoes, they patched their uniforms and kept their rifles in working order.

Considering themselves 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 his 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 formally relieve him of duty.

“I am sorry I have disturbed you for so long a time,” Lieutenant Onoda told his brother, Toshiro.

In Manila, the lieutenant, wearing his tattered uniform, presented his sword to President Marcos, who pardoned him for crimes committed while he thought he was at war.

He was already a national hero when he arrived in Tokyo. He was met by his aging parents and huge flag-waving crowds with an outpouring of emotion. More than patriotism or admiration for his grit, his jungle saga, which had dominated the news in Japan for days, evoked waves of nostalgia and melancholy in a people searching for deeper meaning in their growing postwar affluence.

The 52-year-old lieutenant — a ghost from the past in a new blue suit, close-cropped military haircut and wispy mustache and chin whiskers — spoke earnestly of duty, and seemed to personify a devotion to traditional values that many Japanese thought had been lost.

“I was fortunate that I could devote myself to my duty in my young and vigorous years,” he said. Asked what had been on his mind all those years in the jungle, he said: “Nothing but accomplishing my duty.”

In an editorial, The Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo newspaper, said: “To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten.”

After his national welcome in Japan, Mr. Onoda was examined by doctors, who found him in amazingly good condition. He was given a military pension and signed a $160,000 contract for a ghostwritten memoir, “No Surrender: My Thirty Year War.” As his story went global in books, articles and documentaries, he tried to lead a normal life.

He went dancing, took driving lessons and traveled up and down the Japanese islands. But he found himself a stranger in a strange land, disillusioned with materialism and overwhelmed by changes. “There are so many tall buildings and automobiles in Tokyo,” he said. “Television might be convenient, but it has no influence on my life here.”

In 1975, he moved to a Japanese colony in São Paulo, Brazil, raised cattle and in 1976 married Machie Onuku, a Japanese tea-ceremony teacher. In 1984, the couple returned to Japan and founded the Onoda Nature School, a survival-skills youth camp. In 1996, he revisited Lubang and gave $10,000 to a school. In recent years, he lived in Japan and Brazil, where he was made an honorary citizen in 2010.

Hiroo Onoda was born on March 19, 1922, in Kainan, Wakayama, in central Japan, one of seven children of Tanejiro and Tamae Onoda. At 17, he went to work for a trading company in Wuhan, China, which Japanese forces occupied in 1938. In 1942, he joined the Japanese Army, was singled out for special training and attended Nakano School, the army’s training center for intelligence officers. He studied guerrilla warfare, philosophy, history, martial arts, propaganda and covert operations.

In late December 1944, he was sent to Lubang, a strategic island 16 miles long and 6 miles wide on the southwestern approach to Manila Bay and the island of Corregidor, with orders to sabotage harbor installations and an airstrip to disrupt a coming American invasion. But superior officers on the island superseded those orders to focus on preparations for a Japanese evacuation.

When American forces landed on Feb. 28, 1945, and the last Japanese fled or were killed, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi gave Lieutenant Onoda his final orders, to stand and fight. “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you,” the major promised.

Twenty-nine years later, the retired major, by then a bookseller, returned to Lubang at Tokyo’s request to fulfill his promise. Japan had lost the war, he said, and the lieutenant was relieved of duty. The ragged soldier saluted and wept.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/world/asia/hiroo-onoda-imperial-japanese-army-officer-dies-at-91.html?_r=0

[Divemaster]

When I was a little kid we were living on Guam, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force. I remember the big news on the island when a Japanses soldier was found after hiding out for 28 years. The headline in the Pacific Daily News was something like "No Man an Island Myth Destroyed".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16681636

Shoichi Yokoi, the Japanese soldier who held out in Guam
By Mike Lanchin
BBC World Service

It's exactly 40 years since a Japanese soldier was found in the jungles of Guam, having survived there for nearly three decades after the end of World War II. He was given a hero's welcome on his return to Japan - but never quite felt at home in modern society.
For most of the 28 years that Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in the Japanese Army of world War II, was hiding in the jungles of Guam, he firmly believed his former comrades would one day return for him.
And even when he was eventually discovered by local hunters on the Pacific island, on 24 January 1972, the 57-year-old former soldier still clung to the notion that his life was in danger.
"He really panicked," says Omi Hatashin, Yokoi's nephew.
Startled by the sight of other humans after so many years on his own, Yokoi tried to grab one of the hunter's rifles, but weakened by years of poor diet, he was no match for the local men.
"He feared they would take him as a prisoner of war - that would have been the greatest shame for a Japanese soldier and for his family back home," Hatashin says.
As they led him away through the jungle's tall foxtail grass, Yokoi cried for them to kill him there and then.
Using Yokoi's own memoirs, published in Japanese two years after his discovery, as well as the testimony of those who found him that day, Hatashin spent years piecing together his uncle's dramatic story.
His book, Private Yokoi's War and Life on Guam, 1944-1972, was published in English in 2009.
"I am very proud of him. He was a shy and quiet person, but with a great presence," he says.
Underground shelter
Yokoi's long ordeal began in July 1944 when US forces stormed Guam as part of their offensive against the Japanese in the Pacific.
The fighting was fierce, casualties were high on both sides, but once the Japanese command was disrupted, soldiers such as Yokoi and others in his platoon were left to fend for themselves.
"From the outset they took enormous care not to be detected, erasing their footprints as they moved through the undergrowth," Hatashin said.
In the early years the Japanese soldiers, soon reduced to a few dozen in number, caught and killed local cattle to feed off.
But fearing detection from US patrols and later from local hunters, they gradually withdrew deeper into the jungle.
There they ate venomous toads, river eels and rats.
Yokoi made a trap from wild reeds for catching eels. He also dug himself an underground shelter, supported by strong bamboo canes.
"He was an extremely resourceful man," Hatashin says.
Keeping himself busy also kept him from thinking too much about his predicament, or his family back home, his nephew said.
Yokoi's own memoirs of his time in hiding reveal his desperation not to give up hope, especially in the last eight years when he was totally alone - his last two surviving companions died in floods in 1964.
Turning his thoughts to his ageing mother back home, he at one point wrote: "It was pointless to cause my heart pain by dwelling on such things."
And of another occasion, when he was desperately sick in the jungle, he wrote: "No! I cannot die here. I cannot expose my corpse to the enemy. I must go back to my hole to die. I have so far managed to survive but all is coming to nothing now."
Two weeks after his discovery in the jungle, Yokoi returned home to Japan to a hero's welcome.
He was besieged by the media, interviewed on radio and television, and was regularly invited to speak at universities and in schools across the country.
Hatashin, who was six when Yokoi married his aunt, said that the former soldier never really settled back into life in modern Japan.
He was unimpressed by the country's rapid post-war economic development and once commented on seeing a new 10,000 yen bank note that the currency had now become "valueless".
According to Hatashin, his uncle grew increasingly nostalgic about the past as he grew older, and before his death in 1997 he went back to Guam on several occasions with his wife.
Some of his prize possessions from those years in the jungle, including his eel traps, are still on show in a small museum on the island.

[mojaveman]

Could it be that these former soldiers had strong reasons for hiding out? Cowards, deserters or criminals maybe?

[ghp95134]

Could it be that these former soldiers had strong reasons for hiding out? Cowards, deserters or criminals maybe?

You left out "Duty." Recall: he was a graduate of the Army Nakano Academy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakano_School) [陸軍中野学校]; and the prevailing, though corrupted, neo-Bushido inculcation of the period.

--ghp

[Dusty]

RIP

[therunningwolf]

RIP Lieutenant Onoda

I had the pleasure of serving a little time in Japan and living next door to the Japanese Airman dorms on base, I was one of the few Americans that would actually approach and attempt to hang out with them, we had a lot of good times and I learned my way around Tokyo fairly well thanks to that exchange.
I found them to be very dedicated and hard working, not to mention respectful.

Thinking on it now, that was a odd experience. The first time a member of my family visited Japan we were enemies, the second, we shook hands as friends. Funny how things work out.

[Airbornelawyer]

This may be harsh, but no RIP from me. Onoda and his team weren't guerrillas; they were fanatics who denied all evidence the war was over and spent their time murdering farmers and fishermen.

[Dusty]

Do you know for certain this guy stabbed babies, personally?

I know for certain he gutted it out for nearly three decades.

RIP, Warrior

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/hiroo-onoda-japanese-soldier-dies


The last Japanese soldier to come out of hiding and surrender, almost 30 years after the end of the second world war, has died.

Hiroo Onoda, an army intelligence officer, caused a sensation when he was persuaded to come out of hiding in the Philippine jungle in 1974.

The native of Wakayama prefecture in western Japan died of heart failure at a hospital in Tokyo on Thursday, his family said. He was 91.

Onoda’s three decades spent in the jungle – initially with three comrades and finally alone – came to be seen as an example of the extraordinary lengths to which some Japanese soldiers would go to demonstrate their loyalty to the then emperor, in whose name they fought.

Refusing to believe that the war had ended with Japan’s defeat in August 1945, Onoda drew on his training in guerilla warfare to kill as many as 30 people whom he mistakenly believed to be enemy soldiers.

The world had known of his existence since 1950 when one of his fellow stragglers emerged and returned to Japan. A second member of the group reportedly died in 1950.

Onoda, whose sole remaining companion was killed in a shootout with Philippine troops in 1972, held firm until two years later.

He was only persuaded to surrender when his former commanding officer travelled to his hideout on the island of Lubang in the north-western Philippines and convinced him that the war had ended.

Until then, Onoda would later explain, he believed attempts to persuade him to leave were a plot concocted by the pro-US government in Tokyo. By the time he surrendered he had been on the island since 1944, two years after he was drafted into the Japanese imperial army.

Onoda wept uncontrollably as he agreed to lay down his perfectly serviceable rifle.

He was later pardoned for the killings by the then Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos. In his formal surrender to Marcos, Onoda wore his 30-year-old imperial army uniform, cap and sword, all of which were in good condition.

He returned to Japan in March the same year, but after struggling to adapt to life in his homeland, he emigrated to Brazil in 1975 to become a farmer. He returned to Japan in 1984 and opened nature camps for children across Japan.

Snip

I'm confused over the fact that it's generally acceptable in this Country for a late-term abortion "doctor" to stab babies in the head with forceps and yank them out of the birth canal at will but a Soldier follows his last direct order for 30 years and he gets dissed.

[Airbornelawyer]

He murdered farmers, personally. Often killed from behind, as they worked in their fields, and their bodies mutilated. I can't rule it out, but I can find no evidence that any of his team's victims were police or soldiers.

As for Marcos, his pardon was in part a publicity stunt and in part a reflection of the fact that in the early 1970s Japanese bilateral assistance skyrocketed, increasing seven-fold from the 1960s to the 1970s and surpassing the United States to become the largest source of foreign assistance to the Philippines.

I do not condemn all Japanese soldiers. I have known a lot of Japanese people, soldiers and civilians, over the years. If I were in Tokyo, I would probably visit Yasukuni Shrine.

Onoda made some effort late in life to atone for his sins, I will grant that. But far too many obituaries of him seem to be whitewashing and engaging in hagiography or hero worship, which he does not deserve.

[Dusty]

He murdered farmers, personally. Often killed from behind, as they worked in their fields, and their bodies mutilated. I can't rule it out, but I can find no evidence that any of his team's victims were police or soldiers.

As for Marcos, his pardon was in part a publicity stunt and in part a reflection of the fact that in the early 1970s Japanese bilateral assistance skyrocketed, increasing seven-fold from the 1960s to the 1970s and surpassing the United States to become the largest source of foreign assistance to the Philippines.

I do not condemn all Japanese soldiers. I have known a lot of Japanese people, soldiers and civilians, over the years. If I were in Tokyo, I would probably visit Yasukuni Shrine.

Onoda made some effort late in life to atone for his sins, I will grant that. But far too many obituaries of him seem to be whitewashing and engaging in hagiography or hero worship, which he does not deserve.

You've obviously done much more extensive research on the subject than I have to lead you to want to deny the guy's rest in peace.

I'm just going by the facts I've read: He was a Soldier who followed his last direct order under extreme survival conditions for 29 years, surrendering with his equipment having been meticulously maintained, killed people who he mistook as the enemy, repented the killings and tried to be a good guy for the rest of his life.