No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  Shimada asked anxiously, “Do you suppose he’ll lead the enemy to us?”

  “Probably,” replied Kozuka, in a tone indicating that he thought it only to be expected. I was convinced then that Kozuka had also expected Akatsu to desert sooner or later.

  The place where Akatsu had disappeared was toward the western end of our circuit, deep in the forest near Snake Mountain Abutment. We were later astonished to find that he surrendered at Looc, toward the eastern end of the island—and not until six months afterward. I was amazed and a little chagrined that his luck had held out that long.

  About ten months after Akatsu’s departure, and only a few days after the end of the rainy season in 1950, we found a note saying, “When I surrendered, the Philippine troops greeted me as a friend.” The note was written in Akatsu’s hand. Shortly afterward we spotted a light aircraft circling slowly in the sky above Vigo. Taking this to mean that the enemy was about to start looking for us, we moved over to the other side of the island.

  The next day we heard a loudspeaker that seemed to be somewhat north of Wakayama Point. The voice said: “Yesterday we dropped leaflets from an airplane. You have three days, that is, seventy-two hours, in which to surrender. In the event that you do not surrender in that time, we will probably have no alternative but to send a task force after you.”

  The voice spoke in Japanese, with no trace of a foreign accent, but the choice of words sounded American. Japanese do not speak of three days as “seventy-two hours,” and the whole announcement impressed us as being a translation from some foreign tongue. For them to ask us in strange-sounding Japanese to surrender was still more proof that the war had not ended.

  I had come to this island on the direct orders of the division commander. If the war were really over, there ought to be another order from the division commander releasing me from my duties. I did not believe that the division commander would forget orders that he had issued to his men.

  Supposing he had forgotten. The orders would still have been on record at division headquarters. Certainly somebody would have seen to it that the commander’s outstanding orders were properly rescinded.

  Three days later, we spotted the expected task force from a distance of about 150 yards.

  Kozuka whispered, “That idiot Akatsu has really brought the Americans. Let’s try to get a good look at them!”

  The enemy troops were on a road that runs through a forest of palms east of the Agcawayan River and inland from Brol. They were not Americans but Filipino soldiers, and there were only about five or six of them, carrying a loudspeaker with them. In front was a man in a white hiking hat, walking somewhat nervously.

  “That’s Akatsu, isn’t it?” whispered Kozuka. We squinted, but we could not see his face well enough to tell. After the task force moved on, we persuaded ourselves that it had indeed been Akatsu, now working for the enemy.

  After this encounter, Kozuka said, “They couldn’t take us prisoner with a force of fifty or even a hundred men. We know this island better than anybody else in the world!”

  The main thing that bothered me was the fear that the enemy might try using gas. This would do us in immediately, because we had no gas masks. As an emergency measure, I told the others to keep a towel tied to their canteen straps and in the event of an attack to soak the towel in water and hold it over their faces. I also warned them to keep an eye on the direction of the wind, because the wind would blow the gas in. We did not abandon our makeshift gas masks for six months.

  THREE SOLDIERS AT WAR

  After Akatsu surrendered, we were able to take a more positive course of action. We speeded up the trips around our circuit of campsites, which we began to regard as inspection tours of the area under our “occupation.” When we encountered the enemy, we fired without hesitation. After all, the enemy must have learned from Akatsu when and where they could expect to find us. We considered people dressed as islanders to be enemy troops in disguise or enemy spies. The proof that they were was that whenever we fired on one of them, a search party arrived shortly afterward.

  The number of enemy troops increased every time they came, and it looked as though they were trying to surround us and then kill us. By and by, I began to wonder if they were not eventually going to launch an all-island campaign.

  To search all the hills and valleys in the central area at one time, however, would require at least one or two battalions, and it seemed unlikely that they would send such a large force just to capture three men. My guess was that they would never send more than fifty or a hundred troops. We were confident that we could cut our way through a force no larger than that. We had the advantage of knowing central Lubang like the backs of our hands. In fact, the largest force we ever saw numbered no more than one hundred; usually there were only about fifty.

  When we fled into the jungle, the large trees became our protectors. Sometimes the enemy troops would continue firing for some time at the trees we were hiding behind, but this did them no good. As they grew more and more frustrated, they aimed less carefully and wasted still more ammunition. That was exactly what we wanted them to do. We were only three men, but we were making a force of fifty look silly. That is the kind of warfare I had been taught at Futamata.

  I told Shimada and Kozuka about my orders from the division commander.

  Kozuka immediately said, “Lieutenant, I’ll stay with you to the end, even if it takes ten years.”

  Shimada spoke even more enthusiastically. “The three of us ought to secure this whole island before our troops land again.”

  The two of them usually addressed me as “Lieutenant” or “Commander,” but there was no real distinction of rank among us. I was an officer, Shimada a corporal, and Kozuka a private first class, but we talked as equals, each of us having an equal say in the laying of plans. We took turns hunting and cooking.

  I hid my sword in the trunk of a dead tree not far from Kumano Point. This left me armed just like the other two, with a rifle and a bayonet. The three of us were comrades, fighting for the same goal, and we had a good deal in common. None of us drank, all of us had healthy teeth, and, in general, we were all healthy. Although Shimada was somewhat larger than the other two of us, we were all small enough to move about with the speed required for guerrilla tactics.

  I do not mean that we had no quarrels. Far from it! There were times when we were frothing at the mouth and taking pokes at each other.

  In our heads we carried a “food-distribution map” of Lubang. From the weather and from experience, we could tell which part of the island we should go to to find ripe bananas or a relatively large number of cows. It often happened, however, that when we arrived at the spot indicated by our food map, there was not as much food as we had hoped, and a clash of opinions would ensue.

  “Let’s go farther inland.”

  “No, let’s rest here for a day.”

  “Nonsense! Why do you want to do that?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “That’s about enough back talk out of you!”

  “Who do you think you are, ordering me around?”

  Once this started, it went on until somebody gave in. Shimada and Kozuka sometimes came to blows, and there was an occasional split lip or sore arm. When they went at it, I usually mediated, but sometimes I just sat still and let them fight it out by themselves. When that happened, there was nothing they could do but fight tooth and nail until one or the other surrendered unconditionally. This struck me as a good thing, because it gave them a chance to test their physical strength and find out how far their bodies would go along with their convictions. In the long run, the occasional fights brought us closer together.

  One time I came to blows with Shimada. We were talking about Akatsu’s defection, and Shimada took a sympathetic view toward Akatsu. I, for my part, had no sympathy at all for a soldier who had deserted before my very eyes. Before very long a fistfight started, and we rolled down the hill pounding each other.

  Often when we
were walking at the foot of the mountains near a village, we found waste paper and worn-out clothing. The latter was most welcome, because we were always running out of rags to polish our rifles with. These days, too, the islanders who came into the mountains to cut trees often left uneaten rice in their pots. These traces of waste meant to us that living conditions on the island had improved somewhat. At the time when Akatsu left, you could have walked over the whole island without finding a scrap of waste paper.

  One night Shimada, who had gone out on patrol, came back and said, somewhat excitedly, “Lieutenant, don’t make any noise, but come with me.”

  We were near the Tilik area. I followed him silently up a small hill that had been left bald by the recent harvesting of rice. When we reached the top, I suppressed a gasp. Electric lights were shining in Tilik! It was the first time since I had been on Lubang that I had seen electric lights.

  The three of us sat down on the hill and stared at the town.

  “When do you suppose they got generators?”

  “Let’s try going a little closer.”

  “No! They’ve never had electricity before. Let them enjoy it for a while.”

  It had been six years since I had seen electric lights, but the sight of them did not make me the slightest bit homesick. That surprised even me. I had become so accustomed to having no lights at night that Tilik just looked like a different world from the one I was living in.

  The ships coming into Tilik changed too. At first there had been small vessels that looked for all the world like pokkuri, the high-base wooden clogs once worn by Japanese geisha. We called them pokkuri boats. Now these had given way to large white ocean liners, some of which played music over their loudspeakers when they were anchored in Tilik. They usually played popular Filipino songs, but sometimes we heard a Japanese melody. The sound floated all the way up to the little bald hill where we first saw the lights of Tilik.

  We could also see the lighthouse at Cabra, a neighboring island. The sight of something outside Lubang affected me not at all, and I wondered whether I had lost my ability to feel.

  In the rainy season neither the search parties nor the islanders came to the mountains. We could relax and stay in one place. We built a little shelter with a roof made of palm leaves. Sometimes we would sit here all day. If you are in one place for a long time, you grow accustomed to the sounds around you. When we were on the move, the slightest sound set us on edge, but when we were in the same place for a long time, we began to recognize this sound as the crackling of twigs in the wind and that sound as rising water in the nearby valley, and so on. We learned to distinguish the birds that lived only in particular localities.

  When we were like this, the usual tension left us, and we talked about old times back in Japan. We probably knew more about each other’s family background and childhood than most of our relatives knew.

  Once in a while Shimada would say softly, “I wonder whether it was a boy or a girl.”

  When he had left home, he and his wife were expecting their second child. The first, a girl, had not yet started primary school. One time when Shimada was talking about her, he sighed and said, “I guess she must be about the age to like boys now.” Then he just stared at his feet as the rain fell on outside.

  Shimada particularly liked to talk about the bon-festival dances in his hometown. Whenever he started on this subject, his face would light up, and his voice become animated. Every once in a while he would break out into the song they sang in his town for the festival

  The only ones who aren’t dancing tonight

  Are the old stone Buddha and me.

  He told us about the wooden stage they used to build for the dances and how the young men would strut about on it in their summer kimonos. As the song went on and on to the steady beating of drums, the men and women would dance around in a circle. The traditional words of the song would gradually be replaced by bawdy variations, until, as dawn approached, the young men would begin to sidle up to the girls.

  “You must have danced at the bon festival, Lieutenant,” Shimada once said.

  But I shook my head. I did not know the song Shimada sang, and I had never been to a bon festival. Neither had Kozuka. All we could do was listen.

  “The bon festival is the happiest time of the year,” Shimada would say, often repeating himself. I like to remember him this way, because it was at times like these that I was most strongly impressed with his essential goodness.

  Sometimes we cut each other’s hair with some little scissors I had improvised. I cut Shimada’s, Shimada cut Kozuka’s, and Kozuka cut mine. If two of us cut each other’s, eventually one of the two would have to cut the third one’s hair, and that would not have been fair. It took about forty minutes per haircut, and if one person cut two others’, he would be working nearly an hour and a half, whereas one of the others would not have worked at all.

  In February, 1952, a light aircraft from the Philippine Air Force circled over the island. We heard the sound of a loudspeaker, but I could not make out what it was saying because of the noise of the engine. Kozuka, who had good ears, said, “They seem to be calling our names.” After he said that, that is what it sounded like to me too. The airplane dropped some leaflets and left.

  We picked up the leaflets later, and among them was a letter from my oldest brother, Toshio. The letter started, “I am entrusting this letter to Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo, who is going to the Philippine Islands on the invitation of Madame Roxas.” It went on to say that the war had ended, that my parents were both well and that my brothers were all out of the army.

  There were also letters from Kozuka’s and Shimada’s families, together with family photographs.

  My reaction was that the Yankees had outdone themselves this time. I wondered how on earth they had obtained the photographs. That there was something fishy about the whole thing was beyond doubt, but I could not figure out exactly how the trick had been carried out. The photograph Shimada received showed his wife and two children. If the photograph was genuine, the second child was a girl, but we had some doubts about this.

  “It’s supposed to be a photograph of my immediate family,” remarked Shimada, “but that man on the left is not in my immediate family. He’s only a relative. I think this is just another enemy hoax.”

  I heard after I returned to Japan that when Lieutenant Colonel Nobuhiko Jimbo was in the Philippines during the war, he saved the life of Manuel Roxas, who became president after the war. Roxas died in 1948, and later his widow invited Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo to the Philippines for a visit. He had indeed brought the letters, but we could not believe it at the time.

  About a month later, we heard another loudspeaker. A man’s voice said, “I was staying at the Manila Hotel, when I heard that you were still on this island. I came to talk with you. I am Yutaka Tsuji of the Asahi Newspaper.” After that the man kept repeating that he was Japanese, and then he sang something that sounded like a Japanese war song.

  “They’re at it again,” I commented.

  Shimada replied, “It’s a nuisance. Let’s move somewhere else.”

  Thinking that the man with the loudspeaker might have left something behind, we looked around and found a Japanese newspaper—the first one we had seen for seven years.

  In the current topics section, there was a story in bold type saying, “Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo has gone to the Philippines to persuade the Philippine government to cancel its punitive missions against the Japanese soldiers on Lubang.” This article had been circled in red.

  We read the rest of the newspaper page by page and came to the conclusion that the enemy had devised some means to insert this article into an otherwise genuine Japanese newspaper. The talk about “punitive missions” proved, after all, that the war was still going on.

  I told the other two that the newspaper was “poisoned candy.” It looked good, but it was deadly.

  The daily schedule of radio broadcasts in the paper disturbed me a little. It seemed
to me that there were far too many light entertainment programs. I knew, however, that in America there were commercial radio stations, and I decided that there must now be commercial stations in Japan. When I left the country, there was only the government-operated network, but there might be commercial stations now. If there were, it stood to reason that they would have to present a good deal of light entertainment in order to attract advertisers.

  Kozuka said, “I don’t think there is any reporter named Yutaka Tsuji. I think they’re just trying to be slick, using the name of the Asahi Newspaper and all that stuff.”

  In June, 1953, Shimada was wounded badly in the leg. This happened on the south shore between Gontin and Binacas.

  We considered this a part of our territory. Since islanders rarely came near it, we were surprised one day to find that a group of fifteen or sixteen fishermen had made camp there. The rainy season was approaching, and we could not risk having people this near our hiding place. I said, “Let’s clear them out right now. The sooner, the better!”

  Before dawn, the fishermen built a fire and gathered around it to warm themselves. From a nearby grove, Shimada and Kozuka fired some shots in their direction. They scattered, but one of them seized a gun and hid behind a boulder. We started out on a roundabout path that would bring us out behind him. We did not know that in the meanwhile another of the fishermen, armed with a carbine, had returned to the beach. Our sudden appearance startled him, and he fired two blind shots at us before fleeing.

  One of the shots hit the ring finger of my right hand; the other went through Shimada’s right leg. He dropped to his knees and remained motionless. I hurriedly pulled him up and carried him on my back into the forest, while Kozuka covered our rear.

  The bullet had entered the inner side of the knee and gone through slantwise. I took off my loincloth and made a tourniquet above the wound.

  Carbine bullets are small, and it appeared that there was no damage to the bone. There was no dirt in the wound either, so I did not think there was any danger of tetanus. I sealed the wound with cow fat and made a splint from the knee to the ankle. Shimada gritted his teeth in pain, sweat pouring from his forehead.