No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  At Futamata I had been told that to establish the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, including Southeast Asia, would probably require a hundred years of warfare. A hundred-year war would wear any nation down; in Japan, where the army and the people were fighting as one, the effects would be all the more serious. If we tried to fight for a hundred years the way we were fighting in 1944, we might end up with a military victory. By that time, however, the people would be not only spiritually depleted but reduced to the depths of penury.

  Because of this, I considered it likely that Japan had switched to a new system in which the soldiers fought on the military front, but the civilians only on the economic front. The expense of the war would, of course, have to be covered by taxes. The more I thought about this, the more I decided it was the most realistic policy for perfecting the co-prosperity sphere.

  If the war between America and the co-prosperity league were being carried on on this basis, civilians in the two areas would be competing with each other in the economic field. The side that was winning the economic war would obviously be able to pay more taxes to its government, which would mean more money for military purposes. This government would consequently gradually acquire the military advantage.

  In short, it seemed to me that the co-prosperity league, under Japan’s leadership, must still be engaged in all-out economic and military war against America, but at the same time economic affairs and military affairs were being kept separate. When Kozuka and I discussed the matter together, we always came to this conclusion, and it was only strengthened by the bits of news that we picked up on Lubang in later years. This was our conclusion, and gradually it became our creed.

  “If we are right about all this,” Kozuka asked, “then who are we fighting for?”

  “For Japan and the Japanese people, of course,” I replied without hesitation. “The new army must have assumed all the authority of the old army. If we are fighting for the new army, we are still fighting for the country.”

  Some may think it strange that even after being out of things for fifteen years I could dream up the idea of a war in which military and civilian activities were separate—a war in which Japanese and American civilians competed in the economic field while Japanese and American soldiers fought it out on the military front.

  The idea did not seem very odd to me at the time, however. After all, when I was in Hankow working for the trading company and dancing my feet off at night at the dance hall, my brother Tadao was there too, fighting against the Chinese army. In those days, if one went out even as far as the suburbs of Hankow, one was in dangerous territory, and I remember hearing gunfire when I made the rounds of our suppliers in those areas. Within the city, however, the Chinese were going calmly about their business, and at the dance hall young Chinese girls from Shanghai were gaily practicing the latest dance steps with Japanese soldiers so recently back from the front that their uniforms still smelled of gunpowder. Whenever my brother came back from a military camapign, we would go out for a big dinner at one of the Chinese restaurants. In Hankow I lived alongside the Chinese and did business with them; none of us paid too much attention to the war that was going on around us. Nobody told me that there was anything unusual about all this. I took it as a matter of course.

  If the search parties that came to Lubang had left us reduced-size editions of all the newpapers between 1944 and 1959, both Kozuka and I would probably have recognized that the war was over, and that we were wasting our lives. But I had been taught that the war might last a hundred years, and I had received special orders directly from a lieutenant general, who had assured me that eventually the Japanese army would come after me, no matter how long it might take. I was not able to take the 1959 Japanese newspapers at face value. I was sure from the beginning that they were part of an American deception, and I was more than ready to reject anything that did not fit in with my preconceptions. Moreover, I clearly remembered the days in Hankow when the people and the soldiers were two different things entirely.

  Kozuka and I knew absolutely nothing of the postwar occupation of Japan or the San Francisco treaty. When we came across items in the newspapers that seemed inexplicable to us, we “translated” them into ideas that we could comprehend. We decided, for example, that “American bases in Japan” really meant “co-prosperity league bases in Japan,” and that “Soviet rockets” were “Japanese rockets.” We thought we were seeing through American attempts to deceive us by altering the original news articles.

  Silly as it seems today, when we read about the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, we decided that it must be some pact between the Japanese government and the new Japanese military establishment. The Self-Defense Force seemed to be an armed constabulary separate from the new army.

  Understandably, the 1959 newspapers gave us few clues as to how the fighting war would be decided. We could only guess that the opposing forces were now fighting it out in the Pacific, and that at some point the side with the most remaining battleships and airplanes would win out. This made us feel that the longer we could hold out on Lubang, the more advantageous it would be to our side. We were, we believed, contributing to the firm establishment of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  In sum, working with my limited knowledge of economics and my memory of the situation in Hankow before I entered the army, I constructed an imaginary world that would fit in with the oath I had taken fifteen years earlier. During the following fifteen years, that imaginary world was unshaken either by the death of Kozuka or the arrival of numerous search parties from Japan. It stayed with me until the day Major Taniguchi gave me my final orders. In the days when I was completely alone, it seemed even more real than before. That is why I was psychologically unable to respond even when I saw members of my family and heard them calling to me. Not until I returned to Japan and looked out the window of my hotel at the streets of Tokyo did I understand that my world was no more than a figment of my imagination.

  When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.

  I still remember a number of items I read in the 1959 newspapers. Of them, the one that struck me most was an advertisement for a book called Ningen Yamashita Tomobumi (“Tomobumi Yamashita, the Man”). The ad read: “Why was it that Yamashita, who was considered the greatest Japanese general, did not succeed in the war? Was he undercut by General Tōjō? Did he incur the wrath of the emperor? Here is the life story of the fiery militarist—a story that might be entitled The Tragic General.”

  When Kozuka and I saw that, we both assumed that it was Yankee propaganda. Neither of us believed there was a word of truth in it. General Yamashita was the commander of the Fourteenth Area Army, to which we belonged, and the idea that he had been executed for his role in the war was preposterous.

  I said to Kozuka, “If the Americans feel it necessary to besmirch General Yamashita’s personal character, they must really be afraid of him!”

  One other article that I remember clearly was in a weekly magazine. It was about me, and the title was “Secret Mission on Lubang: What Did the Nakano School Order Lieutenant Onoda to Do?” There was an account of how Shigeichi Yamamoto, who had returned to Japan in 1955, had attended the Futamata school with me and had been ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare on Mindoro at the same time that I had received orders to go to Lubang. The article was mostly concerned, however, with the history of the Nakano School. It said that since nobody was quite sure who had issued my orders, people formerly connected with the school had started to look into the matter.

  The article made me laugh. I admired the subtlety with which our secret service had composed this “fake message.” There was obviously no need to explain to me the history of the Nakano School,
and the secret service itself knew better than anyone else who had given me my orders. The whole thing had been trumped up to conceal a message to me. The message was, “Hang on, Onoda! We haven’t forgotten you.”

  Such was the effect of the newspapers and magazines left by the search party of 1959. By that time, Kozuka and I had developed so many fixed ideas that we were unable to understand anything that did not conform with them. If there was anything that did not fit in with them we interpreted it to mean what we wanted it to mean.

  I saved all these magazines and newspapers. I intended to submit them together with my official report when I finally regained contact with division headquarters.

  JUNGLE LIFE

  If army uniforms were made out of silk serge, life would have been easier for Kozuka and me. As it was, our clothes were always rotting. During the rainy season on Lubang, it would often pour for several days in a row. Our uniforms, which we wore all the time, gave way faster to rotting than they did to wear and tear.

  The trousers would rot first in the knees and the seat, then at the bottoms and in the crotch, until in the last stages, nothing was left but the backs of the legs. The jackets started at the elbows and then the back. The front part usually held together better than the rest.

  To patch the holes, we had to make a needle. I found some wire netting somewhere, and we managed to straighten out a piece of the wire, sharpen it at one end, and make an eye in the other. For thread, we used the fibers of a hemplike plant that grew naturally in the forests. We would sew this vertically, horizontally and slantwise over the hole, occasionally making two layers for a quilted effect.

  For the first three or four years, when we needed patches, we cut pieces of canvas off the edges of our tents, but this could be carried only so far. After that we “requisitioned” what we needed from the islanders as the opportunity presented itself.

  This did not trouble our consciences. It is normal in guerrilla warfare to try to acquire guns, ammunition, food, clothing and other supplies from the enemy. Since the islanders were aiding the enemy task forces that came to look for us, we considered them enemies too.

  In the early years, the outfit worn by the islanders consisted of a handwoven hemp shirt and cotton knee-length shorts, neither of which was of much use to us. The islanders had thick skin, and living as they were on the plain, they required only very light clothing—too light to survive very long in the jungle thickets through which we were always moving.

  The “war booty” that we valued most was the equipment that the departing American troops left behind. The islanders also prized this and kept it in a cabin that they guarded fairly closely, but occasionally we would scare them away with gunfire and make off with some of the goods, which included canteens, tents, shoes, blankets and the like. I think it was around 1951 or 1952 when we first acquired manufactured cotton cloth.

  The Japanese cloth caps with flaps hanging in the back wore out in about a year. I had an officer’s cap made of wool and silk, but even that gave out after about three years. From then on, I had to make my own headgear. There was a war song that started, “Even if my battle cap freezes . . .” We changed this to “Even if my battle cap rots . . .”

  The clothes I had on when I came out of the jungle were some that I had remade after Kozuka’s death. The front and back of my jacket were made from the lining of an islander’s jumper, and the sleeves from trousers. The islander’s trouser legs were not big enough around for my shoulders, but since they were too long, there was enough extra material to space out the shoulders. When I made new trousers for myself, I always reinforced the knees and the seat with leftover parts of the old trousers.

  We often had to wade across streams, and to keep from wetting our clothing, we made our trousers so that they came down only a little below the knee, something like riding pants. We fastened our trousers with zippers, which had come to us as part of our war booty. When we were on the move, we left the zippers open to let air in, closing them only when we slept.

  Cloth and clothing taken from the islanders provided the material for our clothes. When camouflage was necessary, I turned my jacket inside out and stuck small branches, sticks or leaves in loops made of fishing line for this purpose.

  To make sandals, the soles were cut from tires, the “straps” from tire tubes, and the two were joined together with pegs. The upper parts of shoes were used over and over, but the soles were replaced by using the soles of islanders’ sneakers. Nylon thread was best for sewing them together.

  (All illustrations by Yasuo Sakaigi)

  We slept in our clothing, of course, and if we put the carryall breast pockets of our jackets too high, they weighed on our chests and tended to keep us from sleeping. We therefore placed this pocket lower than the ordinary shirt pocket. It also had a zipper. Since we were always ducking under tree branches that brushed against our shoulders, we reinforced the shoulders of our jackets.

  The shoes I had on when I came out were put together from real shoe leather from the tops of old shoes and rubber soles from an islander’s sneakers. I had sewn these together with a thick nylon fishing line. During the early years, I had often worn straw sandles.

  Around 1965 synthetic fabrics appeared on Lubang, and we gratefully “accepted” a number of articles of clothing made from them. We were also pleased by the appearance of vinyl plastic, which was useful for rain clothing and for wrapping our guns.

  “They must have invented this stuff just for us,” laughed Kozuka.

  Our principal staple food was bananas. We cut off only the stem, sliced the bananas, skin and all, into rings about a quarter of an inch thick, and then washed them thoroughly in water. That way the green bananas lost much of their bitterness. Then we boiled them with dried meat in coconut milk. The result tasted like overcooked sweet potatoes. It was not good. But we ate this most of the time.

  The rats on Lubang, which grow to a length of about eight inches, not counting the tail, eat only the pulp of the bananas, but Kozuka and I could not afford to waste the skins. At mealtime, we always said, “Let’s have our feed.”

  Next to bananas our most important food came from cows that had been turned loose to graze. In 1945 there were about two thousand cows on the island, but their number gradually decreased to the point where it was difficult to find a fat one. Even so, three cows a year were enough to provide meat for one man.

  When we could not find cows, we hunted for water buffaloes and horses. Although the water buffaloes are large and furnish a good deal of meat, it does not taste very good. Horsemeat, although tender, has a strong odor and does not taste as good as beef.

  It was easiest to find cows in the rainy season. When the Lubang islanders harvest their rice, they leave about nine to twelve inches of stalk for the cows to eat. When the rice stalks are gone, the cows are turned loose at the foot of the mountains to eat grass, which grows best in the rainy season. The cows gradually work their way up the hills toward the forest, as much as to say, “Here we are. Come shoot us.”

  They usually grazed in herds of about fifteen. We would pick out one and fire at it from a distance of about eighty yards, aiming so that the bullet would enter beneath the backbone and go through the heart. The time to kill a cow was in the evening, after the islanders had gone home from the fields. It was nearly dark then, and if there was rain, it muffled the sound of the shot so that the farmers could not hear it.

  If we hit a cow, the others would run away, frightened by the shot. Usually when we approached, the fallen cow still had life enough to move its legs. We would find a stone and smash it into the cow’s forehead as hard as possible. Then we would finish it off by stabbing it in the heart with a bayonet. Having pulled it by the legs and tail to an inconspicuous spot under the trees, we cut the aorta to drain the blood.

  The cow normally fell on its side, and the first step in dressing an animal was to cut off the front and hind legs on the upper side. Then we would slash down the middle of the belly and strip off t
he skin to the backbone. After cutting the meat off in hunks, we turned the animal over and repeated the operation on the other side. Finally, we would remove the heart, the liver, the sweetbread and other innards and put them in a sack. It took the two of us about an hour to dismember one cow.

  If we left the carcass as it was, the rain and the crows would reduce it to a skeleton, but the remains would tell the enemy where we were. After we cut the cow up, therefore, we moved the carcass along a mountain road to as distant a point as possible. This was done at night, of course. It was really heavy work, because we had to carry all the meat on our backs at the same time.

  For the first three days, we would have fresh meat, broiled or stewed, two times a day. Presumably because of the meat’s high calory content, as I ate, my body temperature climbed until I felt hot to the soles of my feet. It was hard to breathe when walking and impossible to climb a tree. My head would always feel a little giddy.

  I found that if I drank the milk of green coconuts as a vegetable substitute when I ate meat, my temperature would soon return to normal.

  On the fourth day we piled as much meat as possible in a pot and boiled it. By heating this up once every day and a half or two days after that, we kept it from spoiling, and the flavor held up for a week or ten days. While we were eating the boiled meat, we dried what was left for future consumption. We called this dried meat “smoked beef.”

  To prepare the smoked beef, we first built a framework like a table frame. We then skewered the meat on long sticks, placed the skewers across the framework, and built a fire underneath. This had to be done at night in the inner reaches of the jungle; otherwise the islanders might see the smoke or the flame. On the first night, we would keep the fire going all night, so as to harden the outside of the meat a little without causing it to shrink. Afterward, we gradually increased the heat of the fire and cooked the meat about two hours a night for ten nights. By that time it was thoroughly dried. The liver and other innards, we first boiled, then dried.