Onoda and a few other soldiers went underground, waging a low-level guerrilla campaign while still in their old fatigues. By March 1945, Manila was officially liberated, although scattered resistance continued until the war’s end. Douglas MacArthur had begun retaking the Philippines, starting with Leyte island. Onoda, a graduate of the imperial army’s intelligence school, was assigned to Lubang, an island about 90 miles southwest of Manila, in December 1944. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, and the islands’ occupation for the next several years led to atrocities that included the Bataan Death March. The Japanese invasion of the Philippines began shortly after the Dec. He completed high school in 1939 and worked for a Japanese trading firm before he was drafted into the army. He soon returned to isolation, this time as a rancher in Brazil.Ī teacher’s son, Hiroo Onoda was born March 19, 1922, in Kainan, Japan. He did not get along with them when he was a teenager, and time had not changed a thing, he said. He said he was restless when he returned at last to his home region in central Japan and settled in with his octogenarian parents, who had long believed him dead. If he seemed lost in the new world, some circumstances of his youth seemed to have remained the same. (He did not marvel at the small-screen technology, saying that it “irritates my eyes.”) president, where the Cold War and the nuclear age dominated politics, where skyscrapers towered, where television was inescapable. When he left the jungle at long last, he met a world where Richard M. His orders: “To continue carrying out your mission even after the Japanese Army surrenders, no matter what happens.” Onoda remained committed to his mission of watching the skies for American bombers. Many who stayed hidden for so long cited fear of execution, but Mr.
Onoda stirred the deepest emotional and nostalgic response. Other Japanese soldiers from World War II lived on for decades, guerrilla-style recluses in the jungles of Guam and Indonesia, but Mr. Onoda’s surrender, the Japanese ambassador to the Philippines declared him the “paragon of the Japanese soldier.” To many Japanese at the time, he embodied prewar virtues of endurance, obedience and sacrifice - qualities that seemed increasingly antiquated as the country transformed from the devastation of war into an economic powerhouse and a hive of materialism.Īt the time of Mr. He said he thought of “nothing but accomplishing my duty.” 16 at age 91, was the last Japanese soldier to come out of hiding in the Philippines, having survived through thievery, asceticism and undeviating will.
He emerged in 1974, emaciated but still sporting what remained of his old uniform. Onoda, who continued beyond belief to follow wartime orders, loyalty was not only blind but deaf. He stuck to his gun and headed back into the bush in the service of his emperor, bracing for an enemy that didn’t exist anymore.įor Mr. Onoda about the war’s end, but he dismissed it as enemy propaganda. The Japanese government spent a small fortune trying to alert stragglers like Mr. Onoda spent an additional 29 years hiding in the jungle of an isolated Philippine island. A lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army, Mr. World War II was over - but not for Hiroo Onoda. Emperor Hirohito called on the Japanese to “endure the unendurable,” forfeiting the cause that led millions of his countrymen to their graves. 2, 1945 - weeks after two atomic bomb blasts brought an end to years of carnage. The formal surrender of Japan was held in Tokyo Bay on Sept.