A Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for three decades, refusing to believe World War II was over until his former commander returned and persuaded him to surrender, has died in Tokyo aged 91.
Hiroo Onoda waged a guerrilla campaign on Lubang Island near Luzon until he was finally persuaded in 1974 that peace had broken out.
Leaflet drops and other efforts to convince him the Imperial Army had been defeated were unsuccessful and it was only a visit from his former commanding officer, who ordered him to lay down his arms, that brought an end to his one-man war.
Photo: AFP
Onoda was the last of several dozen so-called holdouts scattered around Asia, men who symbolized the astonishing perseverance of those called upon to fight for their emperor.
Their number included a soldier arrested in the jungles of Guam in 1972.
Trained as an information officer and guerrilla tactics coach, Onoda was dispatched to Lubang in 1944 and ordered never to surrender, never to resort to suicidal attacks and to hold firm until reinforcements arrived.
He and three other soldiers continued to obey that order long after Japan’s 1945 defeat. Their existence became widely known in 1950, when one of their number emerged and returned to Japan.
The remaining men continued to survey military facilities in the area, attacking local residents and occasionally fighting with Philippine forces, although one of them died soon afterwards.
Tokyo and Manila searched for the remaining two over the next decade, but ruled in 1959 that they were already dead.
However, in 1972, Onoda and the other surviving soldier got involved in a shootout with Philippine troops. His comrade died, but Onoda managed to escape.
The incident shocked Japan, which took his family members to Lubang in the hope of persuading him that hostilities were over.
Onoda later explained that he had believed attempts to coax him out were the work of a puppet regime installed in Tokyo by the US.
He read about his home country in newspapers that searchers deliberately scattered in the jungle for him to find, but dismissed their content as propaganda.
The regular overflight by US planes during the long years of the Vietnam war also convinced him that the battle he had joined was still being played out across Asia.
It was not until 1974, when his old commanding officer visited him in his jungle hideout to rescind the original order, that Onoda’s war eventually ended.
In his formal surrender to then-Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, Onoda wore his 30-year-old imperial army uniform, cap and sword, all still in good condition.
Asked at a press conference in Japan after his return what he had been thinking about for the past 30 years, he told reporters: “Carrying out my orders.”
Onoda had difficultly adapting to the new reality in Japan and in 1975 emigrated to Brazil to start a cattle ranch, although he continued to travel back and forth.
He later was head of a children’s nature school in northern Japan.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS