Hiroo Onoda & The Surrender of Japan

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

 

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

 

Today’s episode is taking us to a time and place that I will never stop being fascinated with: Japan during the Second World War. / World War II

 

Usually, the topics we do on this show tend to be pretty large in scope – huge conflicts or pivotal events – but this episode is going to be a much smaller, much more personal story. Today, we’re going to be looking at the life of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued fighting for 30 years after the end of World War 2.

 

Now, odds are, if you’re a fan of World War 2 history, you’ve probably heard about this guy before. Hiroo Onoda is the most famous example of the Japanese holdout, a post-war phenomenon where isolated pockets of the Japanese Imperial Army refused to surrender, believing…or perhaps hoping, that the war had not truly ended.

 

In 1944, Onoda was deployed to a tiny island in the Philippines to fight against the American army. And he did not emerge from that jungle until 1974, ostensibly unaware that World War Two was over. In that time, he murdered something like 30 people, believing he was fighting for an empire that no longer existed.

 

Onoda’s story has already been told ad nauseum in a variety of mediums, from podcasts to feature films to historical fiction. The celebrated director Werner Herzog even wrote a book about him in 2021.  There’s just something about this topic that continues to fascinate, to enthrall, to beggar belief.

 

But the story we’re going to tell today is not just about one sad soldier in the jungle. Because while Onoda’s life is certainly fascinating in a vacuum, it is much more interesting when juxtaposed against what was happening at home in Japan. While Onoda was languishing, surviving and killing in the wilderness, his country was undergoing a radical transformation.

 

Under the watchful, imperious eye of American occupation, the Land of the Rising Sun completely jettisoned its national identity and remade itself into something new. But while Japan was racing forward into an uncertain future… Hiroo Onoda was standing still.

 

That fundamental tension is the heart of this episode. A man who could not fathom defeat, fighting for a nation that was embracing it.

 

At its core, this is a story about losing. What it means to lose; how we choose to deal with it – or not deal with it. How we accept defeat, or reject it. How we can believe in an idea so deeply, so fiercely, only to find out that it was just a mirage. An illusion.

 

This story also presents challenges of authenticity and truth. Most, if not all, accounts of Hiroo Onoda’s story draw exclusively from his autobiography, which he wrote with the aid of a ghostwriter shortly after his return from the Philippines in 1974.

 

He is the very definition of an unreliable narrator; and anyone who could corroborate his version of events is long dead.

 

But in a way, that’s par for the course. At the end of the day, history is a locked room. We know the truth is in there. We know it exists, right behind the door. But the past is inaccessible, and we can never truly step inside. All we can do is find little keyholes, little cracks and vantage points and narrow perspectives, that with time and persistence, can help us assemble an impressionist portrait of the truth.

 

In Hiroo Onoda’s story, there are very few keyholes. His autobiography, as flawed and biased as it is, forms the foundation/backbone of this episode. But that said, I’ve tried to approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism and honesty and factual mitigation, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the results.

 

So with all that said, let’s jump right in.

 

Welcome to Hiroo Onoda & the Surrender of Japan

 

 

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It’s February 20^th, 1974.

 

We’re alone in the jungle, on a tiny island in the Philippines.

 

There are 7,641 islands in the Philippines, that ancient, labyrinthine archipelago just north of Australia. So many islands in fact, that you could visit a new one every single day for the next 20 years, and you still wouldn’t have seen them all.

 

But this island - our island - is called Lubang. That’s L-U-B-A-N-G. Lubang.

 

Although it is located just 61 nautical miles from the capital city of Manila, Lubang feels like another planet. Life is hard here. The 10,000 people who call the island home survive by hauling up fishing nets or working their fingers raw in the rice fields. Poverty is a fact of life.

 

Still, Lubang is undeniably beautiful.

 

Like an emerald lodged in a slate of turquoise, the island’s jungle rises above the Pacific waves, ringed with beaches as white as powdered sugar. As you move deeper into the interior, the sound of the ocean recedes, replaced by screaming crickets and chattering birds. Under the dense canopy, the air is thick as soup, swimming with mosquitos and the aroma of rotting leaves. An entire ecosystem, growing and decaying in endless cycles.

 

But tonight, there is something in this jungle that does not belong.

 

A 25-year-old Japanese tourist named Norio Suzuki stumbles through the jungle, slipping on wet leaves and carrying a heavy backpack. After four days of trekking across Lubang, Suzuki is tired and hot and sweaty and uncomfortable…but he is happy.

 

He might be far from home, but he is right where he wants to be.

 

Norio Suzuki was the kind of person you can find in every airport lounge in the world. Always moving, always chatting. Possessed by an insatiable wanderlust and physically incapable of staying in one place for more than a few days.

 

Back home in Japan, young guys like Suzuki were expected to put on a tie every morning and ride a train to a job they hated. To flatter their bosses, drink until dawn, and then do it all over again. But Suzuki didn’t want any of that. He wanted to travel, to wander, to see the world. He wanted stamps on his passport, not money in his bank account.

 

And so, he left.

 

Suzuki dropped out of college, bought a plane ticket, and put Japan in the rearview. Over the next few years, he traveled to forty different countries, seeking out bigger and bigger adventures. Before long, Suzuki was describing himself as a “explorer”, like some kind of Japanese Indiana Jones.

 

There were many items on Suzuki’s bucket list, but three things in particular sat right at the top. 1.) He wanted to see a giant Panda in the wilds of China. 2) He wanted to find a real-life Yeti in the Himalayas, the “abominable snowman”; and finally, Suzuki wanted to locate the infamous Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda.

 

It had been almost thirty years since the Empire of Japan’s calamitous defeat in World War II; Thirty years since a pair of atomic bombs turned Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 200,000 people to ash. And on August 15^th, 1945, when Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled across the airwaves, announcing his plan to surrender unconditionally to the Allies, the Japanese people could hardly endure the psychic shock. Their world ended that day, and for better or worse, a new one began.

 

But for millions of Japanese soldiers, scattered across the Pacific, the news of their nation’s defeat was slow to proliferate. Eventually, most of them went home aboard American repatriation ships, but some never got the message. Others refused to believe that the Japanese Empire would ever surrender, dismissing the entire premise as Allied propaganda.

 

And so, they kept on fighting.

 

For weeks, months, years, decades - scattered pockets of fanatical Japanese soldiers fought their own guerilla war against a world that had passed them by, immune to reason and allergic to defeat. The phenomenon of the ‘Japanese holdout’ was born, capturing the imagination of people the world over. By 1960, most of the holdouts had been killed, captured, or convinced to surrender. Anyone still missing was declared dead.

 

But then, in 1972, a stunning report emerged from the Philippines.

 

On the tiny, flyspeck island of Lubang, local police had clashed with a pair of Japanese soldiers, killing one of them in a shootout. The dead man was identified as Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka. But the second man had vanished back into the jungle. Based on wartime records, this second soldier was Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, a special forces commando and intelligence officer.

 

Onoda had been declared dead back in 1959, so his sudden reappearance caused a flurry of interest back in Japan. Somehow, Onoda had managed to survive all this time. And even more implausibly, he was apparently convinced that World War 2 was still going on. Onoda had eluded the American army, Philippine police, and island patrols for years. He was ghost. Unkillable, untrackable, untraceable.

 

It was a challenge that proved irresistible to the stir-crazy college dropout, Norio Suzuki. 18 months later, he was on a plane to Manila, then a ferry to Lubang, with a brand-new camera, camping gear, and a bag of flashbulbs. The giant panda and the abominable snowman would have to wait. Suzuki was going to track down a very different kind of living legend.

 

When he arrived on Lubang, Suzuki began to understand the grip that Onoda held on the local population. The lieutenant was a hero back in Japan - an amusing, anachronistic novelty. But here on the island, he was a terror. A monster in the dark. A literal serial killer.

 

Over the last three decades, as many as 30 people or more had been murdered by the ghost in the jungle. Dozens of fathers, brothers, nephews and sons. Shot, hacked, decapitated – or all of the above. As Suzuki walked through the villages on Lubang, he would have noticed an abnormally high number of people limping along on one leg. Apparently, Onoda preferred to aim for the knee caps or the groin.

 

But still, Suzuki was undeterred. By hook or by crook, he was going to bring the Lieutenant home. And so, in the second week of February, he entered the jungle. Four days later, after countless mosquito bites and a several sleepless nights, Suzuki found what he was looking for.

 

On the evening of February 20^th, 1974, Suzuki was building a fire by a river on Lubang. The crickets were screaming, the water was churning, but above the jungle cacophony, Suzuki heard a voice call out to him. A voice speaking not in Filipino, but in Japanese. It was uncertain, quiet, the voice of a person who had not spoken to another human being in months.

 

Slowly, Suzuki turned around.

 

A shape was standing behind him. Small and sinewy, coiled tight as a spring. Suzuki’s eyes grew wide. He could see a patchy, half-rotten uniform, lean, leathery muscles, and a polished rifle

pointed directly at his chest.

 

Through the choking panic, Suzuki peered into the dusk at the apparition. It was hard to see clearly in the waning light, but this thing, this person, this man, was unmistakably a Japanese soldier. And there was only one Japanese soldier left alive on Lubang.

 

This was, this had to be, Hiroo Onoda. 

 

 

 

_>

 

Fear hit Norio Suzuki like a wave. He started shaking, trembling. His mind might have flooded with thoughts of one-legged men, red-eyed widows, and farmers buried without their heads. The rifle was still pointed at his chest, and Suzuki realized that if he didn’t do something fast, he was going to die too. So, he did the first thing that came to mind. The only thing that made sense in the moment. He dropped everything, stood up straight, and gave the soldier a salute.

 

“I’m Japanese!” Suzuki stammered, “I’m Japanese!”.

 

The soldier paused. His head whipped from side to side, as if looking for a trap. And then, in a quiet, hollow voice, he asked a question: “Did you come from the Japanese government?”

“No,” Suzuki answered, “I’m a tourist. I’m just a tourist.”

 

The soldier narrowed his eyes, his gaze corrosive with suspicion.

 

Suzuki asked, “Are you Onoda-San?”

 

“Yea,” the soldier answered, “I’m Onoda.”

 

Suzuki caught his breath, and ventured, “I know you’ve had a long, hard time. The war’s over. Won’t you come back to Japan with me?”

 

“No,” answered Onoda, “I won’t go back. For me, the war hasn’t ended.”

 

Suzuki’s mind reeled at Onoda’s resolve. For 30 long years, he’d been stranded on this island, waging a private, pointless war for an empire that no longer existed. He’d missed so many things. Lost so much time. In a sense, Onoda was the last prisoner of war, a prisoner of his own mind. Trapped forever in 1945. And yet now, still, with living proof of the war’s end standing right in front of him, Onoda refused to go home.

 

“Why?” asked Suzuki.

 

“You wouldn’t understand,” replied Onoda.

 

Over the next few hours, Suzuki tried to understand. He invited a very suspicious Onoda back to his campsite and offered him a Marlboro cigarette. Under a moonless black sky, in the middle of the Philippine jungle, the men talked all night, and Onoda told his life story to a twentysomething tourist.

 

I was younger than you, Onoda told Suzuki, when I first came to this place.

 

It all began 29 years, 1 month, and 19 days ago, when he arrived on Lubang island.

 

It’s December 31^st, 1944.

 

And the Empire of Japan is collapsing.

 

“At the peak of its expansion in early 1942,” writes historian John Dower, “Japan bestrode Asia like a colossus, one foot planted in the mid-Pacific, the other deep in the interior of China, its ambitious grasp reaching north to the Aleutian Islands and south to the Western colonial enclaves of Southeast Asia. Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” briefly embraced the Netherlands East Indies, French Indochina, the British colonial possessions of Burma, Malaya, and Hong Kong, and America’s Philippine colony. There was talk of reaching further to take India, Australia, possibly even Hawaii. Banzai cries to the glory of the emperor’s holy war and the invincibility of his loyal soldiers and sailors pierced the heavens in myriad places at home and overseas.”

 

But now, just three years after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it is all falling apart.

 

The Americans were quick to recover from the shock of Pearl Harbor, and before long, the shipyards of North America were ringing with the sounds of hammers and rivets and cutters. Planes roared into the sky, battleships plunged into the sea, and Marines leapt into landing craft – all burning with a righteous hatred for the little island chain that had dared to throw such an audacious sucker punch.

 

Japan built had its empire in the blink of an eye; and they lost it just as fast.

 

With the Americans on the offensive, disaster followed disaster in the Pacific theatre. Outgunned, outmanned, and out-strategized by the US Navy, the Japanese fleet died a slow, agonizing death in a series of decisive battles at places like Midway and Leyte Gulf. By the end of 1944, the once-invincible Japanese Navy was turning to rust at the bottom of the ocean, unable to stop the relentless Americans from establishing complete control over the Pacific.

 

Across the Japanese empire, supplies stopped flowing. Factories stopped producing. Food stopped arriving. And like vengeful hands squeezing a pair of lungs, American forces wrapped themselves around the Empire of Japan, suffocating its dominion one beach, one reef, one airstrip at a time.

 

As the bodies and the desperation mounted, both sides learned to despise the other with a cruel and feral intensity. What US Marine Eugene Sledge called a “brutish, primitive hatred.”

 

“In Europe,” remembered US reporter Ernie Pyle, “We felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people…But in the Pacific, I soon gathered that Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about mice and cockroaches.”

 

1942 became 1943 became 1944, and as the American war machine inched closer and closer to the home islands, the Japanese sought to reinforce key staging areas in the Pacific. To try and slow the American sprint to a painful crawl. One of the most important bulwarks in that defensive perimeter was the Philippine island chain, a U.S territory that Japan had seized very early in the war, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

 

But now, American warships had returned to take back what was theirs.

 

By the time shells started falling on the Philippines, any serious hope of winning the war against the United States had disappeared beneath the waves; Defeat was all but inevitable. But the militarists and bureaucrats who controlled the levers of power back in Tokyo were not content to surrender in despair. After all, an arm that can lift a white flag can also lift a sword; and they were determined to make the United States pay dearly for every grain of sand and every grove of trees in the South Pacific; to drown American morale in an ocean of blood.

 

And so, small numbers of Japanese soldiers, specializing in guerilla warfare and clandestine insurgency were dispatched to the Philippines to conduct operations against US troops.

 

One of these soldiers was Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda.

 

LUBANG

 

On December 31^st, 1944, Onoda is standing on the deck of a Japanese ship called the Seifuku Maru as it steams through the serpentine waterways of the Philippines.

 

He is a young man, about 23 years old. In pictures from the time period, Onoda looks confident, intelligent, and serious. His face is smooth as porcelain, and his taut, wiry frame stands just 5-foot-four-inches tall. But despite his diminutive stature, he is extremely well-trained.

 

Scattered across the Pacific, there are millions of Japanese soldiers fighting, killing and dying for Emperor Hirohito, the Son of Heaven. 900,000 of those soldiers are here in the Philippines. And each of them has a part to play, a specific role in the immense machinery of the war effort. Some of them haul ammunition, or dig ditches, or guard prisoners… but Hiroo Onoda is different.

 

He is - in his own words - “special”.

An elite soldier with a “special mission”.

 

And that special mission is here.

On a tiny island rising out of the gloom. 

 

As Onoda remembered decades later: “The island of Lubang began to appear over the distant horizon. Gradually it grew larger, and before long I could make out the individual palm leaves through my binoculars. There were mountains, but it looked as though the highest could not be more than fifteen to eighteen hundred feet high. My first impression of Lubang was that it was going to be difficult terrain for guerrilla warfare.”

 

It was not an impressive theatre of operations.

 

But Onoda was a loyal soldier. He would go where he was told, without a word of complaint or a whisper of doubt. His orders, which he had received a few days earlier at 14^th Army Headquarters in Manila, had been clear and direct.

 

“The first thing for you to do,” his intelligence officer had told him, “is destroy the Lubang airfield and the pier at the harbor. Should the enemy land and try to use the airfield, destroy their planes and kill the crews.”

 

As Onoda leapt off the boat, and his boots sank into the sugar-white sand of Lubang, it felt like a fresh start. Tomorrow, 1944 would become 1945. As Onoda remembered thinking on that first day: “a new year, and a new job”.

 

Onoda’s job, as he understood it, was fairly straightforward. He was supposed to link up with the Japanese garrison on the island and lead them in a coordinated guerilla insurgency against the local islanders, as well as the American troops that would eventually land to retake Lubang.

 

When they came - and they most certainly would - Onoda was going to bleed the Marines dry. He was going to confuse them, to scare them, to kill them while they slept, to engage in what he called “secret warfare”.

 

It was what he had been trained to do, and although he had never killed a man, Onoda relished the opportunity to make his family and his country proud. To protect his father, his mother, his brother back home in Japan. In his mind, every American soldier stuck dealing with Lieutenant Onoda on Lubang was an American soldier who was not marching towards Tokyo, bayoneting, burning, and raping as they went. He had to keep them tied down, keep them distracted, keep them here.

 

But thankfully, he didn’t have to do it alone.

 

There were just over a 150 Japanese soldiers on Lubang when Onoda arrived. “The best outfit in the whole Japanese Army!” an officer back in Manila had declared. When he finally met them, Onoda realized that the comment had been sarcastic.

 

The Japanese garrison on Lubang was absolutely pathetic. The worst of the worst. The dregs of the dregs. Cowards, or fanatics, or worse - cowards pretending to be fanatics. “I had been sent to this island to fight,” Onoda remembered, “only to find that the troops I was supposed to lead were a bunch of good-for-nothings.”

 

When Onoda tried to organize the men, they ignored him. When he tried to inspire them, they laughed at him. None of them had training in guerilla warfare, and they had no interest in learning. As Onoda remembered:

 

“They did not even take me seriously. My nickname among them was “Noda Shōyu,” the name of a famous brand of soy sauce. The Noda came from my name and Shōyu was suggested by shōi, the word for second lieutenant. The meaning was that I was not the main course—only a bit of seasoning.”

 

In other words, he was irrelevant, unimportant, a joke. Initially, Onoda hoped that he might be able to gain their trust, earn their respect – but that would take time. And they were out of time. On January 3^rd, just 72 hours after he had arrived, Onoda peered out at sea through his binoculars and saw:

 

“The enemy fleet. And what a fleet! As carefully as I could, I counted the vessels. There were two battleships, four aircraft carriers, four cruisers and enough light cruisers and destroyers to make up a total of thirty-seven or thirty-eight warships. What astonished me most, however, was not this awesome armada, but the host of troop transports that followed it. There must have been nearly 150 of them. As if that were not enough, the sea was literally peppered with landing craft—more than I could possibly count.”

 

The American reconquest of the Philippines had officially begun.

 

Desperately, Onoda tried to convince the garrison that they had to prepare. They had to move their supplies up the mountain, conserve their food, and prepare for a long, ugly, protracted fight. They had to stop thinking like occupiers, and start thinking like insurgents. Fighting the Americans head-to-head was not only pointless, it was wasteful. Onoda’s warnings fell on deaf ears. As the weeks dragged on, and the waters around Lubang filled with American warships, discipline broke down completely.

 

“It was infuriating,” Onoda remembered, “There I was, powerless, with a disorderly pack of troops, none of whom understood the first thing about the kind of guerrilla war that we would soon be engaged in.”

 

As they sat huddled next to campfires, some of the Japanese soldiers insisted that the Americans would not attack Lubang island at all. It was too small, too isolated, of little importance or strategic value. Why would they waste their time with a flyspeck island six miles wide and 18 miles long?

 

Why are we here, then? Onoda might have mumbled under his breath. Size had never been a marker of strategic value. The Americans had spent hundreds of lives on scraps of coral barely bigger than a football field. And besides, Lubang was too close to the all-important capital of Manila. As long as the Japanese held Lubang, it was a threat. Sooner or later, the Americans were going to land.

 

And on February 28^th, 1945, they did.

 

The Marines that leapt from the landing craft and waded through the surf were monsters. Huge, hairy, and well-fed. They were like mountain trolls with semi-automatic weapons. Tanks followed them, crawling through the powdered-sugar sand like steel turtles; and a blistering naval bombardment announced their arrival. “My whole insides shook with vibrations,” Onoda remembered, “The coast was covered with dust and smoke. Palm trees and parts of houses flew through the air.”

 

In the end, the garrison on Lubang never stood a chance.

 

Some of the Japanese officers organized a suicidal frontal assault, and were quickly cut down by the Marines. The rest scattered into the jungle, hunted by mop-up squads and hounded by bullets. Amidst the carnage and confusion, Hiroo Onoda searched for survivors. And as he roamed the jungle, he saw something that left a deep impression:

 

“I saw American chewing gum wrappers by the side of the road. In one place a wad of chewing gum was sticking to the leaf of a weed. Here we were holding on for dear life, and these characters were chewing gum while they fought! I was more sad than angry. The chewing gum tinfoil told me just how miserably we had been beaten.”

 

Hiroo Onoda turned 24 in the jungle. But he felt much, much older. In good ways, and bad. He was right about the Americans. No one had listened, but he was right. They came and they conquered and they killed. But he didn’t feel smart, or vindicated, he just felt alone and impotent. He had failed to destroy the airfield. He had failed to destroy the pier. He had failed his mission in every way but one.

 

Back in Manila, three months earlier, a Lieutenant General had been at his mission briefing. The General said something to Onoda that would be his north star, his compass, his bright and burning purpose for the next 30 years.

 

“You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand,” the General said to him, “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we’ll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that’s the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you give up your life voluntarily.”

 

The words were seared into Onoda’s grey matter:

“As long as you have one soldier.”

 

It was a command, a conditional, one that Onoda found himself hard-pressed to fulfill in the aftermath of the American assault. After all - who was even left to lead at this point? Everyone else had been killed, captured, or was too afraid to fight.

 

Well, as it turned out, the Lubang garrison may have been beaten and broken, but not everyone was dead. Not yet.

 

 

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It’s August 14^th, 1945.

 

The last night of World War II.

 

We’re in Tokyo, the capital city of the Empire of Japan.

 

Five years earlier, Tokyo had been a vibrant metropolis, teeming with promise and prosperity. This was a city drenched in history, with thousands of stories etched into every garden, temple and alleyway. 12 million people lived here.

 

Now, it is a graveyard. An ashtray.

 

American air raids, dropping napalm, white phosphorus, and incendiary bombs, have turned Tokyo into the skeleton of a city. Everything is flat and dead, as if some giant Etch-A-Sketch had simply wiped the buildings away. Millions are homeless. Streets that used to hum with parades and patriotic fervor are haunted by starving kids and feral dogs.

 

But despite the devastation, there is at least one building left standing in the heart of Tokyo:

The Imperial Palace, home of the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito.

 

In the last months of the war, the Japanese archipelago was a target-rich environment for the American air force, a bomber’s paradise of bone-dry wood and crowded neighborhoods. With the Japanese Navy destroyed, US planes and carriers could reach any corner of the home islands with impunity. But there was one building they absolutely could not touch. The Imperial Palace was considered strictly off-limits. Not necessarily because of its beauty or historical significance, but because of its occupant.

 

For the Japanese, Emperor Hirohito is a living god, the soul of the nation rendered into flesh and blood. Even the most rabid Air Force commanders knew that a direct attack on the emperor would be extremely unwise. And so, the Imperial Palace rises up from the ash, as insulated from consequences as its divine occupant.

 

But tonight, those consequences are coming home to roost.

 

Deep beneath the Palace, somewhere in its maze of hallways and antechambers, a makeshift recording studio is being prepared. Wires are connected, electricity is routed, and a microphone is placed delicately in the center of the room.

 

Just before midnight, a man enters the recording studio, flanked by a coterie of technicians and attendants. He is exhausted and somber. He wears round glasses to compensate for his bad eyesight. At 44 years old, Emperor Hirohito does not look – or feel - much like a living god.

 

The emperor sits in front of the microphone and prepares to read the document that is laid out before him. It’s only 652 words, about 4-and-a-half-minutes of recording time, but it will alter the destiny of millions of people around the world. This document is an address to the subjects of the emperor, an official declaration informing them that Japan is going to surrender unconditionally to the Allies.

 

Surrender had not been Hirohito’s first choice. “If we hold out long enough in this war,” he once told an advisor, “…We might be able to win.”

 

But then, two things happened. On August 6^th, the United States erased the city of Hiroshima from the map with an atomic weapon. The next day, August 7^th, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. This was check-mate. Game over. As one Imperial advisor remembered: “I felt the atomic bomb struck me hard on one cheek, and immediately afterwards the Soviet declaration of war hit me with full force on the other cheek.”

 

“Emperor Hirohito had to make a hard decision”, one historian wrote, “Either keep on fighting and ensure that his entire country is completely obliterated—or agree to an unconventional surrender which would almost certainly ensure that his whole cabinet and most likely himself would be tried as war criminals.”

 

In the end, Hirohito chose to gamble on the mercy of the Americans, as he told his Cabinet: “All of us now must bear the unbearable and tolerate the intolerable.”

 

And so, just before midnight on August 14^th, Hirohito takes a breath, leans close to the microphone, and reads. His voice is wobbly, unsure of itself. He stumbles and speaks in a stiff, clipped cadence. But he gets through it. The audio technicians check the recording and have it pressed onto two phonograph records. Tomorrow at noon, the recording will be broadcast on Japanese state radio. For most of the emperor’s subjects, it will be the very first time they have heard his voice.

 

But tonight, not everyone in the Japanese High Command is willing to “bear the unbearable.”

 

While the Emperor is recording his address down in the Imperial catacombs, an armed coup d’état is unfolding up above. A battalion of renegade soldiers, enraged at the humiliating prospect of surrender, has decided to overthrow Hirohito’s government and stop the recording from being broadcast. To intercept the message and destroy it. The Son of Heaven had clearly gone insane, they thought; Didn’t he know? Didn’t he understand what would happen if US troops were allowed enter the nation, victorious and unopposed?

 

The Americans would take their revenge. Their horrible, blood-soaked revenge. Men butchered, children enslaved, women raped. The Son of Heaven himself dangling from a noose. No - it was better to stand and fight to the death, no matter how many atomic bombs they dropped or cities they destroyed. In a way, it would be poetic. One nation, one race, snuffed out in a last act of glorious sacrifice. “Would it not be wondrous,” one Japanese general mused, “for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?

 

The ringleaders of the coup moved quickly. They cut the phone lines, surrounded the palace, and killed anyone who got in their way. With bayonets gleaming, they swarmed the hallways and corridors, desperately searching for the phonograph recordings that would bring an end the war. They searched and searched and searched, but in the yawning blackness of the catacombs, the conspirators could not find what they were looking for.

 

In the end, the coup died on the vine.

 

Within hours, the loyalists in the Japanese Army took back control of the Palace, disarmed the renegades, and delivered the recordings to the broadcast stations. At 11:59AM the next day, millions of Japanese gathered around their radios in anticipation of the historic address. As Ian Toll writes:

 

In outlying rural communities, there might be only one radio in a village, so the entire community gathered in an outdoor space—a street, a park, a school playground. In the cities, neighborhood associations connected radios to loudspeakers. Friends and neighbors gathered in private homes. Many workers came home so that they could listen to the broadcast with their families. In factories, in offices, in schools, in military barracks, the Japanese gathered around the radios, solemn and reverent, with heads bowed and hats in hand.

 

When the clock struck noon, Hirohito’s voice crackled over the airwaves:

 

[AUDIO] Jewel Voice Broadcast (Emperor Surrender Speech) 8/15/1945

 

It was a short speech, and after a brief introduction, Hirohito got right to the point:

 

“Despite the best that has been done by everyone—the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people—the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.”

 

The initial reactions to the emperor’s address, known to history as the Jewel Voice Broadcast, were mixed. Some wept. Some laughed. Some were catatonic with shock. But most people were just confused.

 

“The language was archaic,” writes Ian Toll, “an obscure dialect of the ancient Japanese imperial court. Even highly educated Japanese found the speech cryptic and perplexing; those who had received less schooling were completely baffled.”

 

But despite the confusion and the terrible audio quality, the core idea of the emperor’s message still managed to break through. As one Navy Lieutenant remembered:

 

“Even though we couldn’t follow the words exactly, we knew what the message was, what he was telling us, and we were frightened and yet relieved.”

 

From its epicenter in Tokyo, the Emperor’s message radiated out into the world like an earthquake. Across the home islands, over the oceans and continents, from New York to Paris, Capetown to Cleveland. Moscow to Manila. Hirohito’s words may have sounded timid, his phrasing esoteric, but the message was loud and clear: The war was over. This monstrous conflict, this global tragedy, was finally, finally over.

 

AUDIO: VJ Day Newsreel

“Newsmen rushed to nearby telephones with the electrifying story. A hurricane of unrestrained joy sweeps through every part of the war-sick world, from the rice paddies of China, to the streets of America. Manila: The Japs are instructed by General Douglas MacArthur, Allied Supreme Commander, to send a delegation to him for his first orders to Emperor Hirohito. Led by general, they are escorted to Japanese headquarters.”

 

But there was at least one corner of the war-sick world where the emperor’s words went unheard.

 

FIGHTING ON

 

2,000 miles south of Tokyo, on Lubang Island, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was deep in the jungle, planning a guerilla resistance against the Americans and their Filipino collaborators.

 

The months since the amphibious assault on Lubang in late February had been difficult. Driven into the mountains, hunted by patrols and wracked with hunger pangs, Onoda came to the grim realization that he actually had no idea how to survive in wilderness. All his training, all his skill and expertise, it meant nothing out here.

 

“I could only perform those functions of guerrilla warfare that resemble the work of a spy,” Onoda remembered,“The techniques I had been taught were of little use to me. I had learned to tap telephone lines, open letters surreptitiously and undo handcuffs, but these all involved there being a lot of other people around. Here in these mountains, it was far more important to know how to build a fire without making much smoke.”

 

Fear was a constant companion, as ubiquitous as the screaming crickets and the distant shouts of American patrols. Onoda felt alone, and scared, and worst of all – impotent. He was unable to complete his mission, and yet forbidden to die. Someday he knew, the Japanese army would come back in force and retake the island; The Americans would be driven out of the Philippines entirely, hounded back across the Pacific to their own filthy shores. Their wheel-chair bound President, that duplicitous cripple Roosevelt, would beg the Son of Heaven for a ceasefire.

 

And when that happened, what would Onoda say to his superiors? That he had hid in the mountains like a rat, waiting out the storm? No – he had to do something. He had to survive. As long as there was blood in his veins and breath in his lungs, he could be an instrument of the Emperor’s holy war.

 

Thankfully, Onoda soon learned that he was no so alone after all.

 

One day, shortly after the American assault, Onoda stumbled upon a pair of surviving Japanese soldiers in the jungle. They were dirty and haggard, but he recognized both of them instantly. Their names were Corporal Shoichi Shimada and Private Kinshichi Kozuka. Whereas many of the other soldiers on Lubang had been cruel and dismissive, calling him “Soy Sauce” and laughing off his warnings, Onoda knew these men to be brave, reliable, and filled with what he called “essential goodness”.

 

Or at least he hoped that they were. When it comes to companions in a life-or-death situation beggars can’t be choosers.

 

Now before we go any further, let’s take a second and really commit these names to memory, because these two men are going to be absolutely crucial to our story going forward. Shimada and Kozuka. Sometimes Japanese names are a little difficult for us in the West, but I think it’s important to really internalize them.

 

That’s Shimada, S-H-I-M-A-D-A

And Kozuka, K-O-Z-U-K-A

Shimada and Kozuka.

 

As they huddled around the campfire, speaking with hushed voices in the flickering dark, Onoda, Shimada, and Kozuka shared their lives with each other. Who they were before the war. Their hopes, their dreams, their flaws and failures. And little by little, sprouts of trust began to emerge from their conversations.

 

Shimada was a country boy, a farmer’s son from rural Japan. Years of working the fields had hardened his body into a slab of coiled muscle. He was tall, he was strong, he was tough as an ox and twice as loyal. But despite his imposing physique, Shimada was a glowing presence. A veritable chatterbox. “He always had something to talk about,” Onoda recalled, “and he took the lead when we sat around chatting in the evening.” Shimada laughed, he smiled, and he told stories. He talked about his family back home: His beautiful wife, his little girl, and the baby that was one the way.

 

Like all good fathers, Shimada loved talking about his daughter. He couldn’t wait for the day when he could go home, and burst through door with medals jingling on his uniform. When he could scoop his little girl up in his arms, kiss his wife while dinner bubbled on the stove, and listen to the new baby cooing in the crib. It was a good life; a life worth fighting for. And Smiling Shimada was a breath of fresh air for a group in desperate need of optimism.

 

Then there was the second man: Kozuka. If Smiling Shimada was a fountain of words, Kozuka was a aquifer of thoughts and feelings, locked deep beneath a stoic exterior. A small man with a small voice, Quiet Kozuka was more of a listener than a talker. The introvert to Shimada’s extrovert. “Kozuka was very reticent,” Onoda remembered, “Only rarely did he speak without having been spoken to. On those occasions when he did loosen up, he talked with great feeling about the days before he entered the army, but even then, he had trouble expressing himself. I gathered that his family was fairly well-off. He said he had owned a racehorse.”

 

As the men talked more and more, the initial awkwardness began to melt away. In this remote, threatening jungle, crawling with ants, centipedes, and Americans who wanted them dead, the three Japanese soldiers entered a kind of covenant. They found each other in the dark; and like metal shavings around a magnet, the men drew together in purpose. Onoda, the leader. Shimada, the optimist. And Kozuka, the introvert.

 

One day, they knew, Japanese reinforcements would arrive. It might be five days, five weeks, five months, or five years. But the Emperor’s armies were indomitable and implacable, guided by Heaven and filled with the samurai spirit. In time, they would return to drown the Americans like dogs in the surf. But until that day, Onoda and his men would endure, they would resist, they would fight.

 

Rejuvenated by companionship and renewed purpose, Onoda, Kozuka and Shimada went to work. They meticulously catalogued what remained of their food supplies. The rice would be gone in a matter of weeks, but Lubang Island was rich in natural food sources. Bananas and coconuts fell from the trees, iguanas and chickens scuttled in the brush. Even cows and water buffalo could be found in the open fields.

 

The trio moved from place to place, always covering their tracks, never staying in one spot for more than a few days. In the distance, they could occasionally hear the plunk of mortar fire or the crack of a gunshot. The American clean-up squads were killing the other groups of Japanese survivors, slowly, systematically. But as the days passed, and the weeks went on, Onoda heard fewer and fewer gunshots. Eventually, they receded entirely. “After the middle of August,” Onoda observed, “the patrols stopped coming.”

 

They must be trying to starve us out, thought Onoda. Waiting for us to die in the jungle. To go mad with malnutrition and hunger and rot. And just when we can’t take it anymore, when we come running out of the jungle like crazy men, begging for a thimble of rice…they’ll kill us. Or capture us. Or worse. Well, Onoda decided, that is not going to happen. They will never, ever find us. We will be death, waiting for them in the dark.

 

But one day, in the closing months of 1945, Onoda, Shimada and Kozuka heard a sound overhead. It was a tremendous whine, a diesel roar that cut through the jungle calm. The three men looked up, and through the dappled canopy, silhouetted against a clear blue sky, they saw the unmistakable shape of an American B-17 heavy bomber.

 

So, Onoda thought, they’ve decided to burn us out. To flatten the jungle and us along with it.   Sure enough, the bomber’s bay doors opened like an enormous mouth, spewing its payload down onto the island. Onoda and his men braced for the inevitable impact, the violent tremors that would shake their teeth out of their gums, the shockwaves that would collapse their lungs and pop their organs/livers like grapes.

 

But instead of an explosion, all they heard was a soft rustling. A fluttering.

 

It wasn’t bombs that were falling on Lubang. It was paper. Hundreds and hundreds of paper leaflets, fluttering to the ground like snow. With trembling hands, Onoda picked one up, blinked through the sweat, and read the words. The message was written in broad, black strokes. Clear as day, in Japanese. The leaflet said:

 

“The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

 

The hairs on Onoda’s neck stood up like troops on parade. He was well-versed in the art of propaganda and subterfuge. It had been a cornerstone of his commando training. When you cannot break an army with bullets or bombs, you break them with ideas. You infect their minds with doubt, contradictions, even hope. Onoda gnawed on his chapped lips, and analyzed the content of the leaflet:

 

“We gathered together and considered whether the orders printed on the leaflet were genuine. On the front were printed the surrender orders from General Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army and a directive from the chief of staff. On the back was a map of Lubang on which the place where the leaflets were dropped was marked with a circle.”

 

At face value, the message did appear to be legitimate. Could it be true? Could the war really be over?

 

But the closer Onoda looked, the more the leaflet felt… wrong. Something eerie, uncanny, like a feeling you can’t explain, or a memory you can’t quite place. It felt unsettling, malicious even. The grammar was awkward, the semantics were clumsy, as if some American who only knew Japanese as a second language had scribbled it down in haste. A translation of a translation of a translation …No, this was all wrong. The leaflets were clearly a trick, meant to lure them into a trap.

 

Onoda had never seen it firsthand, but the rumors of what American soldiers did to their Japanese captives had been drilled into them by their superiors and the state media. Monstrous atrocities, like something out of a horror story. As one man on Okinawa recalled: ‘We knew that if we were captured, we’d be chopped to pieces. They’d cut off our noses, our ears, chop off our fingers, and then run over our bodies with their tanks.”

 

They think we are stupid, thought Onoda. This leaflet was obviously a lie. A forgery. A ponderous ploy by a desperate enemy. It was textbook counter-insurgency, and Onoda knew better. “I could only conclude,” Onoda remembered, ”that the leaflet was phony. The others all agreed with me. There was no doubt in our minds that this was an enemy trick.”

 

But the truth was…far away, in some crowded American intelligence office, a typist had just made a mistake. A simple printing error that made the leaflet sound odd to Japanese ears. It was only a handful of typos, not worth correcting when thousands of leaflets had already been printed. If anyone noticed the error, they shrugged it off and went back to work.

 

But that printing error would alter the course of Hiroo Onoda’s life.

 

To him, it was a telltale sign of American duplicity. And so, he dropped the leaflet right where he’d found it. Like a hot stone or a venomous snake. To carry it away or discard it somewhere else might reveal their location to the enemy.

 

And so, like phantoms, Onoda, Shimada and Kozuka slipped back into the jungle.

 

 

----- MUSIC BREAK -----

 

It’s September 2^nd, 1945.

 

Two weeks after Emperor Hirohito’s solemn radio broadcast. Two weeks since the Son of Heaven had told his subjects that the war was over.

 

And now, we are in Tokyo Bay, on the deck of an American battleship called the U.S.S. Missouri. With its gargantuan guns, towering superstructure, and 12-inch armor plating, the Missouri is an imposing instrument of war, a testament to the near-limitless industrial resources of the ascendent American empire.

 

But today, the U.S.S. Missouri is not a ship. It is a stage.

 

A carefully chosen venue for a well-planned, well-choreographed performance that will seal the fate of 70 million people. Today, the representatives of the Japanese Emperor will sign the official declaration of surrender.

 

As they arrive at the U.S.S. Missouri, the Japanese steel themselves to bear the unbearable, to endure the unendurable, as Hirohito had put it. All they have to do is sign on the dotted line, but each flick of the pen feels like a knife on their skin.

 

“The future remained terribly uncertain,” writes historian John Dower, “and the enormity of the nation’s humiliation had only begun to sink in. The country’s utter subjugation was reinforced by the dramatic setting of the surrender ceremony itself.

 

The imperial navy had long since been demolished. Apart from a few thousand rickety planes held in reserve for suicide attacks, Japan’s air force—not only its aircraft, but its skilled pilots as well—had virtually ceased to exist. Its merchant marine lay at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of the country’s major cities had been fire bombed, and millions of the emperor’s loyal subjects were homeless. The defeated imperial army was scattered throughout Asia and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, its millions of surviving soldiers starving, wounded, sick, and demoralized.

 

But Tokyo Bay was clogged with hundreds of powerful, well-scrubbed American fighting ships. At a thunderous theatrical moment, the sky was all but obscured by a fly-by of some four hundred glistening B-29 bombers accompanied by fifteen hundred Navy fighter planes. The imperial soil was being desecrated by the landings of wave upon wave of well-fed, superbly equipped, supremely confident GIs—an army of occupation whose numbers, in a short time, would surpass a quarter of a million.”

 

The Allied military occupation of Japan is about to begin, and presiding over the momentous ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, conducting this symphony of subjugation, is General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for Allied Forces in the Pacific. Or “SCAP”, for short. Towering over the Japanese delegation at six-feet tall, General MacArthur initiates the proceedings.

 

AUDIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZW_6EM1Ms [:20]

“It is my earnest hope, that on this solemn occasion, a better world shall emerge from the blood and carnage of the past. I now invite the representatives of the Japanese government to sign the instrument of surrender at the places indicated.”

 

On this fine day in Tokyo Bay, General MacArthur felt like a winner. A demigod in khaki, energetic in fatigues, endowed with absolute authority. He is the man in Japan. The one who hold this renegade nation to account and usher in peace to a mauled and mutilated hemisphere. Today, Douglas MacArthur is a winner. But he knows better than most what it means to lose. In the anguished faces of the Japanese delegation, he sees a reflection of himself, of days gone by. The rage and impotence and embarrassment and goddamn awful sting of defeat. Blood on your hands, shit in your pants, and bullets in your back. MacArthur knows what it means to lose.

 

Four years earlier, in 1941, MacArthur had been tasked with the defense of the Philippines, then a US territory. From the capital of Manila, to the sugar-white beaches of Lubang, MacArthur’s job was to guard all 7,641 of those islands from any encroachment by the Japanese empire.

 

And then, like a hammer to the temple, Pearl Harbor happened. In a matter of hours, the Japanese were everywhere at once. The oil slicks were still burning, and the bodies were still bobbing in Hawaii when the Japanese descended upon the Philippines. MacArthur rallied his forces, did the best he could…but the emperor’s soldiers were too many, too organized, too well-equipped. MacArthur’s defense of the Philippines ended in a humiliating retreat; a nauseous midnight ride in a PT boat bound for Australia.

 

The Philippines were lost, and he had failed.

 

But MacArthur was proud and vain and defiant, and he vowed to retake the Philippines. “I shall return”, he said, The U.S. Office of War Information advised against that kind of self-aggrandizing rhetoric, and asked him to amend the statement to “WE shall return”; But MacArthur refused. That was just the kind of person he was. As historian and biographer William Manchester writes:

 

“He was a great thundering paradox of a man. Noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced.”

 

Two years later, MacArthur kept his word, and returned to the Philippines with the US Navy at his back. He took back Manila, smoking crater that it was; he sent the marines and landing craft that broke the garrison on Lubang Island.

 

And now, in September of 1945, he is standing here on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, beaming with blissful vindication. The Japanese had taught him what it meant to lose, and now he was going to teach them what it meant to lose. Oh yes, General MacArthur had big plans for Japan.  

 

What those plans were exactly? Well, the Japanese could only speculate.

 

AUDIO: [1:25] “What does a conquering army do with 70 million people? What does a conquering army do with the family of the Japanese soldier? Fathers, brothers, mothers, cousins of the soldiers. What do we do with the solders themselves, back no in civilian clothes as part of the Japanese family. What do to with these people?

 

In the long, ugly history of armed conflict, defeated nations generally do not fare well under occupying armies. The Assyrians skewered their enemies on spikes. The Mongols built towers of skulls. The Romans enslaved tribes by the hundreds. It was an old, immutable instinct – to punish your enemies so brutally, so completely, that they would never ever challenge you again. The Japanese knew history; they knew their own history. And they were afraid. What would happen to them now?

 

The Americans had already proven what they were capable of. Swarms of bombers had burned half of Tokyo alive; Atomic weapons had flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki into clumps of human potpourri, studded with little bones and teeth. And now that they had complete control, full access, unfettered dominion…what was to stop the United States from taking a crimson revenge?

 

Maybe they deserved it. Nagging at the heart of every Japanese bureaucrat, every general, every sergeant, every truck driver, trench digger, and radio operator – was the knowledge of what they had done in places like China and Korea and Singapore. As John Dower writes:

 

From the rape of Nanking in the opening months of the war against China to the rape of Manila in the final stages of the Pacific War, the emperor’s soldiers and sailors left a trail of unspeakable cruelty and rapacity. As it turned out, they also devoured themselves. Japanese died in hopeless suicide charges, starved to death in the field, killed their own wounded rather than let them fall into enemy hands, and murdered their civilian compatriots in places such as Saipan and Okinawa.”

 

As American ships filled Tokyo Bay, and propellors screamed overhead, the Japanese people were apprehensive about what the future held. But in a way, they were also relieved. For months, Hirohito’s government had been telling them day after day after day that they were expected to resist the Americans to the death. With sticks and spears and suicide bombs, every man woman and child would die, in the words of one militarist, like “shattered jewels”.

 

“Good men and women,” observed one Japanese writer, “remained committed to collective suicide right up to the moment at which unconditional surrender was announced.” Or, if not committed, at least resigned. Like their fighting men abroad, those on the home front were rarely able to imagine a future other than struggle and probable death.”

 

Through propaganda and relentless repetition, they had been, in the words of another Japanese scholar, “socialized for death”. But the Emperor’s surrender had opened up a window, an escape hatch, a light at the end of the tunnel. An entire nation was getting a second chance. As John Dower writes: “Surrender—and, by association, the Allied victory, the American army of occupation itself—liberated them from death. Month after month, they had prepared for the worst; then, abruptly, the tension was broken. In an almost literal sense, they were given back their lives.”

 

Yes, General MacArthur did indeed have plans for Japan. But they were not intrinsically punitive. They were transformational. He saw the Japanese Empire like a patient on the operating table. There was a political cancer, a rot deep inside; And to save the body, he was going to cut the tumors out. It would be painful, it would be messy, but Japan was going to survive. And in time, it would thrive. As John Dower writes:

 

“The Japanese would not be enslaved or destroyed as a nation, although they would lose their empire. On surrendering, the country would be placed under military occupation; “stern justice” would be meted out to war criminals; the authority and influence of those who had “deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest” would be eliminated “for all time”; “just reparations in kind” would be exacted; military forces would be “completely disarmed”; the economy would be demilitarized but eventually permitted to return to world trade; and the government would be required to “remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people,” and to establish freedom of speech, religion, and thought, as well as respect for fundamental human rights.

 

MacArthur and his lieutenants were no angels, of course. Their bigotry was palpable. Their neo-colonial zeal, viscous and potent. Lifting Japan back to its feet was not some act of altruism, it was a matter of national security. With Communism on the rise, America needed a reliable bulwark in Asia. And defeated Japan was the fresh clay that they would use to shape it. As one historian out it:

 

“In the American occupation of Japan, the interests of enlightened humanitarianism and cold-blooded realpolitik were, for the most part, conveniently aligned.”

 

Ultimately, the intent of the Allied occupation was not to hurt; it was to heal. To turn an enemy into an asset. To deprogram 70 million people and give them something to live for again. It was not going to be easy; but they had to try. As historian John Dower wrote:

 

“Such an audacious undertaking by victors in war had no legal or historical precedent.”

 

“An empire had vanished,” wrote one American journalist. “The world was fluid and about to be remade.”

 

AUDIO:  “Concluding the brief, history-making ceremony, General MacArthur expresses a wish. Let us pray the peace, be now restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed. Swarms of Planes yada yada…War is over, peace is here”

 

         AUDIO….slow transition to jungle noises.

 

 

THE MONSTER

 

Peace had indeed come to Japan; it had come to Germany and Russia and Italy and North Africa too. But for the 10/12,000 people on Lubang Island, for the fishermen and police and farmers, the war was not over.

 

There was a monster in the jungle. Shapes in the trees. This thing, this creature, had A creature with six arms, six eyes, six legs, 78 teeth, and an inexhaustible appetite. Everyone knew that somewhere up in the mountains, three Japanese soldiers were planning their next attack, their next raid, their next kill. They were immune to reason, inoculated against truth. No matter how many leaflets were dropped, newspapers left behind, recordings played – Lieutenant Onoda and his men refused to participate in reality.

 

The cattle had started dying first.

 

Farmers found their cows and water buffalo picked clean for meat. Baking and bloody in the heat. In the villages, items started to go missing. Little things like fishing nets, or utensils, or bags of rice. Villagers would wake up in the morning with the unmistakable sensation that someone had been in their house while they slept. Doors ajar, furniture shifted, footprints in the grass. People became afraid to go too deep into the woods. Or walk alone down a dirt path. They learned to fear the snap of a twig or the rustle of a leaf. It could be nothing… or it could be Lieutenant Onoda and his bolo knife.

 

The jungle had eyes. It was a mouth. At any moment a gunshot could blow apart a knee cap, or shred a femoral artery. Filipino civilians were found hacked and headless, their organs perforated by a well-placed bullet. Never more than one bullet per body, though. Onoda’s guerillas would not dare waste precious ammunition. Every shot had to count. Sometimes, almost illogically, two Filipino bodies were found to have been killed by a single bullet.

 

To the Filipinos on Lubang, it was a waking nightmare. “There was a shadow cast on their lives,” observed the documentary filmmaker, Mia Stewart,” They couldn’t go and farm. They couldn’t harvest without the fear of being attacked. Children couldn’t go play out at a certain time,”  

 

But to Onoda and his men, it was war. A war that would go on for as long as it needed to.

 

“We began a new year,” Onoda remembered, “1946. This meant that I had been on Lubang for a full twelve months. On New Year’s morning we bowed to the rising sun and swore to do our best in the coming year. […] I saw an aircraft carrier off the coast, and fighters passed over from time to time. Obviously, the war was still going on.”

 

Onoda was pleased with the strategic impact they had made on Lubang thus far. Smiling Shimada and Quiet Kozuka were capable subordinates, and the trio had been able to engage the enemy and inflict sufficient disruption to collaborationist forces. When the Japanese army returned to retake Lubang, they would face a softer, more pliable target. Until that time, he had to keep the pressure up; he had to keep his body healthy. The Filipino collaborators were stupid and weak and easy to kill; this was their island, but Onoda and his men knew it better than they ever could.  

 

The Son of Heaven would be proud.

 

Onoda had a lot of time to think in the jungle. Food was scarce, but downtime was plentiful. And in those quiet moments, Onoda thought about home. He thought about his parents, his sisters, his brothers. His oldest brother especially. Toshio was his name. When was the last time he’d seen him. 1943? 1944? Onoda tried to remember little details about Toshio, things he’d say. He remembered a song that Toshio liked to sing back when they were in high school. One of the lyrics was: “East wind blowing in the sky, over the capital….” Something like that.

 

Onoda wondered where Toshio was now. If he was even alive.

 

But a commando like Onoda couldn’t afford to dwell on tender thoughts of home. He had a job to do, a special mission. In the year since he’d come to the island, Onoda had learned a lot about surviving in the jungle. As it turned out, Shimada, the loquacious farm boy, was not just a good conversationalist, but a hell of an outdoorsman. Shimada taught Onoda and Kozuka how to weave nets, patch clothes; taught them which woods burned clean and which ones made smoke. As Onoda remembered, “I learned a lot from him about the art of staying alive.”

 

The three men developed a system for survival. When they weren’t planning an ambush, or restocking caches of ammunition, they told stories. They repaired clothes. They cut each other’s hair with an improvised set of scissors. Sometimes they got into scuffles, or disagreements, but the tension never lasted long. When the mood got sour, or the doubts began to creep in, Onoda was their compass. True north. “Since I had the highest rank,” remembered Onoda, “I was officially the leader, but never once did I try to impose an order arbitrarily. It was all in all a cooperative effort.”

 

Onoda didn’t know where his brother Toshio was…but he had new brothers now. A team, a squad, a little family, bound in common purpose. Onoda, Shimada and Kozuka.

 

Things were going well for the group, until the day they met Private First Class Yūichi Akatsu.

That’s A-K-A-T-S-U. Akatsu.

 

FOUR’S A CROWD

 

“You could tell just from looking at him that he was a weakling,” Onoda remembered.

 

Akatsu was a survivor from another group of Japanese soldiers on Lubang island. After the American landings, their unit had fled into the jungle, but one by one, they were killed or captured. Akatsu was all that was left, and one day, he stumbled up to Onoda’s campsite, begging for help.

 

Onoda’s group looked at this new man with disgust. Akatsu’s voice was a whimper, his feet were bleeding, his uniform was rotting off him. For strong survivors like Onoda, Shimada and Kozuka, this man was a liability. He would do nothing but slow them down. Kozuka, usually so quiet and introverted, was volcanic in his contempt: “Go somewhere else,” he told Akatsu. “You can’t keep up with us. Your body is weak, and you don’t know much about soldiering. We can’t use you.”

 

But Akatsu didn’t leave. Like a lost child or a neglected dog, he hung around the campsite, begging for scraps. He tried to prove himself in small ways. Gathering firewood, or bringing water from the river, most of which he spilled. Onoda, disgusted as he was, took pity on Akatsu, and let him join the group. He was, after all, a servant of the Emperor.  

 

“Akatsu was the weakest of us, both physically and morally,” Onoda remembered, “Without a doubt he was a liability for us. When we brushed up against the enemy, he was always the one who fell behind or lost track of the others.”

Onoda came to regret his compassion. Akatsu began to have a negative effect on other members of the group. He stole food. He shirked his duties and went missing for days at a time. But worst of all, he questioned their mission. He doubted their purpose. One day, as the four of them huddled around a fire, Akatsu asked a question. The question.

 

“Lieutenant,” he asked, “do you suppose the war really has ended?”

 

It was a question that had been on Shimada and Kozuka’s minds as well. Shimada echoed Akatsu’s doubt: “I sort of have a feeling that it has, too.”

 

The evidence was becoming difficult to ignore. The leaflets were dropping more frequently, more urgently. They fluttered down from the sky, hand-written in Japanese, not printed, begging the soldiers to surrender. No one is going to hurt you, they said. It’s not a trap, it’s not a trick. Some leaflets even mentioned Onoda by name: “Lieutenant Onoda. Please come out.”

 

“There were more and more leaflets urging us to surrender,” Onoda remembered, “and from time to time we heard people calling to us in Japanese. But we could not believe that the war had really ended. We thought the enemy was simply forcing prisoners to go along with their trickery. Every time the searchers called out to us, we moved to a different location.”

 

Onoda could only laugh. The Americans thought they were so clever. These elaborate lengths they were going to, just to deceive a handful of Japanese soldiers. The war must be going terribly for them, he thought. If securing Lubang was a priority, that meant they desperately needed airfields, and if they needed airfields, that meant they were being pushed back. It meant the Americans were losing. The tide had finally turned. Any day now, a Japanese armada would appear on the horizon. Battleships, destroyers and aircraft carriers, each with a red rising sun fluttering above them.

 

They just had to hold out a little longer.

 

->

 

To stay ahead of the search parties and patrols, Onoda and his men were always on the move. According to Onoda: “We developed a circuit of sorts, around which we moved from point to point, staying nowhere very long. This circuit was a rough ellipse coursing around the mountains in the central sector of the island, and moving counterclockwise.”

 

Like the earth moving around the sun, Onoda’s group orbited the mountains of Lubang. Round and round, month after month, year after year. 1946 became 1947 became 1948 became 1949.

 

One day, in September 1949, Onoda woke up and realized something was wrong. Akatsu, the weak one, was gone. He wasn’t in the campsite, he wasn’t by the river, he wasn’t gathering firewood, or taking a piss. He was just gone. There was only one possibility: He had deserted. He had gone to surrender to the Americans and the Filipino police. He had defected.

 

“If Akatsu deserted and surrendered, he would certainly be forced or persuaded to give the enemy information about the rest of us. This prospect seriously affected my attitude. We were after all at war with a fearsome enemy, and nothing could have been more infuriating to me than the idea that one of our group might betray the others.”

 

Onoda, Shimada, and Kozuka spread out like hounds, hunting for Akatsu. Onoda cursed himself for ever taking pity on that weakling, that traitor, that wretch:

 

“I felt responsibility for Akatsu’s desertion. From watching his everyday actions and listening to what he said, I concluded that he would not last very long.”

 

The trio searched for Akatsu for several days, but they never found him. It was like he had vanished, subsumed into the vines and moss and rotting undergrowth. Kozuka, the quiet one, just shrugged and said:

 

“This kind of life was too much for him from the beginning.”

 

But despite Akatsu’s defection, despite all the information he could spill to curry favor with the enemy, no attack ever came. Their caches of ammunition and food, their hiding spots and trails, all remained undisturbed. Maybe Akatsu wasn’t such a weakling after all. Maybe, under terrible torture, he’d held his tongue, stayed silent while the Americans chopped off his fingers, his nose, his ears, his feet. Or maybe he’d been too stupid to remember the right details. Maybe he’d died screaming.

 

Good riddance, Onoda thought. Three’s company; four’s a crowd.

 

It wasn’t until 10 months later, in 1950, that Onoda and his men finally found out what happened to Akatsu. It was just after the rainy season, when Lubang island is drenched for weeks at a time with non-stop showers.

 

“The rain came down in buckets all night long, it did no good to stay huddled up in the tent. We still got soaked to the bone. Our skin would turn white, and we would shiver from the cold, even though it was summer. Often I felt like screaming out in protest. But how wonderful it was when the rain stopped! We would fall all over each other to get out of the tent, then stand there stretching each numb finger. I remember how I welcomed the sight of the stars through the clouds.”

 

One day, when the sky was clear and the air was warm, they stumbled upon a note in the jungle. It was new, fresh, and white, painted in clear black characters. And it hadn’t fallen from a plane, it had been left for them, carefully, in a spot they often foraged for food.

 

The note said: ‘When I surrendered, the Philippine troops greeted me as a friend.’

 

“The note,” Onoda remembered,” was written in Akatsu’s hand.”

 

 

---- MUSIC BREAK ---

 

On Lubang island, Hiroo Onoda and his men were forced to adapt to survive. Thrust suddenly into a frightening new situation, they had to change, evolve, remake themselves into something new.

 

Little did they know, but Japan was changing too – in ways they never could have imagined. The truth was, the empire they believed they were still fighting for no longer existed.

 

AUDIO:“All over the world, the US Army is on alert, to defend our country, you the American people, against aggression. This is the Big Picture. Now to show you part of the big picture, here is Sergeant Stewart: “Japan is the key to the fate of the far east. Once again, for the second time in the march of modern history, those words have urgent reality, but now there is a difference in their meaning. The US army has come to know Japan well in recent years. In war, in occupation, and finally in partnership. In the record of that relationship, there can be found the changing symbol of Japan’s place in the far east. Once it was a symbol of destruction. Today, we look upon it with hope, as a symbol of stability.”

 

In September of 1945, when General MacArthur sealed the Empire’s surrender in ink on the crowded deck of the U.S.S Missouri, most Japanese people had no idea what to expect. They had been spared annihilation, but robbed of their purpose. As historian John Dower writes:

 

Since the early 1930s, the Japanese had been told they were fighting for the purest and most noble of objectives—that they were a “great country” and a “great empire,” a “leading race” destined to overthrow Western imperialism and bring about a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a people possessed of a unique and indomitable “Yamato spirit.” Now, what could one say to the war dead? How was one supposed to survive, spiritually as well as materially, in the midst of such a stupendous abandonment of purpose?”

 

Dower continues:

 

“Exhaustion and despair followed quickly in its train—a state of psychic collapse. […] The defeat was so shattering, the surrender so unconditional, the disgrace of the militarists so complete, the misery the “holy war” had brought home so personal, starting over involved not merely reconstructing buildings but also rethinking what it meant to speak of a good life and good society.

 

What now? They asked. What next? What were we even fighting for? Who were we even fighting for? It was an existential crisis on a national scale.

 

But the human spirit is an indomitable, relentless, airborne thing. Wartime propaganda in America liked to portray the Japanese as fanatical robots; simian slaves who could not think or plan or dream for themselves. Doomed to do as they were told, forever. But in the aftermath of their defeat, under the velvet boot of “benevolent” occupation, the Japanese performed a miracle of psychological self-resurrection.

 

As Dower writes: “What defeat showed, to the astonishment of many, was how quickly all the years of ultra-nationalistic indoctrination could be sloughed off. Love of country remained, but mindless fanaticism and numbing regimentation were happily abandoned.”

 

Yes, they had been brought low. Yes, they been humiliated. Yes, they had lost everything and everyone. But there was a way forward. There had to be. As a poet named Horiguchi Daigaku wrote in 1946: “The country has become small and powerless, food scarce, shame plentiful, life fragile. Stop grieving! Raise your eyes to the treetops, to the sky!”

 

It was an inspiring sentiment, but in those early years, the blue sky seemed a long, long way off.

 

The American bombs had left craters in their cities, but also in their stomachs. The number one concern of almost every Japanese person in 1946…. was food. In fact, it is entirely reasonable to suggest that Hiroo Onoda and his men on Lubang Island were probably eating as good or better than the average resident of Tokyo in 1946. At least they had meat to hunt and rice to steal.

 

In the home islands, food shortages had been a fact of life since as early as 1943. The US Navy blew apart Japanese merchant ships, sending tons upon tons of rice, grain, and other vital staples to the bottom of the Pacific. By the time the war ended, one historian explained, “the emperor’s loyal subjects were encouraged to supplement their starch intake by introducing such items as acorns, grain husks, peanut shells, and sawdust to their household larder.”

 

“Protein deficiencies,” Dower writes, “could be remedied by eating silkworm cocoons, worms, grasshoppers, mice, rats, moles, snails, snakes, or a powder made by drying the blood of cows, horses, and pigs.” The proof of privation was written in the face of every child on every street. “Elementary-school children,” Dower writes, “were on the average physically smaller in 1946 than they had been in 1937.

 

But there was one place in Japan, where food was plentiful. Where the dumplings and broth and simmering pork sent fragrant clouds of hot steam billowing in the air. And if you weren’t in the mood for that local stuff, you could get a nice, bloody steak and a frosty Coca-Cola.

 

GHQ – or General Headquarters – located in the mostly undamaged financial district of Tokyo, was the red, white and blue nerve center of the Military Occupation. And from there, General Douglas MacArthur reigned supreme. Supreme Commander of Allied Forced in the Pacific, to be specific The “blue-eyed shogun”, as historian John Dower described MacArthur, had all-encompassing and unchallenged authority. Japan was his domain, and now his redemption was complete. He’d come a long way from that shameful midnight retreat from the Philippines.

 

Now MacArthur was deep in ventricles of Japan itself, pumping American values, American democracy, American soldiers into the far-flung capillaries of the home islands. Japan had a cancer in the blood. And if this nation was going to become a loyal US asset, a shield against the Soviets, that cancer needed to be excised. Radiation treatment had certainly been effective – Hiroshima and Nagasaki still glowed with Geiger readings - but a full recovery would require a more surgical approach.

 

The Japanese militarists, the warmongers and wannabe samurai and who had led Japan into disaster at the point of a ceremonial katana – they had to go. Trials were organized, jurors convened. War criminals tend to leave long paper trails, and over the next few years, some of Japan’s top generals and politicians found themselves at the end of a short rope. They dangled and twitched just like the Nazis at Nuremberg.

 

But as General MacArthur tore out Japan’s military culture root & stem, he was confronted by a more complicated problem. The little man in the big robe. The living god that had applied a waxen seal of complicity to every raped woman, bayoneted child and butchered civilian in East Asia.

 

Hirohito. The Son of Heaven.

 

The international community was screaming for accountability. They wanted the emperor strung up with the rest of his cabinet and generals. As the undisputed leader of his nation, the so-called living god, Hirohito must be held responsible for what had been done in his name. In the words of New Zealand’s Prime Minister: “There should be no soft peace. The Emperor should be tried as a war criminal.”

 

Questions swirled around Hirohito and his guilt. What did he know? And when did he know it? How much had he been told, or not been told, about what Japanese troops were doing in Nanking or Bataan or Singapore? Was he a megalomaniac like Hitler, or just a puppet in a fancy hat, dragged along for the ride? These were the questions burning a hole in the front page of every newspaper in the world.

 

But in the end, General MacArthur, the SCAP, made the final judgement. And he decided…. that it didn’t really matter. Not one little bit. The Emperor was much more valuable alive than dead. “I have no desire whatever to debase him in the eyes of his own people,” MacArthur said, “as through him it will be possible to maintain a completely orderly government.”

 

Executing, prosecuting, or even embarrassing the Emperor was not an option. As one advisor to MacArthur made clear: “To dethrone, or hang, the Emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese. Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants.”

 

Whether that was true or not, MacArthur didn’t want to risk the peace of an entire hemisphere for the sake of watching Hirohito’s silk slippers dance over a gallows platform. Instead, he would use the emperor’s intrinsic legitimacy to guide Japan into a new era of imposed democracy. The emperor would be an empty vessel, a cipher, a bridge to newer, more democratic, more America-friendly Japan. As John Dower writes:

 

“The plan turned on separating Hirohito from the militarists, retaining him as a constitutional monarch but only as a figurehead, and using him to bring about a great spiritual transformation of the Japanese people. Because retaining the emperor was crucial to ensuring control over the population, the occupation forces aimed to immunize him from war responsibility, never debase him or demean his authority.”

 

“Hirohito remained on the throne,” writes Herbert Bix,” unindicted, unrepentant, and protected.”

 

The Emperor may have been sacrosanct, but his government and its laws were most certainly not. Beginning in October of 1945, MacArthur and his army of reformers at GHQ systematically transformed the political ecosystem of Japan. It was, in the parlance of the time, “a democratic revolution from above”.  In other words: Congratulations, you are a democracy now; and if you don’t like it…well, what do you think this is? A democracy?”

 

It was a paradox, a political oxymoron: Here was an authoritarian, occupying army forcibly installing a democratic, “free” system of government. The hypocrisy, the naked neocolonialism of it all, was not lost on the Japanese, but what choice did they have?

 

AUDIO:

“Japan’s new constitution, compiled under American guidance, led the framework for democracy. It gave the people the right to exercise their sovereignty through their elected representatives. As a result, free elections, a condition that Americans accept as casually as the air they breathe, began to appear for the first time in Japan’s long history. […] woman were given the right to vote [ civil liberties] [freedom of press] …and responsibility.”

 

The newsreels told a rosy, feel-good story of a downtrodden nation embracing democratic principles like a long-lost friend. But for most Japanese people, the new constitution was just a piece of paper. The paper they really cared about, money, was in short supply. The reforms were a step in the right direction, but they did nothing to alleviate the short-term suffering of the people.

 

Those first few years were very, very hard. Jobs were scarce. The homeless numbered in the millions. People spoke about living a “bamboo shoot” existence, or an “onion” existence; a metaphor for the possessions they would have to peel off themselves and sell on the black market for a few half-rotten provisions.

 

In his book, Embracing Defeat, John Dower writes about a “a middle-school student who asked to be demoted to elementary school so that he might partake of the free lunches there.”

 

To support their families and themselves, many young women turned to prostitution. With tens of thousands of American GIs roaming the cities in search of a good time, skin was a growth market. One woman, speaking under the alias “Otoki”, talked about the vicious cycle of sex work and the stigma it carried:

 

“Of course, it’s bad to be a hooker. But without relatives or jobs due to the war disaster, how are we supposed to live? . . . There aren’t many of us who do this because we like it . . . but even so, when we try to go straight and find a job, people point their fingers at us and say we were hookers. “

 

Money was tight, crop yields were low, and for most people, the only way to eat was to buy food on the black market at prohibitive prices. It was illegal, it was dangerous, but it was the only way to keep yourself and your kids alive. As one Japanese magazine joked in 1948: “In today’s Japan, the only people who are not living illegally are those in jail.”

 

The dire situation in post-war Japan was perhaps best illustrated by the kinds of games that children played during the period. As Dower writes: “The three most popular activities among small boys and girls were […] holding a mock black market, playing prostitute and customer, and recreating left-wing political demonstrations.”

 

The Japanese had never felt lower or more lost. But despite all the chaos and the poverty, a fountain of self-expression and optimism began to emerge from the wreckage. As one Japanese writer named Sagakuchi put it: “We must discover ourselves, and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability.”

 

In other words, only through this complete, total and humiliating defeat, can we figure out who we really are. What we really want. What we care about. …And they did. “Under the militarists and ultranationalists,” writes Dower, “free expression had been severely suppressed. What passed the censors gave meager sustenance at best.”

 

But those days were gone, the prison door ajar. And like a roiling, effervescent liquid under immense pressure, the creativity of the Japanese people exploded in great geysers of innovation, invention and expression. As Dower continues: “Words matter; and, as if a dam had broken, defeated Japan was engulfed in words. The magazines and literature were but currents in a great river of communication. People came alive through words. They crossed from past to future on bridges of language.”

 

->

Art flourished, publishing expanded, even cinemas and movies were packed. The very first on-screen Japanese kiss occurred during the American occupation. The actors were wearing a thin layer of gauze on their lips to avoid actual contact, but it delighted audiences all the same. Little by little, day by day, light was returning to the land of the rising sun.

 

“We have cried all we can” one magazine said,”—now let’s smile and stand up.”

 

Slowly and sure, the nation of Japan, now a constitutional democracy, struggled to its feet. And offering a helping hand, were the least likely people imaginable. The Americans themselves. As it turned out, the Americans were not voracious, rapacious, salacious barbarians. They were actually, for the most part, kinda nice. According to Dower:

 

“Beyond doubt, many of the conquerors conveyed an impressive idealism and generosity of spirit. GIs became famous for their offhand friendliness and spontaneous distribution of chocolates and chewing gum. Individual Americans demonstrated serious interest in aspects of Japanese culture and a sense of bearing responsibility toward strangers that was unfamiliar and attractive (or sometimes just bizarre) to their Japanese neighbors. They took people unknown to them to hospitals and did favors without expecting repayment. They practiced simple charity in uncalculating, matter-of-fact ways. The conquerors also bestowed significant practical gifts upon their new subjects: penicillin, streptomycin, blood banks, and genuinely public libraries, for example, as well as tutoring in such technological practices as statistical quality control, which would be of immense value in the country’s eventual economic reconstruction.

 

There were outliers of course, cruel men who, in the words of one historian, saw the Japanese only as “receptive exotics to be handled and enjoyed.” But for the most part, the cultural cross-pollination that occurred between Japan and America was for the benefit of both nations.

 

 This was an extraordinary moment, ”writes Dower, “—never seen before in history and, as it turned out, never to be repeated.”

 

Stability and normality were slow to return to Japan, but eventually they did. Industry flourished, investments poured in, and the economy stabilized. Japan still had a long road to recovery, but it was on the mend. The Japanese had surrendered to the Americans, but not to despair. Against all odds, they had transcended a national apocalypse.

 

When the atomic bomb called Little Boy fell on Hiroshima on August 6^th, 1945, the city was erased. Houses, streets, cars – all gone. 78,000 people killed in the space of a few heartbeats. And standing just over a mile from the epicenter of the blast, was a grove of trees. Gingko trees they’re called. These trees are beautiful and very, very old. They’re famous for the bright, almost neon gold color their leaves take on in the fall.

 

Well, when the Little Boy hit Hiroshima, those trees were stripped bare. Engulfed by a man-made sunspot and burnt down to skeletal fingers of driftwood.

 

“They would have been exposed to massive amounts of radiation,” wrote journalist Emma Betuel, “— even strange black rain, dark with ash and other particulates that fell in the days following the explosion. But even after being exposed to what were perhaps the most stressful soil conditions in the history of the planet, the trees survived. In the spring, the ginkgos bloomed again and continued to do so every spring after that. Today, each tree has a name and is marked by a plaque. They’re now natural memorials, reminders that evolution has equipped life to survive even the greatest catastrophes wrought by humans.”

 

“That’s what caught people’s imaginations,” Sir Peter Crane, a professor at Yale remarked. “You have this incredible scene of devastation, and it would take months for people to come to grips with it. Just as they had gone through the winter, out pop these new leaves from trees that everyone thought were dead.”

There were other traces of Japan’s long-dead Empire. Little echoes out in the world. And one of them was still fighting, suffering, murdering, waiting, back on Lubang Island.

----- MUSIC BREAK -----

 

It’s March 8, 1961.

 

We’re on a sweet potato farm on the western end of Lubang Island, in the Philippines.

 

The owner of this farm is named Emelio Viaña, and after a long, hot morning of digging up potatoes, he’s taking a well-deserved lunch break. His back hurts, his shirt is damp with sweat, but he’s in the shade, he’s got a good cup of coffee, and overall – it’s a pretty good day.

 

And tomorrow will be an even better day. Because tomorrow is Emilio’s 53^rd birthday.

 

53 years on this earth. It was hard to believe. Another year, another harvest. And in those five decades, Emilio had managed to maintain his land, meet a good woman, and raise two strong boys. Their names were Protacio and Diony (dee-OH-nee). Teenage boys are never easy to manage, but Protacio and Diony were good boys. At least good enough to take a break from chasing girls and spend a few hours helping their Dad dig up sweet potatoes.

 

As the three of them sipped their coffee and ate lunch, Emilio might’ve been thinking about a birthday party.

 

Then, the shots rang out. Two loud cracks from the jungle, one after another. The first bullet tore into Emilio’s thigh and shattered his femur. The second bullet clipped his youngest son Diony in the leg. Blood and coffee and piss spilled into the dirt as Emilio and his sons tried to crawl away from the gunfire. There weren’t many places to hide, but the older boy Protacio, thinking fast, managed to drag his Dad and brother into a nearby thorn bush.

 

And there, they hid - breathing fast and shallow, while evil-looking thorns ripped at their skin. Despite the pain, they tried to stay as quiet as they could. Whoever had attacked them was still out there, waiting for another clear shot. The boys looked down at their Dad, and they were frightened by what they saw. Emilio was pale, his eyelids were flickering, and blood was pouring out of his thigh like water. If they didn’t get out of here fast, he was going to die.

 

Then Protacio saw something. A person walking through the potato field. It was a Japanese soldier, carrying a rifle and a bolo knife. It was him. “Demonyo sa bundok”. The demon in the mountain, as the people of Lubang had started calling him.

 

Lieutenant Onoda.

 

Protacio was shaking and hyperventilating, trying to control his breath as the soldier prowled the field. One snap of a twig, one yelp of pain, and he’d be on them with that bolo knife. After what seemed like hours, the Japanese soldier melted back into the jungle. The boys waited fas long as they could stand it, and then dragged Emilio into a small boat they’d left at the river. They paddled frantically, splashing toward the nearest fishing port. There, they might find a doctor, police, someone, anyone who could help their Dad.

 

Emelio died in that boat. By the time they reached the port, their Dad was already gone.

One day shy of his 53^rd birthday.  

 

A PATTERN

 

Emelio and his sons were not the first victims of sudden, violent ambushes on Lubang. They had been happening for almost 20 years now. There were dozens of murders, but the story was always the same. A Filipino civilian was going about their daily life, when all of a sudden, a Japanese soldier had leapt from the jungle, shooting and slashing.

 

By 1961, the list of names was getting very long.

 

Rafael Canals had been shot to death. Francisco Villar had been stabbed multiple times. Ayong Tagle had been decapitated. On and on and on.

 

For years, the local authorities had been trying to solve the problem of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda. And for years, they had failed. Nothing seemed to work. First, they’d tried to catch him, but the Japanese guerillas were like apparitions, always one step ahead. When capture failed, they tried to coax him out – to convince him that the war was over and he didn’t need to fight anymore. They dropped leaflets and messages and notes and letters, a mountain of paper. When that didn’t work, they tried a more direct approach. Search parties traveled all the way from Japan, wandering the woods with loudspeakers, appealing to them in colloquial Japanese.

 

But nothing worked. Nothing could unlatch Onoda and his men from their shared delusion. For the people on Lubang, Hiroo Onoda became an occupational hazard. Encounters with him were just bad luck, like a shark attack or a lightning strike. Rare, but possibly fatal. Something they just had to live with.

 

For the Viaña family, that was cold comfort. Emilio’s death hit them hard. They’d lost a father, a husband, an uncle. And worst of all, there was no justice to be found, no closure to be had. The man who killed Emilio was still just…out there.

 

On the evening of March 9^th, 1961 - what would have been Emilio Viana’s 53^rd birthday – Hiroo Onoda spent the night in the jungle, the same way he’d spent the last 5,840 nights.

 

The man he’d killed the day before weighed less than a feather on his conscience. That stupid farmer was just another collaborationist, another agent of the Americans. He felt no pity for the dead man. After all, Onoda had lost someone too.

 

There were only two faces around their campfire that night.   

 

DEATH OF SHIMADA

 

By 1961, It had been 10 years since Onoda, Shimada, and Kozuka had found the note from the defector Akatsu. The weak link in their party who had planted the seeds of doubt and disillusionment, then abandoned them. “When I surrendered, they greeted me as friends” Akatsu’s note said.

 

It was a lie, of course. Akatsu, weakling that he was, had probably traded intelligence on their group for a bottle of cheap sake. And now the Americans might know everything. Where the ammunition was buried, where the food supplies were stashed, where they hunted, where they slept - everything.

With that information in hand, the American agents would certainly intensify their efforts to confuse and divide them.

 

When Akatsu left, it was 1951. And still no reinforcements had arrived. It was 1952. And still no reinforcements had arrived. It was 1953, and still no reinforcements had arrived. It was 1954, and still no Japanese reinforcements had arrived. Onoda’s mind was crystalline with purpose and discipline…but his compatriots were slipping. This long war was starting to wear them down.

 

He was getting worried about Corporal Shimada, in particular. Smiling Shimada didn’t smile much any more. In years past, he’d been the heart and soul of the group. His jokes and stories were the kindling of companionship on those dark nights in the jungle. But melancholy had fallen over Shimada like a shadow. As Onoda remembered:

 

Once in a while Shimada would say softly, “I wonder whether it was a boy or a girl.” When he had left home, he and his wife were expecting their second child. The first, a girl, had not yet started primary school. One time when Shimada was talking about her, he sighed and said, “I guess she must be about the age to like boys now.” Then he just

stared at his feet as the rain fell on outside.”

 

Things only got worse when the family photos started to fall from the sky. One day, a Filipino plane dropped the usual flurry of leaflets. But this time, they included letters and pictures from Onoda, Shimada, and Kozuka’s families back home in Japan. There was even a letter from Onoda’s brother Toshio. It begged him, pleaded with him, to give up the fight. To come home. The war was over.

 

As Onoda remembered:

 

“My reaction was that the Yankees had outdone themselves this time. I wondered how on earth they had obtained the photographs. That there was something fishy about the whole thing was beyond doubt, but I could not figure out exactly how the trick had been carried out. The photograph Shimada received showed his wife and two children. If the photograph was genuine, the second child was a girl.”

 

Onoda tried to convince him Shimada that the pictures were just “poisoned candy”, meant to lure them out in the open. They probably weren’t even real. American intelligence teams must have meticulously doctored the photographs to achieve the likeness of relatives. But the damage was done.

 

In the months to come, Shimada started getting sloppy. During a shootout with the Filipino police, a bullet tore off a chunk of his leg. The wound festered for weeks, and it was slow to heal. And Shimada’s mental health wasn’t faring any better. As Onoda remembered:

 

“He talked to himself a good deal now. One day when I asked him what he had said, he just shook his head and replied, “Oh, nothing.” Not many days later, I found him staring blankly at the photograph. Thinking I would cheer him up, I walked up behind him, but before I spoke, I heard him say quietly, “Ten years. Ten whole years.”

 

On May 7^th, 1954, the long years finally caught up with Smiling Shimada.

 

The three men were cooking lunch, when out of the corner of their eyes, Onoda saw movement in the trees. Shapes materializing in the distance. It was a Filipino search party, men with guns. The three Japanese soldiers leapt up and grabbed their rifles. Kozuka and Onoda fired shots in the direction of the islanders, and took cover. But then they saw Shimada…just standing out in the open.

 

“Shimada continued to stand by a tree some yards away,” Onoda remembered, ”His gun was aimed, but he had not fired a shot. This was peculiar, because he was the fastest shot of us all. He could fire five times while I was firing twice. What bothered me more was that he was still standing. Under normal circumstances, I would have shouted, “Get down, you fool!” But for some reason, on that one occasion I had no voice. […] A shot rang out in the valley, and Shimada fell forward head first. He did not move. He was killed instantly.”

 

Onoda and Kozuka managed to escape, but at great cost. Shimada had been the strongest one in their group. The one who knew the most about surviving in the wild. But he was also their friend. After 15 years, they knew everything about each other. And now Shimada was just…gone.

 

Onoda blamed himself.

 

“It had been a mistake for Shimada to remain standing and a mistake for me not to call to him to get down. Why had my voice deserted me? The only explanation I can think of is that unless we were fighting with each other, the three of us never talked in a loud voice. I never even gave orders in a loud voice. Conceivably habit could have prevented me from crying out immediately. But did that really hold water? Shouldn’t I have been able to raise my voice when I wanted to? I cursed myself for not having done so.

 

Ten days after Shimada died, more leaflets fell from the sky. “Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended.” They said. It infuriated the grieving soldiers.

 

“We wanted to scream out to the obnoxious Americans to stop threatening and cajoling us,” Onoda remembered, “We wanted to tell them that if they did not stop treating us like scared rabbits, we would get back at them someday, one way or another.”

 

Shimada’s death was a huge blow to Onoda and Kozuka. It made them hateful. Cruel. Angry. They resented the islanders for killing their friend. Resented the Emperor for abandoning them. Resented their superior officers for making promises they could not keep. What had that General from the 14^th Army said, back in 1944? Onoda tried to remember. “Whatever happens, we’ll come back for you.”

 

Well? Where were they? Why had they not sent other Japanese commandos to make contact?

The Filipino authorities left newspapers, stacks and stacks of newspapers, waist-high, with articles about what was supposedly going on back in Japan. A surrender, an occupation, a reconstruction, a rebirth. But how could any of that that be true? As Onoda recalled:

 

“In a way the newspapers confirmed that the war was still going on, because they told a lot about life in Japan. If Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead. When I arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the war was going badly for Japan, and in the homeland the phrase (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. I took this at face value, as I am sure many other young Japanese men my age did. I sincerely believed that Japan would not surrender so long as one Japanese remained alive. Conversely, if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. After all, this is what we Japanese had all vowed to each other. We had sworn the we would resist the American and English devils until the last single one of us was dead. If necessary, the women and children would resist with bamboo sticks, trying to kill as many enemy troops as they could before being killed themselves.”

 

By the 1959, Hiroo Onoda was in a psychological prison of his own construction. An airtight logic trap of conspiratorial thinking and delusional deduction. The isolation, the loss of Shimada, the silent unquestioning loyalty of Kozuka – it all served to harden, rather than soften, the edges of his alternate reality. Onoda saw threats everywhere, codes in the messages, patterns in the leaflets. He had, in his own words, “developed the habit of reading even beyond the lines between the lines.”

 

One year, they managed to steal a transistor radio from a local house. The noises that came out of it were so strange and nonsensical, so misaligned with their understanding of 1945 geopolitics, that they assumed even the radio waves were an elaborate psy-op:

 

“We considered that we were listening not to live broadcasts but to tapes made by the Americans, who had deleted or altered anything unfavorable to them. What pretended to be a broadcast from Japan or Australia was, to our way of thinking, a tape prepared by the enemy and rebroadcast with suitable changes.”

 

At one point, Kozuka remarked, “When you think of it, the Americans are really good at this, aren’t they?” “Yes,” I replied. “They have to take out anything they don’t want heard and then rebroadcast it in almost no time. They must have managed to gather together a bunch of very smart people. Just one slip, and the whole thing would sound fishy. I take off my hat to them. It must be very tricky work!”

 

Nothing could shake him out it. And I do mean nothing.

 

In the summer of 1959, a large search party arrived from Japan. It was bigger than any previous group they’d seen before. Onoda and Kozuka were curious about what tactics they might use to lure them out. After several weeks of watching from a distance, they decided to creep a little closer. Close enough to hear what was being said.

 

From the top of Six Hundred [the mountain] came the sound of a loudspeaker saying, “Hiroo, come out. This is your brother Toshio. Kozuka’s brother Fukuji has come with me. This is our last day here. Please come out where we can see you.” The voice certainly sounded like Toshio’s, so I thought at first the enemy must be playing a record made by him. The more I listened, however, the less the voice sounded like a recording. I went a little closer so that I could hear better.

 

I could not see the man’s face, but he was built like my brother, and his voice was identical. “That’s really something,” I thought. “They’ve found a prisoner who looks at a distance like my brother, and he’s learned to imitate my brother’s voice perfectly.”

 

But then, the man started to sing. The melody was like a dead ember in Onoda’s brain, suddenly glowing hot with recognition. “East wind blowing in the sky over the capital . . .”

 

This was a well-known students’ song at the Tokyo First High School, which my brother had attended, and I knew he liked it. It started out as a fine performance, and I listened with interest. But gradually the voice grew strained and higher, and at the end it was completely off tune. I laughed to myself. The impersonator had not been able to keep it up, and his own voice had come through in the end. I found it very amusing, particularly so because at first he had nearly taken me in. Suddenly it began to rain. A squall was rising. The man on the hill picked up something lying at his feet and started down the hill, his shoulders drooping. After I saw him safely out of sight, I slipped back into the jungle.”

 

Many years later, Onoda found out that it actually had been his brother speaking to him that day on the mountain.

 

The next day, the search party departed Lubang island and went home to Japan. Reports were submitted, paperwork filed, death certificates printed. If Hiroo Onoda could listen to his own brother sing a childhood melody and still not come out, he must be dead. Or, so far gone that he might as well be. The planes stopped coming. The leaflets stopped dropping. Back in Japan, Onoda and Kozuka’s memories were entombed in a coffin of paperwork.

 

They were both declared dead. And for the next 10 years, they existed only in the minds and nightmares of the villagers on Lubang.

 

---- MUSIC BREAK ------

 

 

 

It’s the summer of 1969.

  

25 years have passed since World War II; and in that time, so much has happened. One

landmark event after another.

 

The Partition of India. The creation of Israel. The rise of Mao and Communism in China. With each passing year, young nations sprang up from the flotsam of geriatric empires; Old places with new names.

 

Then came the Cold War, a bitter game of brinkmanship that drove a wedge into every government on earth, sparking a daisy chain of atrocities and close calls. North Korea and the Khmer Rouge. Jarheads in Vietnam and warheads in Cuba.

 

But it wasn’t all bullets, bombs, and baby-killers; The culture changed too. From London to Laos, a new generation found its voice in the deafening post-war silence. Led by blues musicians and beatnik writers, visionary directors and transgressive photographers. This was the era of Elvis, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin. Slogans and songs were on the lips of young people all over the world.

 

Things were changing. And they were changing fast.

 

Then, in a staggering achievement for the human race, NASA astronauts from the Apollo 11 mission planted their feet on the moon. The year was 1969, and looking down from the sea of tranquility, the world seemed new.

 

But while all that was happening, while the world was lurching forward into an exhilarating new paradigm, absolutely nothing changed for the two Japanese soldiers on Lubang island. Like a fish tank in a moving truck, their exterior world was rushing forward, but their interior world remained static. Hiroo Onoda and Kinshichi Kozuka were trapped like flies in amber. Loyal servants of an Empire that did not exist anymore.

 

By 1969, Onoda and Kozuka had been together on Lubang for 24 years. And since Shimada’s death in 1954, it had been just them. That’s 15 years together, stuck in the world’s worst episode of “Naked & Afraid”. When you spend that much time with somebody, in those kinds of conditions, you either kill the guy, or reach a level of familiarity and intimacy that is difficult to define.

 

“Kozuka and I slept side by side.” Onoda remembered, […] “We became closer than real brothers.”

 

That didn’t mean that their cohabitation on Lubang was free of conflict or anger or argument. Like a married couple that knew each other’s every habit, every tick, every telltale facial expression, Onoda and Kozuka could read each other like a book. But sometimes the rigors and frustration of surviving in the jungle took its toll. As Onoda remembered:

 

”Our world had a population of two, both male, and every once in a while we did have bitter clashes, usually over something trivial.”

 

But for the most part, they took care of each other. By this point, all artifices of rank and military hierarchy had rotted off, just like their old uniforms. When one got sick, the other took care of them. When one was tired, the other pulled a little extra weight. When one was plagued by doubts and loneliness and homesickness, the other talked him to sleep.

 

Onoda and Kozuka were as close as two people can possibly be, absent the presence of a sexual relationship. Like those American astronauts up on the moon, they depended entirely on each other for survival. And they did not spend their remaining years on Lubang idly/ just hanging out and roasting marshmallows.

 

“The years that Kozuka and I spent together,” Onoda explained, “were the ones in which I was most actively engaged in guerrilla tactics.”

 

Together, they burned fields, beheaded villagers, shot innocent people and stole from houses in the dead of night. As Onoda admitted: “The islanders called us the “mountain bandits,” the “kings of the mountain,” or the “mountain devils,” No doubt they had good reason to hate us.”

 

And things went on this way for a long time. Years passed. Time dilated and contracted with the rhythms of the jungle, the sounds in the trees. Onoda’s face was no longer smooth as porcelain and wrinkle-free; He was a middle-aged man now, and he had the crow’s feet to prove it. The days blended together in a seamless green line, stitched together by Onoda’s rough calculations. But one day in particular soon became seared into Onoda’s memory.

 

“I shall never forget October 19, 1972. For that is the day Kozuka died.”

 

While conducting a raid on the outskirts of a Lubang farm, Onoda and Kozuka stumbled upon a large cache of rice. Sacks and sacks of rice. Enough food to keep them fed for months, if not years. But guerrilla existence depends entirely on mobility, and there was simply too much food to carry. So, they decided to set fire to the rice and deprive the Allied armies of much-needed supplies.

 

That’s when the shooting started. For the first time in a very long time, the ambushers had become the ambushed. These were no farmers with pea-shooters. “The enemy was firing like mad,” Onoda remembered, “I knew from the sound that they were using carbines and small automatics.”

 

Kozuka was hit in the shoulder. He tried to take cover, but his wound made him slow – too slow. Kozuka’s body jerked when the second bullet went in, and folded like a lawn chair. As Onoda remembered:

 

“I started to scream to him to get down, but before I could open my mouth, he sobbed, “It’s my chest.” Kozuka groaned, “It’s no use!” As I looked, his eyes went white. A second later, blood and foam spewed out of his mouth, and he fell over forward.

I called to Kozuka, but there was no answer. He did not budge.”

 

Onoda looked at the man he had spent every day with for the last 25 years. Dead white eyes stared back. Onoda realized his friend was gone, and all he could do was run.

 

“The gunfire continued behind me. I ran through the forest, shouting, “I’ll get them for this! I’ll kill them all! Kill them, kill them, kill them!”

 

When the adrenaline stopped pumping and the shouts faded away, the gravity of what had just happened hit Onoda like a ball peen hammer.

 

“Now there was no one left but me. Shimada had been killed. Kozuka had been killed. My turn was next. But I vowed to myself that they would not kill me without a fight.”

 

Onoda was alone. Completely, and utterly, alone. He still remembered the words the General had said to him in 1944: “So long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him.”

 

Well, now he didn’t have anyone.

 

Back at the rice farm, Filipino police officers examined the body of Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka. As their gun barrels cooled from the shootout, they could not help but stare at this bizarre, flesh-and-blood anachronism. The man’s clothes were rotting off, patched together from a quilt of stolen local fabrics. His sandals were just flaps of tire rubber, sown together with nylon thread. With eyes white as pearls, and a face smeared with gore, Kozuka stared at the sky.

 

After all these years, after all this time, they’d finally killed one. The so-called ‘demons of the mountain’. As it turned out, this demon was just a malnourished middle-aged man. But one detail stuck out to the police officers. One little loose end that bothered them.

 

The dead man’s rifle was missing.

 

SENSATION

 

News of Kinshichi Kozuka’s death traveled fast. Back in Japan, the public was understandably fascinated. Almost 30 years since the bombs had fallen, 30 years since American soldiers had marched in and transformed their country into a democracy. And yet, 2,000 miles to the southwest, Japanese soldiers were still fighting and dying for the Emperor. It was bizarre, unsettling, but also exciting.

 

If the reports coming out of the Philippines were true, and the dead man’s identity was correct, that meant there was still another Japanese soldier left alive on Lubang Island. Some Army Lieutenant named Hiroo Onoda from Wakayama Prefecture; a special forces soldier sent to the Philippines in late ‘44 to wage a hopeless insurgency against the Americans.

 

And yet, somehow, he had survived.

 

For most people in Japan, the news about the holdouts on Lubang was a passing curiosity, a brisk read on the way to work, or a conversation topic at dinner. But for one young man, it became an obsession, a fixation. Norio Suzuki, the college-dropout-turned-explorer that we met at the beginning of this episode, decided he had to find this guy, this Lieutenant Onoda.

 

18 months later, Suzuki entered the Lubang jungle in search of the elusive Onoda, a specimen as rare and valuable as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster.

 

The months since Kozuka’s death had not been kind to Hiroo Onoda’s mental health. His best friend was dead, and the sudden, violent nature of it was like a record skipping in his head, playing over and over again. As he remembered: “I could not keep Kozuka’s blood-spewing face out of my mind”. Deprived of his companion, Onoda became more reclusive, feral, unstable. Thoughts of revenge clouded his mind. “I swore that one day I would kill them all.”

 

Kozuka’s death prompted a new flurry of search parties and expeditions from Japan, hell bent on coaxing the Lieutenant back to civilization. The largest expedition even included multiple members of Onoda’s family – his brother, his sisters, and his elderly father. But Onoda’s delusions were unassailable. In his grief and frustration, he invented conspiratorial leaps of logic to make their presence fit into his worldview.

 

“The new expedition was actually sent by the Japanese government. The search, however, was only a pretext…. The appeals to me to come out were intended to throw American intelligence off the track. Under cover of the ostensible search for me, Japanese agents would photograph every strategic point on the island and prepare detailed reports on the terrain and conditions among the people. Looked at from this viewpoint, the pleas urging me to come out really meant that I should not come out, because if I came out, the game would have to end."

 

Eventually the expedition went home - just like all the others that came before.

 

But on February 20^th, 1974, just when he thought things were returning to normal, Onoda discovered another unwanted visitor poking around his territory. A lone intruder, stomping loudly through the brush. It was a young Japanese man, draped in store-bought camping gear and wearing socks with sandals. It was our old friend, the amateur explorer and adventurer, Norio Suzuki.

 

->

Onoda confronted Suzuki with a loaded rifle and a barrage of pointed questions. Their initial exchange was tense, but eventually Onoda’s suspicions abated, and he agreed to go back to Suzuki’s camp site. The men talked all night. Onoda told Suzuki about his experiences on Lubang island, the people he’d lost, the people he’d killed.

 

At one point, the young man offered Onoda some food. “My tongue, my whole mouth, melted,” Onoda remembered, “I felt that for the first time in thirty years I was eating something fit for human beings.”

 

Then it was Onoda’s turn to listen. Suzuki told Onoda about his own experiences: “He said he had wandered about all over the world, working his way through about fifty countries in four years. I thought to myself, somewhat admiringly, that he looked like the type who might do something like that. He reminded me a little of myself in those erratic days before I went into the army. I felt myself drawn to him to some extent.”

 

After a night of talking, eating, and relaxing, Suzuki finally felt comfortable asking Onoda the big question. “Onoda-san,” he said, “the emperor and the people of Japan are worried about you. Don’t you want to see cherry blossoms again? Wouldn’t you like to see Mount Fuji? What could I do to persuade you to come out of the jungle?”

 

Every cell in Onoda’s body was screaming like a warning siren. This tourist might not be a tourist at all. Maybe Suzuki was an enemy agent, sent to befriend him, to lower his guard. 30 years evading patrols and dogs and bullets and bombs, just to be undone by a kid wearing socks and sandals. But against his better judgement, Onoda gave Suzuki an answer. He said that he would not “give in” until he had “direct orders from his immediate superior officer, Major Taniguchi.”

 

Suzuki didn’t know who this Taniguchi was, where he was, if he was even still alive…but it was something.  “Let me get this straight then,” said Suzuki. “If I bring Major Taniguchi, and if Major Taniguchi tells you to come to such and such a place at such and such a time, you will come, right?”

 

“Right,” answered Onoda.

 

That was enough for Suzuki. As proof of his encounter with Onoda, he took a proto-selfie with the soldier and promised to return with Major Taniguchi. “I’ll come back for you as soon as I can,” said Suzuki. “The press will make a huge story out of this. You won’t believe it!”

 

With that, Suzuki saluted like an excited kid and marched off towards the nearest village. In their short time together, Onoda had grown fond of the young man. But he was pretty sure he’d never see him again.

 

In a way, he had made peace with his isolation, his long, lonely war: “I had expected a friendly army to land at almost any time, but there had been no further word. I was beginning to think that the plans had been changed. That, I thought, was all right too. If ever I did manage to return to Japan, I would still have to work and sweat every day, and I could do that just as well on Lubang. Staying here even had one advantage: if I died, it would be death in the line of duty, and my spirit would be enshrined. That idea appealed to me.”

 

Weeks went by, and still Suzuki had not returned. At night, Onoda’s sleep was interrupted by dreams, nightmares, visions of dead friends and lost opportunities:

 

“I dreamed I was awakened by a noise and started to ask Kozuka if he had heard it too. But Kozuka was not there, and I wondered where he was. Then I awoke and realized I had been dreaming. Kozuka was not there because he was dead. Only after this did I really wake up. It was a dream within a dream. Kozuka would not appear even in a dream within a dream. Nothing made me feel more alone than that idea.”

 

Back in Japan, the wheels of bureaucracy moved swiftly to fulfill Onoda’s request. Norio Suzuki had taken the photograph of he and Onoda to the government as proof of the soldier’s existence, along the request to receive orders directly from his commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.

 

As luck would have it, Taniguchi was still alive. He ran a bookstore in southern Tokyo, and truth be told, he hadn’t thought about the war in a long time. Like most Japanese soldiers, Taniguchi was eager to move on and build a new life from the rubble. But when the government asked him to put on a uniform one last time, travel to the Philippines, and relieve Hiroo Onoda of his command, he felt honor-bound to comply.

 

Two weeks later, Taniguchi stepped off a boat onto Lubang Island and traveled to the spot where Hiroo Onoda had agreed to meet him. And then, he waited.

 

Onoda, meanwhile, was unsure any of this was even real at all, but the death of Kozuka had left such a crater in his heart, he needed to fill it with something, anything. He was going to take a leap of faith:

 

“There remained the possibility that all of this was the work of the enemy. Or maybe real orders were on the way, but the enemy had found out about them and was striking first. Still there is never an end to doubts. If you doubt everything, you end up not being able to do anything.”

 

For Hiroo Onoda, World War II ended on March 9^th, 1974.

 

In some ways, it was an anti-climactic affair. A man that claimed to be Major Taniguchi waited quietly in a tent, and when Onoda came out of the jungle, the Major handed him a piece of paper. It was a formal order from the Japanese government to cease his actions on Lubang Island immediately and withdraw. Cut and dry. Simple as that.

 

Taniguchi had a secondary order for Onoda: Please, please, take a shower. Onoda took a bar of soap and walked down to the river. He didn’t creep, or lurk, or run…he walked. As he remembered:

 

When the washing was done, I stood there looking at the river for a time, and then I looked up at the sun. Whenever I had crossed this river in the past, I had first looked carefully in all directions, then darted across the river and into a clump of bosa trees. Now I was standing here practically naked with the sunlight streaming down on me. It was an odd feeling. What was to happen now? Major Taniguchi had said that I could go back to Japan immediately, but the idea of going back and trying to live among ordinary people frightened me. I could not quite imagine it.

 

Shortly afterwards, Onoda and Taniguchi were joined by a small delegation from Japan. Among the men, Onoda recognized a very familiar face. It was his brother, Toshio. The one who had sang to him all those years ago in the jungle.

 

“We finally found you!”, Toshio said, and hugged him. Onoda explained that he’d been convinced that man singing to him had been an impersonator, a fraud. The voice hadn’t sounded right. It had been breaking and struggling to finish.

 

“So you did hear me, after all,” Toshio replied, “While I was singing, I began thinking that this was my last day on Lubang, and I choked up.”

 

The next few months were a whirlwind of flashbulbs, crowds and reporters. Hiroo Onoda was an overnight sensation, a celebrity. His weathered face was on newspapers around the world, and the media chuckled and gawked at the crazy little Japanese man who’d spent 30 years fighting a lost war in the jungle.  But to Onoda, it had been much, much more than that. And he was forced to grapple with some hard realities:

 

“Not until I returned to Japan and looked out the window of my hotel at the streets of Tokyo did I understand that my world was no more than a figment of my imagination. When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

 

[…] I had developed so many fixed ideas that we were unable to understand anything that did not conform with them. If there was anything that did not fit in with them we interpreted it to mean what we wanted it to mean.”

 

[…] I had constructed an imaginary world.

 

Onoda’s war, his reason for fighting, had been imaginary. But the damage he and his men had done on Lubang was very real. Dozens of people, innocent civilians, had been murdered in cold blood. Onoda’s imaginary war had shattered families, stolen lives, and left a trail of heartache in its wake. And the worst part, was that it had all been for nothing. As one Lubang resident told a documentarian in an interviewer:

 

“Whenever I hear the name Onoda, I get so angry.’” 

 

The voices calling for justice on Lubang were ultimately ignored, and Onoda received a ceremonial pardon from the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. The only payment Filipinos ever received for Onoda’s crimes, was a forced smile and a few photo ops.

 

Back in Japan, Hiroo Onoda was welcomed home as a war hero. He was lionized by the press and celebrated as a genuine example of bravery, tenacity, and commitment under fire. Onoda had lost years of his life to the fake war raging inside his head, but once he returned to his country, he reluctantly capitalized on the fame he had garnered. He wrote a best-selling autobiography, received adoration from the public, and was even encouraged to run for public office.

 

But fame never sat right with Onoda.

 

This new Japan, this democratic, westernized Japan, was not the same country he’d left in 1944. It was alien, different, changed. But then again, so was he. 30 years in the jungle had transformed him, for better or worse. Still, Onoda managed to build a good life for himself in the years he had left. He married, reunited with friends and family, and eventually moved to Brazil to become a cattle farmer.  

 

Clearly, Onoda longed for the silence and solitude of the jungle. He spent those last few decades of his life between Japan and Brazil, doing the occasional interview and engaging in philanthropic work. Until finally, in January of 2014, at the age of 91, he passed away from heart failure and complications of pneumonia.

 

Hiroo Onoda lived a long and ostensibly fulfilling life after his surrender. He was 52 when he emerged from the jungle, and in many ways, he was able to reclaim the time he had lost. But the people of Lubang would never be able to reclaim the people they had lost. The fathers, sons, brothers, cousins. We’ll never know for sure, and there is still documentary work being done on the subject, but it’s estimated that Hiroo Onoda killed at least 30 people on Lubang.

 

Whether it ever seriously troubled his conscience, it’s hard to say. Personally, I’d guess it didn’t trouble him in the slightest. To him, they were just enemy combatants or collaborators, meat for the grinder in an ugly, pitiless war.

 

Is that a satisfying answer? The families of the victims on Lubang didn’t think so. Neither did the ghostwriter of Onoda’s best-selling biography, a man named Tsuda Shin. After spending three months with Onoda for the book, Tsuda Shin went on to write his own version of events debunking Onoda’s heroic self-portrayal.In it, he claimed that Onoda’s campaign against the islanders was far more brutal and far more vicious than anything Onoda was willing to commit to ink.

 

Ultimately, Onoda’s chapter of history is a locked room, and there are precious few keyholes that we can use to see into it. Frustrating as it is, we’ll probably never know the full truth.

 

But maybe, in the quiet hours of the night, when he was warm and safe back in Japan… maybe Onoda still dreamed about his dead friend, Kozuka.

 

Kozuka with blood spewing from an open mouth, staring back at him with dead, white, accusatory eyes.

 

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

 

---- END ----