Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese army intelligence officer who stayed in the jungle of Lubang Island in the Philippines from December 1944 until March 1974, refusing to accept that Japan had surrendered in 1945. He came out only when his former commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, flew to Lubang and formally relieved him of duty. During those years his small group is believed to have killed as many as 30 local people.
In March 1974 a thin man of 51 walked out of the hills of a Philippine island in a patched imperial army uniform, carrying a rifle that still worked and 500 rounds of ammunition. The war he was fighting had ended more than 28 years and six months earlier.
Hiroo Onoda's story is usually told as a parable of loyalty. It is that, but it is also the story of the villagers of Lubang, who lived for almost three decades with armed men in their hills. Both belong in an honest account.
An officer trained not to die
Onoda was born on 19 March 1922 in Wakayama Prefecture. As a young man he worked for a trading company in Wuhan, China, and in 1942 he was conscripted. The army chose him for intelligence work and trained him at the Futamata branch of the Nakano School1, which prepared officers for guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines.
That training explains much of what followed. Ordinary Japanese soldiers were taught that death was preferable to surrender, as the garrisons of Iwo Jima and Okinawa would show in 1945. Onoda was taught something different. As he told an interviewer in 2010, "Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death, but as an intelligence officer I was ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare and not to die2."
On 26 December 1944, as American forces fought their way back into the Philippines after Leyte Gulf, he was sent to Lubang, a small island south-west of Manila Bay. His task was to destroy the airstrip and the harbour pier. His orders stated that he must not surrender3 and must not take his own life. Senior officers on the island kept him from carrying out the demolitions, and when American and Filipino troops landed on 28 February 1945 the garrison quickly collapsed.
Four men in the mountains
Onoda withdrew into the hills with three soldiers: Private Yuichi Akatsu, Corporal Shoichi Shimada and Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka. They lived on bananas, coconuts, stolen rice and slaughtered cattle, moved camp constantly and kept their weapons in working order.
In October 1945 they read a leaflet left by islanders announcing that the war had ended3 on 15 August. They decided it was enemy propaganda. Leaflets carrying a surrender order from General Tomoyuki Yamashita, dropped at the end of 1945, were studied and rejected as forgeries. In 1952 letters and photographs from their own families fell from the sky. They judged those a trick too.
The group began to break up. Akatsu slipped away in September 1949 and surrendered to Philippine forces in March 19501, which told Japan that the others were alive. Shimada was wounded in a clash with local fishermen in 1953 and was killed on 7 May 19541 in a shootout with a Philippine Army unit. Kozuka was shot dead by local police on 19 October 19721 while he and Onoda were burning villagers' harvested rice, a signal they meant for Japanese forces they still believed were out there. From then on Onoda was alone.
The people of Lubang
For the farmers and fishermen of Lubang, the men in the hills were not a legend but a danger. The group raided fields, killed cattle, burned crops and fought repeated shootouts with villagers and police. Onoda believed he was fighting enemy soldiers and their helpers. The people he attacked were civilians.
Estimates of the dead vary, but the figure most often given is as many as 30 people killed by the group4 over the years. Onoda did not mention these deaths in his memoir. When he visited Lubang in 1996, the town council of Looc asked him to compensate the families of seven people he was alleged to have killed, and about fifty relatives protested. Many on the island never forgave him.2
A traveller, a panda and a yeti
The end came through a stranger. Norio Suzuki, a young Japanese adventurer travelling the world, had told friends that he was looking for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the abominable snowman, in that order. He found Onoda on Lubang on 20 February 19741, after four days of searching.
The two men talked and became friends, but Onoda still refused to come out. He would lay down his arms, he said, only on the orders of his commanding officer. Suzuki went home with photographs as proof. The Japanese government traced Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who had given Onoda his last instructions and was now a bookseller, and flew him to Lubang.
On 9 March 1974 Taniguchi met Onoda in the jungle3 and read him the orders: the Fourteenth Area Army had ceased all combat, and his special squadron was relieved of all military duties. The next day Onoda surrendered at the island's radar base. On 11 March, at Malacañang Palace, he handed his sword to President Ferdinand Marcos, along with his rifle, ammunition, grenades and the dagger his mother had given him in 1944. Marcos pardoned him for the crimes committed during his years in hiding.
After the jungle
Onoda returned to Japan in March 1974 to a hero's welcome, and found it hard to live in. In 1974 he published a memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. Its account has been questioned: the book was ghostwritten, and in 1976 the ghostwriter, Tsuda Shin, published his own book arguing that the memoir was a constructed narrative and that Onoda had known the war was over. That claim is disputed and cannot be settled.
In April 1975 Onoda left for Brazil1, where he raised cattle and married in 1976. In 1984 he returned to Japan and founded the Onoda Shizen Juku, a nature camp teaching survival skills to young people. He died of heart failure in Tokyo on 16 January 2014, aged 91.
Not the last holdout
Onoda was one of several Japanese soldiers who held out long after 1945. Shoichi Yokoi was found on Guam in 1972. Onoda was not even the last: Private Teruo Nakamura, a soldier from Taiwan who had served in the Japanese army, was found growing crops alone on the Indonesian island of Morotai2 in December 1974. He was sent home to Taiwan and died there in 1979.
The historian Beatrice Trefalt has shown how the return of each straggler between 1950 and 19755 became a public event in Japan, forcing a country that wanted to move on to face again how it remembered the war and the men it had sent to fight it.
Why Onoda's story still matters
It is easy to admire Onoda's endurance and harder to sit with what it cost. Nearly thirty years of obedience to an order cost two of his comrades their lives, cost the people of Lubang far more, and cost Onoda his youth. The story of the soldier who refused to surrender is a story about loyalty, and about what happens when loyalty is cut off from any knowledge of the world it serves.