Who was Hiroo Onoda?
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. He came out only when his former commander flew in to relieve him of duty. His group is blamed for the deaths of up to 30 islanders.1
Onoda fought in none of the famous battles of the Philippines. He took no part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Battle of Manila of 1945 or the battles of Bataan and Corregidor. His whole war was waged on Lubang, an island about 130 to 150 km southwest of Manila, where he was sent late in 1944 to help resist the American return.2
What was Hiroo Onoda famous for?
Onoda was famous for holding out on Lubang for almost 29 years after Japan's surrender in August 1945, as one of the last Japanese soldiers to give up. He treated leaflets, search parties and family appeals as enemy tricks and laid down his arms in March 1974 only when his wartime commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, ended his mission in person.3
An officer trained not to die
Onoda was born on 19 March 1922 in Kamegawa, a village now part of the city of Kainan in Wakayama Prefecture. After secondary school he went to China in 1939 to work for a trading company in Hankou, today part of Wuhan, according to his foundation and Japanese reference works; the Associated Press obituary placed the job in Shanghai. He was drafted in 1942.4
In 1944, after officer training, he was sent to the Futamata branch of the Nakano School, the army's school for intelligence and guerrilla warfare, and was later commissioned a second lieutenant. Late in 1944 he joined the intelligence staff of the Fourteenth Area Army in the Philippines and was posted to Lubang to lead guerrilla operations and to stay behind enemy lines gathering intelligence.5
His orders ruled out the usual end. Japanese soldiers were taught that death was preferable to surrender, but Onoda was told the opposite: Lieutenant General Shizuo Yokoyama ordered him not to die in a last charge and to hold out, however many years it took, until the army came back. "Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death, but as an intelligence officer I was ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare and not to die," he later told an interviewer.6
American troops landed on Lubang in February 1945, and most of the Japanese garrison was killed or surrendered. Onoda took to the hills with three soldiers, among them Corporal Shoichi Shimada and Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka. They lived on bananas, stolen rice and cattle they shot for meat.7
Why did Hiroo Onoda refuse to surrender?
Onoda would accept the end of the war only as a military order from his own superior. He took leaflets, letters and the voices of search parties, which included his own brothers, for American tricks. By his own account, the American bombers he saw flying toward Indochina from 1965 convinced him that Japan was still fighting there.8
The searches were repeated. Kodansha's history of the memoir counts three search parties, the Associated Press at least four, and a US Embassy telegram of March 1974 five Japanese government searches after 1954. Relatives appealed to him over loudspeakers, and aircraft dropped leaflets urging him to come out.9
Whether he truly believed the war was still on is disputed. In Japan he was asked again and again whether he had known of the defeat, and his insistence on a spoken order from his old commander was mocked as theater. The historian Beatrice Trefalt has pointed out that he had access to newspapers and carried a transistor radio.10
In 1977 the writer Shin Tsuda, who had spent three months with Onoda, published Gensō no eiyū (An Imaginary Hero). Documentary magazine describes the book as a retraction of the heroic story Tsuda had helped to build.11
What happened to Onoda's comrades?
Of the three soldiers who went into the hills with Onoda, one gave himself up in 1950, which told Japan that the others were alive. Corporal Shoichi Shimada was shot dead in May 1954, and Kinshichi Kozuka was killed by Philippine police on 19 October 1972, leaving Onoda alone.12
The months come from Kodansha's account, which dates the first man's departure to September 1949; The Guardian's obituary dated the death of a second member of the group to 1950. Japanese reports in 1972 said police shot Kozuka, while the BBC and The Guardian later described a clash with Philippine troops. After his death a search mission flew in from Japan with Onoda's elder brother, but it found no trace of him.13
Did Hiroo Onoda kill civilians?
Yes. Onoda's group stole rice from farmers, shot their cattle and fought repeated clashes with islanders and police on Lubang. The BBC, The Guardian and SBS News all put the number of people killed by Onoda and his men at up to 30. President Ferdinand Marcos pardoned him in 1974, but many islanders never forgave him.14
Relatives have named the dead. Emilio Viaña, a farmer, was shot while working his land in 1951 and bled to death, according to family members interviewed by SBS News and in Searching for Onoda, a documentary by his great-niece Mia Stewart.15
Onoda's memoir says little about these deaths, SBS News reported, and Documentary magazine calls it an expurgated account. Trefalt has said that Japanese questions about the people of Lubang and about compensation were soon overshadowed by the story of the returning soldier.16
How did Hiroo Onoda finally surrender?
On 20 February 1974 a young Japanese traveler, Norio Suzuki, found Onoda on Lubang. Onoda refused to come out without an order from his superior, so the Japanese government brought his wartime commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, to the island. Taniguchi delivered the order ending his mission, and in March 1974 Onoda came out.17
On 11 March, at Malacañang Palace in Manila, Onoda offered his sword to President Marcos, dressed in his 30-year-old uniform, which was still in good condition. He returned to Japan on 12 March 1974, where his parents and large crowds welcomed him at the airport.18
After the jungle
Japan's reaction was divided. A US Embassy telegram reported public happiness at his return, but also renewed questioning of the prewar education that had shaped him. Onoda wrote that the newspapers cast him either as the embodiment of the military spirit or as a ghost of militarism.19
In 1974 Kodansha published his memoir, which appeared in English the same year as No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. In 1975 he emigrated to Brazil and ran a cattle ranch with the wife he married after his return. In 1984 he began running nature camps for children, the Onoda Shizen Juku, and in 1989 set up the Onoda Nature School foundation, with a camp in Fukushima Prefecture.20
Onoda died in a Tokyo hospital on 16 January 2014, aged 91. The Guardian, citing his family, gave the cause as heart failure; CNN's Japanese service reported pneumonia.21
Was Hiroo Onoda the last Japanese soldier to surrender?
No. Onoda was one of several Japanese soldiers who held out for decades after 1945. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi had come out of the jungle on Guam in 1972, and later in 1974 Private Teruo Nakamura, a soldier from Taiwan who served in the Japanese army, was found on the Indonesian island of Morotai and surrendered in December.22
The historian Beatrice Trefalt has studied these stragglers in a book that follows their discoveries and returns between 1950 and 1975 and what they revealed about Japanese attitudes to veterans, to the families of the war dead and to memories of the war.23
Why Onoda's story still matters
It is easy to admire Onoda's endurance and harder to sit with what it cost. His 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.24
