The Observer Magazine cover story of 26 May 1974 was Mark Frankland’s incredible account of a Japanese soldier who refused to surrender even decades after the end of the second world war (‘Why Lieutenant Onoda fought on for 30 hopeless years’). This was, depending on your viewpoint, an admirable show of duty and honour or the tale of a life ruined by being too loyal to the cause.
The Japanese government had a list of 3,600 soldiers who never came back home (so-called stragglers) after they surrendered on 15 August 1945. ‘Most of the stragglers,’ said Frankland, ‘believed that whatever had happened to Japan – and most of them had only a hazy idea of how the war had ended – the Japanese army would one day come back to rescue them.’
And try they did. But no one was as hard to entice out as Hiroo Onoda. The first news that he was alive came in 1950 when one of the three other soldiers in his group got lost and surrendered. Onoda ended up on the small island of Lubang in the Philippines. He and fellow soldier Kozuka had been raiding villages for food and other supplies.
A gun battle between the police and the pair in 1972 ended in Kozuka’s death. Another Japanese search party was then sent ‘taking Onoda’s brother and elderly father along to call to him through megaphones’. Even though he heard them, he continued to hide – taught that the war could last for decades he assumed that searches were enemy tricks.
It was a 24-year-old ‘university drop-out’, Norio Suzuki, who finally convinced him to surrender. But even then, Onoda told him: ‘I still need an order from my senior officer before making a decision to give myself up.’
He’d survived largely on bananas and coconuts and was in surprisingly good shape, and later returned to the island to much fanfare in 1996. He died in Tokyo, in 2014, aged 91.
Chris Hall
