No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  After I landed on Lubang at the end of 1944, I had no real knowledge of how the war was going. There was no news at all from the outside world for several years, and I did not believe the leaflets. Kozuka was in the same position as I; we both believed that it was our duty to hold out until the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was firmly established. Perhaps my determination was what had brought about my appointment as a secret warfare agent in the first place. Kozuka was under no special orders like mine. He had simply been drafted into the army and sent to the Philippines. But he had been with me a long time and felt the same way I did about the situation. Neither of us doubted for a minute that there must be other Japanese soldiers like us on many of the Philippine Islands.

  In 1950, just after Akatsu defected, a number of poles from Japanese army pup tents had floated up on the south shore of the island, along with fragments of army backpacks. These were blown in by the wind during the rainy season. and we took them to be debris from a passing Japanese troop transport. The presence of a troop transport in this region in turn suggested that the main fighting was now centered in Indo-China.

  Five years later it stood to reason that the front had been extended to Java or Sumatra, and we judged that a joint air, sea and land campaign must be going on all over the area to the south.

  We were impressed by the continued enemy patrol activity in our area. Around 1950 lighthouses went into operation on Cabra and on the northwest end of Mindoro; from then on two patrol planes covered the area every day. And the number of fighter planes continually increased. At first there had been only two or three a day, but now there were sometimes dozens.

  What convinced us most of the presence of other Japanese troops in the islands was the occasional dropping of bombs in the valley near Vigo. After it was all over, I learned that Lubang had become a practice target for Philippine Air Force training planes, but at the time I could only speculate as to the reason for the bombs. I came to the conclusion that the enemy believed we were trying to bring in Japanese guerrilla units from other islands. The bombs were being dropped to prevent this.

  Around May, 1954, a voice speaking over a loudspeaker said, “I am Katsuo Sato, former chief of staff of the Naval Air Force. I would like to meet you in Looc.” It seemed to us ridiculous that a naval officer would come looking for us when we were both in the army.

  In sum, the various leaflets and “fake” messages that reached us on Lubang, far from convincing us that the war was over, persuaded us that Japanese troops would soon be landing on the island. Thinking that any advance Japanese agent would certainly come ashore on the south coast, we were trying to “secure” that area. We believed that if, when this agent arrived, we were unable to give him all the information he needed about the island, we would be severely reprimanded, and rightly so.

  The south shore would be the best place for Japanese troops to land. They could anchor their boats on the reefs and walk through sixty or seventy yards of shallow water to the beach, from which they could immediately run into the mountains. If they were to say, for example, that they wanted to proceed from this point to the airfield within two days, we were prepared to guide them in the specified time along a route where they would not encounter enemy troops.

  We tried, by firing occasional warning shots, to keep islanders out of the south coast area, and we spent a good deal of time working out the safe route to the airfield. I did not know until much later that because of our tactics, the Filipinos had decided to fire on us at sight.

  In the spring of 1958, the Philippine Air Force began building a radar base on the mountain we knew as Five Hundred. Before actual construction began, the air force hired a large number of islanders to construct a motor road leading up to the base. One day when we went out to see how the road was coming along, we were surprised by the sound of an explosion near the top of the mountain. We looked at each other in surprise.

  Kozuka said, “Looks like they’re starting to build in earnest.”

  I replied, “Let’s wait until dark and take a look around up there.”

  We sat down on the side of the hill and waited for sunset, which would be in about thirty minutes. I had my back to the ridge, and Kozuka, who was sitting beside me in such a position that he could keep an eye on the ridge, was talking to me in a low voice.

  Suddenly he gasped, “Uh!” I whirled around and fired toward the top of the ridge. There was a cry from that direction, as somebody fell over on the other side of the ridge, We hurried down the hill into the forest.

  Not long after that the large search party of 1959 arrived from Japan to look for us.

  “The Americans seem to be starting another one of their fake rescue operations,” I said.

  “What a nuisance!” growled Kozuka. “Let’s move somewhere where it’s quiet.”

  We shifted to an area toward the south where we could not hear the loudspeakers, from which, I found out later, the search party had repeated over and over again: “Lieutenant Onoda! Private First Class Kozuka! We have come from Japan to look for you. The war has ended. Please talk with us and come back to Japan with us.”

  They also played the Japanese national anthem and a lot of Japanese folk songs and popular songs. The search party went around the whole island, camping out at night. Every time they came near us, we went farther into the jungle.

  We were sure in our own minds that these people were enemy agents who had been fooled by our own army’s faked messages and were trying to prevent us from making contact with supposed Japanese spies. They could appeal to us all they wanted; we had no intention of responding.

  The enemy was trying, we thought, to remove us from this island. If they could capture the two of us, advance agents from Japan would not be able to land here, and it would be impossible for a Japanese task force to recapture the airfield. From our viewpoint, if we were to be taken in by this deception, all our work up to that time would be wasted. Even if they searched the island with a fine-tooth comb, we had to try to keep from being discovered.

  If there should indeed be a full-scale search, we had a plan for escaping from the island, but in the event that we were found before we could carry this into effect, we had resolved to inflict as much damage as we could. If we had to die, it would be easier knowing that we had killed ten or twenty or thirty enemy troops.

  People had often told me that if I was really cornered, I should save the last bullet for myself, but I intended to use every bullet I had against the enemy. Why should I waste a bullet on myself when the enemy would take care of me soon enough anyway? I had held on to those bullets and kept them clean all these years. I wanted each one to do as much damage as possible. 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.

  “They can raise all the fuss they want to,” said Kozuka, “but I’m not going to let them find me.”

  “Well,” I replied, “as long as they’re carrying on like this, no Japanese agent is going to show up. Let’s find a nice safe place and relax for a while.”

  But they stayed and stayed and stayed. They came in May and were still there in late November.

  Finally, one day I said, “Just for future reference, let’s go closer and see exactly what tactics they’re taking.”

  We slipped up to the peak nearest the one we called Six Hundred. I did not know it then, but this was to be the last day of the search. From the top of Six Hundred came the sound of a loudspeaker saying, “Hiroo, come out. This is your brother Toshio. Kozuka’s brother Fukuji has come with me. This is our last day here. Please come out where we can see you.”

  The voice certainly sounded like Toshio’s, so I thought at first the enemy must be playing a record made by him. The more I listened, however, the less the voice sounded like a recording. I went a little closer so that I could hear better.

  A man was standing on the top of Six Hundred speaking earnestly into a microphone. I approached a point abou
t a hundred and fifty yards away from him. I did not dare go nearer, because I would have made too good a target.

  I could not see the man’s face, but he was built like my brother, and his voice was identical.

  “That’s really something,” I thought. “They’ve found a Nisei or a prisoner who looks at a distance like my brother, and he’s learned to imitate my brother’s voice perfectly.”

  The man started to sing, “East wind blowing in the sky over the capital . . .” This was a well-known students’ song at the Tokyo First High School, which my brother had attended, and I knew he liked it. It started out as a fine performance, and I listened with interest. But gradually the voice grew strained and higher, and at the end it was completely off tune.

  I laughed to myself. The impersonator had not been able to keep it up, and his own voice had come through in the end. I found it very amusing, particularly so because at first he had nearly taken me in.

  Suddenly it began to rain. A squall was rising. The man on the hill picked up something lying at his feet and started down the hill, his shoulders drooping. After I saw him safely out of sight, I slipped back into the jungle.

  When I returned to Japan, I learned that it really had been my brother.

  “When I heard the voice go off at the end of the song,” I explained, “I was convinced it was an impersonator.”

  With a sad look on his face, my brother said, “While I was singing, I began thinking that this was my last day on Lubang, and I choked up. . . . So you did hear me, after all.”

  The search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Most of them were recent, and a lot of them contained articles about the crown prince’s marriage. The newspapers, which covered a period of about four months, made a stack nearly two feet high. We thought they were reprints of real Japanese newspapers doctored up by the American secret service in such a way as to eliminate any news the Americans did not want us to see. This was all we could think so long as we believed that the Greater East Asia War was still going on.

  And in a way the newspapers confirmed that the war was still going on, because they told a lot about life in Japan. If Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

  When I arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the war was going badly for Japan, and in the homeland the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. I took this at face value, as I am sure many other young Japanese men my age did.

  I sincerely believed that Japan would not surrender so long as one Japanese remained alive. Conversely, if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered.

  After all, this is what we Japanese had all vowed to each other. We had sworn the we would resist the American and English devils until the last single one of us was dead. If necessary, the women and children would resist with bamboo sticks, trying to kill as many enemy troops as they could before being killed themselves. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. “Struggle to the End!” “The Empire Must Be Protected at Any Cost!” “One Hundred Million Dying for the Cause.” I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk.

  When I became a soldier, I accepted my country’s goals. I vowed that I would do anything within my power to achieve those goals. I did not, it is true, come forward and volunteer for military service, but having been born male and Japanese, I considered it my sacred duty, once I had passed the army physical examination, to become a soldier and fight for Japan.

  After I entered the army, I became a candidate in officers’ training school. When my brother Tadao came to see me there, he asked me whether I was prepared to die for my country. I told him I was. At that time, I renewed my oath to myself that I would give my all. It was a solemn oath, and I was resolved to carry it out.

  By 1959 I had been in Lubang for fifteen years, and the only real news I had received from Japan during that time was the newspaper left by Yutaka Tsuji, who claimed to be a reporter from the Asahi Newspaper. I was not even sure that this news was genuine.

  In short, for fifteen years, I had been outside the flow of time. All I could be sure of was what had been true in late 1944 and what I had sworn at that time to do. I had kept my vow rigidly during those fifteen years.

  Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!”

  The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? Didn’t the pictures show a lavish wedding parade through the streets of Tokyo, with thousands of cheering Japanese lined up along the way? There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous.

  Who said we had lost the war? The newspapers proved this was wrong. If we had lost, our countrymen would all be dead; there would be no more Japan, let alone Japanese newspapers.

  Kozuka agreed with me completely. As we were reading the papers, he looked up and remarked, “Life in the home islands seems to be a lot better than it was when we left, doesn’t it? Look at the ads. There seems to be plenty of everything. I’m glad, aren’t you? I makes me feel it has been worthwhile holding out the way we have.”

  How could we even dream that Japan’s cities had been leveled, that Japan’s ships had nearly all been sunk, or that an exhausted and depleted Japan had indeed surrendered? As to the details of the defeat, such as the invasion of Manchukuo by the Soviet Union or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the newspapers of 1959 gave not an inkling.

  We read the newspapers through and through, right down to the little three-line want ads. As a matter of fact, the want ads were particularly interesting, because they indicated what kind of work people were seeking and what kind of people were being sought.

  But time had stopped for us in 1944, and as we read, we kept finding items that we could not understand at all. We were particularly puzzled by articles on foreign relations and military affairs. Sometimes after we had read them several times, they still meant nothing.

  It was difficult to tell, for example, which countries were now on Japan’s side and which were not. Putting together what we read in the newspapers and the bits and pieces of information (or misinformation) we had gleaned from leaflets and the like, we formed a total picture of Japan and the war situation in 1959.

  We knew that the Great Japanese Empire had become a democratic Japan. We did not know when or how, but clearly there was now a democratic government, and the military organization had been reformed. It also appeared as though Japan was now engaged in cultural and economic relations with a large number of foreign countries.

  The Japanese government was still working for the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the new army was still engaged in military conflict with America. The new army seemed to be a modernized version of the old army, and we supposed that it must have assumed responsibility for the defense of East Asia as a whole, China included.

  China was now a communist country under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung: there seemed little doubt but that Mao had come to power with the support of Japan. No doubt he was now cooperating with Japan to implement the co-prosperity sphere. Although there was nothing in the newpapers about this, it was only logical that the American secret service would have eliminated any mention of it in preparing the newspapers for us.

  We calculated that Japan would have found it advantageous to set Mao Tse-tung up as the leader of the New China, because this would make the vast sums of money held by wealthy Chinese financiers available to Japan. We assumed that to secure Japan’s support, Mao had agreed to drive the Americans and English out of China and to cooperate with the new Japanese army.

  Fundamentally, Japan and China were working for the same goal. It seemed only natural that they would have
formed an alliance. We started speaking of this as the “East Asia Co-Prosperity League,” and we assumed that Manchukuo was also an active member, contributing materially in the field of arms manufacture.

  Kozuka asked, “Do you suppose those are the only three countries in the league?”

  “No,” I answered. “I would think that the eastern part of Siberia had by now broken away from the Soviet Union and joined the league.”

  “Siberia?” he asked incredulously.

  “Why not? I should think it would be only a matter of time until the White Russians in eastern Siberia would rebel against communist atheism and secede from the Soviet Union.”

  “Then you think there might be an independent ‘Siberian Christian Republic’? Maybe you’re right—it makes a good deal of sense. What about the southern regions?”

  “Java and Sumatra have no doubt been liberated from Holland by now. I imagine they belong to the league too.”

  I remember that more than twenty of my fellow students at Futamata had been sent to Java to lead the Javanese troops there in guerrilla warfare.

  “What about India?” asked Kozuka.

  “I guess that it’s independent from England now, and that Chandra Bose is president, or premier, or whatever the head of the country is called. I can’t decide whether I think it belongs to the league or not. What do you think?”

  “Well, my guess is that it’s at least a friendly nation. Australia may still be holding out, but it shouldn’t be too long before the Australians join us too. Anyway, that leaves us with East Siberia, Manchukuo, China, Java and Sumatra all in the league and supporting Japan in the war against America and England. The big question is when will the Philippines split off from America and join our side?”

  “I think it’s only a matter of time,” I said confidently.

  We also worked out a theory about the organization of the new Japanese military establishment. We felt that basically it could not be very different from the old. There must still be a division into army, navy and air force, and certainly there would be a secret service. We supposed also that the chain of command was the same as it had been, and that we ourselves were consequently under the command of the new organization. The new army, too, must be the source of the fake messages that were sometimes sent to Lubang. The main difference, as far as we could see, was that the conscription system had been replaced by a volunteer system.