Hiroo Onoda

) was a Japanese soldier who served as a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. One of the last Japanese holdouts, Onoda continued fighting for nearly 29 years after the war's end in 1945, carrying out guerrilla warfare on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974.

Onoda initially held out with three other soldiers. One surrendered in 1950, and two were killed, one in 1954 and one in 1972. The men did not believe flyers and letters from their families stating that the war was over. They survived on wild fruits, game, and stolen rice, and occasionally engaged in shootouts (using their service rifles) with locals and police. Onoda was contacted in the jungles of Lubang by Japanese adventurer Norio Suzuki in 1974 but still refused to surrender until he was formally relieved of duty by his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who flew from Japan to the island to issue the order.

Onoda surrendered on 10 March 1974 and received a hero's welcome when he returned to Japan. That year, he wrote and published an autobiography and later moved to Brazil, where he became a cattle rancher. In 1984, Onoda returned to Japan, where he died in 2014 at the age of 91.

Early life and service

Onoda was born on 19 March 1922, in Kamekawa, Wakayama, in the Empire of Japan. In 1939, he went to work at a branch of the Tajima Yoko trading company in Wuhan, China, and in 1942 was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army.

thumb|Hiroo Onoda (right) and his younger brother Shigeo, 1944

On 26 December 1944, Onoda was sent to lead guerrilla warfare operations on Lubang Island in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. His mission was to destroy the island's airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion as well as to destroy any enemy planes or boats that attempted to land. His orders explicitly stated that under no circumstances was he to surrender or take his own life.

Time in hiding

While in hiding, Onoda and his companions continued their mission, carrying out guerrilla activities, surviving on bananas, coconuts, stolen rice and cattle, and on several occasions engaging in shootouts with locals and police. They successfully evaded American and Filipino search parties and attacked villagers whom they believed to be enemy guerrillas, allegedly killing up to 30 civilians on the island.

First time seeing surrender announcement

The first time Onoda's group saw a leaflet announcing that Japan had surrendered was in October 1945: a separate group of Japanese holdouts showed them a note left behind by islanders that read: "The war ended on 15 August. Come down from the mountains!" The men concluded that the leaflet was Allied propaganda and reasoned that they would not have been fired on before if the war had ended. Near the end of 1945, leaflets with a surrender order from General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army were dropped by air on Lubang. Onoda's group studied them to determine whether they were genuine and decided that they were not.

Surrender of Akatsu

Akatsu separated from the group in September 1949, and after six months on his own, surrendered to Philippine forces in March 1950. The others considered this a desertion and a betrayal and became even more cautious as a result. In February 1952, letters from the three soldiers' families, urging their surrender, along with family photographs, were dropped by air, but the group concluded that it was a trick.

Death of Shimada

Shimada was wounded in the leg in a shootout with local fishers in June 1953, after which Onoda nursed him back to health. On 7 May 1954, Shimada was killed in a shootout with a Philippine Army mountain unit that accidentally encountered the soldiers while training on the island.

Death of Kozuka

On 19 October 1972, Kozuka was killed in a shootout with local police while conducting a recurring raid in which he and Onoda would burn piles of rice harvested by villagers, which they intended as a signal to fellow Japanese forces that their group was still alive and carrying out its duties on Lubang. Onoda was alone from this point on.

Surrender and return to Japan

On 20 February 1974, Onoda encountered Norio Suzuki, a Japanese adventurer who was traveling around the world and had told friends he was looking for "Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the abominable snowman, in that order".

thumb|Onoda surrendering his sword to Philippine President [[Ferdinand Marcos on 11 March 1974]]

Onoda was thus relieved of duty, and on 10 March 1974 surrendered to Philippine forces at Lubang's radar base. On 11 March, a formal surrender ceremony was held by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos at Malacañang Palace in Manila, which attracted attention from the international press. Marcos granted Onoda a full pardon for any crimes he had committed while in hiding. Onoda turned over his sword, a functioning Type 99 rifle made by Arisaka, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades, as well as a dagger his mother had given him in 1944 to kill himself if captured. He had held out for 28 years, 6 months, and 8 days (10,416 days) after Japan's surrender in 1945. Only Private Teruo Nakamura, arrested on 18 December 1974 in Indonesia, held out longer.

Later life

Onoda, who had been declared dead by the Japanese government in 1959, was the subject of widespread attention from the press and public upon his return to Japan in 1974. He was reportedly unhappy at receiving such attention and at what he saw as the withering of traditional Japanese values. He wrote No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, an autobiography published in 1974. In April 1975, he followed the example of his elder brother Tadao and left Japan for Brazil, where he became a cattle farmer. He married in 1976 and assumed a leading role in the Colônia Jamic ("Jamic Colony"), a Japanese Brazilian community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul. After reading about a case in which a Japanese teenager murdered his parents in 1980, Onoda returned to Japan in 1984 and established the Onoda Shizen Juku ("Onoda Nature School"), an educational camp for young people in Fukushima Prefecture.

After the war, Filipino news media interviewed villagers who had lived on Lubang during Onoda's time in hiding and alleged that he and his men had killed up to thirty civilians. Onoda had not mentioned these deaths in his autobiography, however. In 1996, he visited the town of Looc on Lubang after his wife Machie (née Honoku) arranged a US$10,000 scholarship donation on his behalf to the local school. The town council presented Onoda with a resolution asking him to compensate the families of seven people whom he had allegedly killed, and about fifty close relatives of the alleged victims staged a protest against his visit.

After 1984, Onoda spent three months of the year in Brazil and the rest in Japan. For allowing the Brazilian Air Force to conduct training sessions on his land, he was awarded the Santos-Dumont Merit Medal on 6 December 2004. On 21 February 2010, the Legislative Assembly of Mato Grosso do Sul awarded him honorary citizenship.

In 2006, his wife Machie became head of the conservative Japan Women's Association, which had been established in 2001 by the ultranationalist organization Nippon Kaigi.

Death

On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure resulting from pneumonia at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga commented on his death, saying, "I vividly remember that I was reassured of the end of the war when Mr. Onoda returned to Japan".

Bibliography

Interviews

"Hiroo Onoda describes his private thirty years of war against the United States". Broadcast on The Mike Douglas Show, 14 February 1975.

Representation in other media

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle – 2021 French film co-written and directed by Arthur Harari based on historic accounts of Onoda's life
The Twilight World – 2021 novel by German director Werner Herzog

Footnotes

External links

(with Shoichi Yokoi)
"Onoda Shizen Juku"
Taylor, Alan. Image No. 45 (last at bottom): Photo of Onoda wearing his sword, on his last day before being relieved, with narrative caption, "World War II: After the War, a Retrospective in 20 Parts". The Atlantic, 30 October 2011
Hiroo Onoda obituary The Daily Telegraph
"Hiroo Onoda fought WWII for 30 Additional Years" (video)
Hiroo Onoda (middle): The Imperial Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for 30 years after WWII. March 11, 1974 (photo), Imgur