No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War

 

His first name almost rhymes with “hero,” but what can we conclude about a man who fought the Second World War for decades after it ended?
Hiroo Onoda, born in 1922 in the Kamekawa Village of Japan, hailed from a family of samurai warriors. His father had served in the 4th Cavalry Brigade until he was killed in action in China. Hiroo went to work at age 17 for a trading company in China. He was enlisted in the infantry of the Imperial Japanese Army the next year.
Onoda trained as an intelligence officer in the commando class of the Nakano School, where he learned intelligence work, including gathering intelligence and conducting guerrilla warfare. In December 1944, he was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines. He had orders to hinder enemy attacks on the island, which meant destroying the airstrip and the pier at the harbor. His orders stated that under no circumstances was he to surrender or take his own life.
When he landed on the island, he joined forces with a group of other Japanese soldiers. The officers in the group outranked Onoda and prevented him from carrying out his assignment. This helped U.S. and Philippine Commonwealth forces take the island when they landed in February 1945. Soon after the landing, all but Onoda and three other Japanese soldiers had died or surrendered. Onoda, who had been promoted to lieutenant, ordered the men to head for the jungle.
The group continued to harass enemy troops as best they could while rationing food, ammo, and other supplies. They supplemented their small rice rations with bananas, coconuts, and other food by raiding farms.
In October 1945, Onoda and his troop received a leaflet from the locals saying, “The war ended August 15. Come down from the mountains!” His troop and the few remaining cells discussed the leaflet but decided it was Allied propaganda trying to get them to surrender. They did not believe that Japan could have lost so quickly after they had been deployed. After all, one of the cells had been fired upon a few days before; they felt that this wouldn’t have happened if the war was over. They knew nothing of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Near the end of 1945, the locals, tired of being shot at and raided, got a Boeing B-17 to drop leaflets all over the jungle, ordering them to surrender under orders of General Yamashita. The wording on the leaflet about how they were to be sent back to Japan seemed fishy to them, mainly because it sounded as if Japan had lost. They couldn’t fathom this. They thought that if Japan had won, it would send soldiers to get them. Japan couldn’t lose, so the war must still be going on. By now, Onoda and his band had been in hiding for more than a year.
Finally in 1949, one of Onoda’s four comrades walked away and, after six months on his own, surrendered to Filipino forces in 1950. In 1952, aircraft dropped letters and family pictures to the holdouts, urging them to surrender, but the three soldiers thought this was a trick. Each attempt only made them suspicious, causing them to believe it was an elaborate hoax by the Allies.
One of the men was shot in the leg in a shoot-out with local fishermen in June 1953, after which Onoda nursed him back to health. In May 1954, Onoda’s colleague was killed by a shot fired by a search party looking for the men. Almost 20 years later, another man, Kozuka, died from two shots fired by local police, when he and Onoda were burning rice that had been collected by farmers. With Kozuka’s body in custody, Filipino authorities suspected that Onoda was still alive, even though he had long been declared dead. Japan sent delegates who traversed the jungle using loudspeakers to beg the soldier to surrender. But by now, Onoda was so skilled at hiding that they could not find him.
In February 1974, Onoda met a Japanese man, Norio Suzuki, who was traveling around the world, looking for Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman. Suzuki tried to convince Onoda to come home with him. Onoda refused because he believed his commanding officers would return for him no matter what. He would not surrender or believe the war over until his superiors returned and ordered him to do so. 
Suzuki returned to Japan with photographs of Onoda and him as proof of their encounter. Later that year, the Japanese government located Onoda’s commanding officer, then retired, and he went to the Philippines to tell Onoda that Japan had lost and he should surrender to the Filipinos. Onoda was thus relieved of duty at age 52. In the full uniform that he’d kept immaculately, he marched out of the jungle and surrendered his samurai sword, functioning Arisaka Type 99 rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades, as well as the dagger his mother had given him in 1944 to Philippine’s President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos pardoned Onoda for his crimes, given that Onoda had thought he was still at war.
Onoda enjoyed wide popularity following his return to Japan, releasing a ghostwritten autobiography, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, which detailed life as a guerrilla fighter in a war that was long over. The Japanese government offered him a large sum of money in back pay, which he refused. When money was pressed on him by well-wishers, he gave it away.
Reportedly unhappy as the subject of such attention and troubled by what he saw as the fading of traditional Japanese values, he followed the example of his elder brother and left Japan for Brazil, where he raised cattle. He married in 1976 and helped to lead the Colônia Jamic (Jamic Colony), the Japanese community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. But after reading about a Japanese teen who had murdered his parents in 1980, Onoda returned to Japan in 1984 and established the Onoda Shizen Juku (Onoda Nature School), an educational camp for young people.
Onoda revisited Lubang Island in 1996, donating $10,000 to its local school. Onoda received the Merit medal of Santos-Dumont by the Brazilian Air Force in 2004 and, in 2010, the Legislative Assembly of his town in Brazil gave him the title of “Cidadão do (Citizen of) Mato Grosso do Sul.”
Realizing that living in the jungle and killing and injuring innocent civilians turned out to be a waste of 29 years came as a crushing blow to Onoda. He wrote in his memoir: “Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. I felt like a fool for having been so tense and cautious…. Worse than that, what had I been doing for all these years?”
We might consider Onoda a fool and murderer of innocent people. On the other hand, he showed extreme dedication to his country and duty as well as tremendous fortitude but maybe not much sense. Onoda died of heart failure in 2014 in Tokyo due to complications from pneumonia.