Hiroo Onoda: A Case Study in Believing the Impossible
Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2025 3:46 pm
On December 26, 1944, 2nd Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was ordered to lead a small force of Japanese commandos to destroy an airfield and a dock on the tiny Lubang Island in the Philippines. He valiantly continued fighting in jungles of Lubang Island until he learned that World War II was over. He learned the war was over officially and surrendered on March 10, 1974. For 29 and a half years, he lived on bananas, coconuts, wild game, and occasionally stollen rice.
I had heard stories of Japanese soldiers not knowing the war was over for decades. I imagined that they were on uninhabited islands and were marked down as MIA and that nobody knew they were still alive. But in Hiroo Onoda’s case, the opposite was true. Lubang Island was populated with something like 20,000 villagers, and Onodo watched them, stole from them, occasionally captured them and interrogated them, and on multiple occasions got into gun fights with them, killing about 30 civilians over the three decades.
For that entire time, everyone on the island not only knew that a crazy Japanese commando was in the jungle still fighting WWII, they knew who he was. For three decades, the Japanese government was dropping leaflets for him into the jungle, explaining that the war was over and that he should come home. They airdropped him letters from his family and friends. On multiple occasions, his very own brother went to the island and drove around the jungle with a loud speaker begging for him to come home. Over the decades they left him hundreds of Japanese newspapers so he could see that the world had gone on. He found a transistor radio and listened to the news on the radio. For years.
The crazy part about that is he thought all of this was a ruse by the Americans. For example, when he saw his brother driving around the jungle calling him out on a loudspeaker, he was sure that it was a clever ploy by the Americans: the sneaky Americans found a POW that looked like his brother, brainwashed him, trained him to talk like his brother, and then took him to the jungle in order to capture him. Everything he saw in the newspapers and heard on the radio? Just elaborate plots to trick him into surrendering. Everything that was painfully obvious evidence that the war was over was interpreted as the Americans trying to trick him.
Then in 1974, a Japanese adventurer by the name of Norio Suzuki was wandering around the jungle on Lubang Island. Zuzuki was there because he had three items on his bucket list; he wanted to find the three most illusive things on the planet: 2nd Lieutenant Onoda, a wild panda, and the abominable snowman, in that order. When he found Onoda, he asked him what it would take for him to surrender. Onoda said the only thing that could convince him the war was over would be formal orders by his WWII commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguch, commander of his Special Intelligence Squadron.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4 ... 0690905406
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
https://www.amazon.com/No-Surrender-My- ... 1557506639
I had heard stories of Japanese soldiers not knowing the war was over for decades. I imagined that they were on uninhabited islands and were marked down as MIA and that nobody knew they were still alive. But in Hiroo Onoda’s case, the opposite was true. Lubang Island was populated with something like 20,000 villagers, and Onodo watched them, stole from them, occasionally captured them and interrogated them, and on multiple occasions got into gun fights with them, killing about 30 civilians over the three decades.
For that entire time, everyone on the island not only knew that a crazy Japanese commando was in the jungle still fighting WWII, they knew who he was. For three decades, the Japanese government was dropping leaflets for him into the jungle, explaining that the war was over and that he should come home. They airdropped him letters from his family and friends. On multiple occasions, his very own brother went to the island and drove around the jungle with a loud speaker begging for him to come home. Over the decades they left him hundreds of Japanese newspapers so he could see that the world had gone on. He found a transistor radio and listened to the news on the radio. For years.
The crazy part about that is he thought all of this was a ruse by the Americans. For example, when he saw his brother driving around the jungle calling him out on a loudspeaker, he was sure that it was a clever ploy by the Americans: the sneaky Americans found a POW that looked like his brother, brainwashed him, trained him to talk like his brother, and then took him to the jungle in order to capture him. Everything he saw in the newspapers and heard on the radio? Just elaborate plots to trick him into surrendering. Everything that was painfully obvious evidence that the war was over was interpreted as the Americans trying to trick him.
Then in 1974, a Japanese adventurer by the name of Norio Suzuki was wandering around the jungle on Lubang Island. Zuzuki was there because he had three items on his bucket list; he wanted to find the three most illusive things on the planet: 2nd Lieutenant Onoda, a wild panda, and the abominable snowman, in that order. When he found Onoda, he asked him what it would take for him to surrender. Onoda said the only thing that could convince him the war was over would be formal orders by his WWII commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguch, commander of his Special Intelligence Squadron.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4 ... 0690905406
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
https://www.amazon.com/No-Surrender-My- ... 1557506639