
Hiroo Onoda (19 March 1922-16 January 2014) was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who served in World War II and waged a one-man war in the Philippines until his surrender in 1974 upon discovering that the war had ended, making him the penultimate Japanese holdout to surrneder.
Biography[]
Hiroo Onoda was born in Kamekawa, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan on 19 March 1922, and he enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army at the age of 18. On 26 December 1944, he was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines and tasked with destroying the airstrip and the pier at the harbor, hampering Allied attacks on the island by any means, and never surrendering or committing suicide. On 28 February, American and Filipino soldiers landed on the island and killed all but four of the soldiers on the island, and Onoda - promoted to Lieutenant - led the three other men into the hills to wage a guerrilla war. In October 1945, the holdouts discovered a propaganda leaflet claiming that Japan had been defeated, but they distrusted the leaflet as Allied propaganda. Over the years, the soldiers were picked off one by one: Yuichi Akatsu surrendered in March 1950, Shoichi Shimada was killed by a search party in 1954, and Kinshichi Kozuka was shot by police in 1972. Onoda killed almost 30 Filipino farmers by the time that the young adventure-seeker Norio Suzuki came to the island to find Onoda, succeeding in doing so on 20 February 1974. Suzuki persuaded Onoda that the war had ended only after returning to Japan to bring back Onoda's former superior officer, Yoshimi Taniguchi, on 9 March 1974; Taniguchi properly relieved Onoda of duty, and Onoda surrendered his sword, his Arisaka rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. On his return to Japan, he was urged to run for the National Diet, but he was disappointed by the withering of traditional Japanese values and refused back pay from the government, instead sending monetary gifts from well-wishers to the Yasukuni Shrine. In April 1975, he followed his brother to Brazil to raise cattle, and he returned to Japan in 1984 to establish an educational camp for young people after reading a 1980 news story about a young man killing his parents. President Ferdinand Marcos later pardoned Onoda, who visited Lubang Island in 1996 after his wife arranged a $10,000 donation to a local school. He died of heart failure in Tokyo in 2014 at the age of 91, having become a hero to Japanese nationalists.