History of Japan - Hiroo Onoda

Hiroo Onoda

Hiroo Onoda was a former Army Special Intelligence Squadron man, an elite commando who in 1944 was sent to Lubang island in the Phillippines to conduct guerilla warfare and to gather military intelligence.

 Trained in secret warfare, his mission was to infiltrate behind enemy lines, gather intelligence and to stay alive and keep fighting until he was ordered otherwise. He did exactly just that: for the next 30 years, convinced that the Greater East Asia War was still being fought.

Onoda carried out guerrilla warfare on Lubang Island in the Philippines, on several occasions engaging in shootouts with locals and the police.

 Onoda initially held out with three other soldiers: one surrendered in 1950, and two who were killed, one in 1954 and one in 1972.

 They did not believe flyers saying that the war was over. Onoda was contacted in 1974 by a Japanese explorer, but still refused to surrender until he was relieved of duty by his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi. The officer was flown from Japan to Lubang for this.

Onoda surrendered on 10 March 1974 and received a hero's welcome when he returned to Japan. 

Onoda was reportedly unhappy at receiving such attention and at what he believed to be the withering of traditional Japanese values. He wrote No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, a best-selling autobiography. In April 1975, he followed the example of his elder brother Tadao and left Japan for Brazil, where he became a cattle farmer.

He married in 1976 and assumed a leading role in the Colônia Jamic ("Jamic Colony"), a Japanese Brazilian community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul. Onoda also allowed the Brazilian Air Force to conduct training sessions on the land that he owned.

 After reading about a Japanese teenager who murdered his parents in 1980, Onoda returned to Japan in 1984 and established the Onoda Shizen Juku ("Onoda Nature School") educational camp for young people, held at various locations in Japan.

In 1996, Onoda visited the town of Looc on Lubang after his wife Machie (née Honoku) arranged a US$10,000 scholarship donation on his behalf to the local school.

 The town council presented Onoda with a resolution asking him to compensate the families of seven people whom he allegedly killed. About 50 relatives of the alleged victims staged a protest against his visit.

After 1984, Onoda spent three months of the year in Brazil. He was awarded the Santos-Dumont Merit Medal by the Brazilian Air Force on 6 December 2004.

 On 21 February 2010, the Legislative Assembly of Mato Grosso do Sul awarded him the title of Cidadão ("Citizen").

 In 2006, his wife Machie Onoda became the head of the conservative Japan Women's Association (JWA), which had been established in 2001 by the ultranationalist organization Nippon Kaigi.

On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure resulting from pneumonia at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga commented on his death, saying "I vividly remember that I was reassured of the end of the war when Mr Onoda returned to Japan".

“If I could kill one more enemy with the last bullet, so much the better. That, rather than commit suicide, seemed to me to be what a soldier ought to do.”
― Hiroo Onoda, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War