No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  When we shot a cow, we cut the meat up, skewered it and dried it over a fire at night. During the ten days required for this, we ate boiled beef.

  Piled on pieces of wood, the liver and other innards were cooked in a makeshift steamer (left). Small pieces of meat were boiled in a pot until the water was gone. To keep it from getting moldy, it was reheated every day.

  From one cow, we could make about 250 slices of smoked beef. By eating only one slice apiece each day, we could make the meat last for about four months. It did not always work out this way, however, because when we were moving around a lot to keep out of the way of search parties, we allowed ourselves two slices a day.

  We did not eat rice much, because it was so much trouble to hull it. In October and November, however, when the islanders harvested their rice, we usually requisitioned some of it. After pounding it, we separated it with a sieve into chaff, unpolished rice and half-polished rice. Both glutinous rice and nonglutinous rice grow on Lubang. The nonglutinous rice varies greatly in quality. We classified it into four grades, which we called “rice, ‘barley’ rice, ‘millet’ rice and fodder rice.” The fodder rice was so black and the grains so small that we had trouble thinking of it as rice. When we ate rice, we made soup to go with it. This was concocted from dried meat and the leaves of papaya, eggplant or sweet potatoes, with a dash of salt and powdered pepper. Sometimes we made a gruel with rice and dried meat.

  We called salt the “magic medicine.” In the days when there were four of us, we had to get by on only about a quart a year. Every once in a while, whoever was cook would say, “It’s cold today, so I’ll put in a little of the magic medicine.” And then he would put in a very tiny pinch. But even that helped the flavor a lot.

  At first we had only the briny natural salt that we found on the south shore. Later, when there were only Kozuka and I, we grew more aggressive and invaded the islanders’ salt flats in Looc and Tilik, but we never took more than we needed for the foreseeable future. After about 1959 we managed to obtain coffee and a few canned goods from the houses of the islanders. We called the sneak raids to obtain these valuables “stepping out for the evening.”

  Keeping rice from getting moldy was difficult, especially during the rainy season. We put it in plastic bags, then placed these in five-gallon cans sealed with plastic and oil. Since ants were a constant problem, the cans were raised off the ground on triangles of tin.

  The fruit called nanka has a feltlike skin and a hard core surrounded by the edible portions, each of which also has a core; the taste is sweet. Coconuts provided, besides copra and milk, fibers (seen at the top) that we used to brush our teeth. Heating the milk settled the lees, which were boiled with water to make soup.

  During the thirty years on Lubang, the only thing I always had plenty of was water. The streams on the island were nearly all so clear that you could see the bottom. The only trouble was that the cows and horses that had been turned out to graze would drink water upstream and then relieve themselves in the water. For that reason, we always boiled the water before drinking it, even if it looked perfectly all right.

  Having no doctor and no medicine, we were very careful to keep an eye on the condition of our health. We watched for variations in our weight by measuring the girth of our wrists. We also examined our own stool for signs of internal disorders.

  I was thinnest just before Akatsu defected. I think this was partially because I was mentally upset at that time, but it was also due to a lack of sufficient nutrition. During this stage, the whites of my fingernails disappeared except for a tiny strip on my thumbs.

  I examined my stool every day to see how much there was, how hard it was, and how big the pieces were. If the pieces were too big, it meant that my stomach was not functioning properly. If the stool was soft, my intestines were not absorbing enough.

  If something was wrong, I had to decide for myself whether it was because of the weather, because the food I had eaten was not good, or because my body was not in good condition. Everytime something went wrong, I thought back over what I had eaten the day before, how the weather had been, and how much I had exerted myself. After I had determined the cause, I adjusted my diet and my activities accordingly.

  We ate pretty much the same quantity every day, but there was some variation, simply because some bananas are juicy and others are dry. Also, since good ripe bananas were not always available, we had to make do with green ones a great deal of the time. We tried to adjust the method of cooking to the quality of the food, then judge the effect on our insides by examining our waste. I remember deciding once not to move to a certain spot until the weather was cooler, because the last time I had spent some time there in hot weather, I had come down with diarrhea. There were other places where we could not stay long at one time because the wind chilled us too much at night. When that happened, we invariably suffered from indigestion.

  When we were in a place that was too hot, our urine turned yellow, and if we overexerted ourselves, it became more red than yellow. This was a warning to take it easy for a while.

  Whenever we settled down in a place, we dug a latrine, leaving the soil beside it to cover it up with when we moved on. The depth of the hole depended on how long we planned to stay. While we encamped, we covered the latrine with a stone; when we left, we filled it with dirt and strewed leaves over it. During our eighteen years together, Kozuka and I spent a great amount of time digging and covering up latrines.

  Having no toilet paper, we had to use palm leaves instead. One time Shimada found some paper somewhere, but when he started to use it, Kozuka said, “You’ve only got enough for two or three times. Then you’ll have to go back to leaves. Why bother?”

  When we found leaflets that the enemy had dropped, we would save one of them and leave the rest where they were, so long as they all said the same thing. They made too much smoke to use for starting fires, and we were afraid to use them even for blowing our noses, because one piece of soiled paper might lead the enemy to us.

  We often found cartoons or nude photos of women in the mountains. They were not left by the search parties but deliberately distributed by the islanders. I guess they thought we would be tempted to take them, but we did not dare touch them for fear that we would reveal our location.

  Fortunately, there was no malaria on Lubang. During my thirty years there, I was sick in bed with a fever only twice. Kozuka impaled his heel on thorns twice. Both times his leg swelled up, but otherwise he had no illnesses.

  May is the hottest month in Lubang. In the daytime the thermometer goes up to about 100° Fahrenheit, and even if you sit still in the shade, the sweat pours off. If you have to walk fifty yards to get wood for the fire, you feel as though you were in a hot spring bath.

  In June the squalls begin, coming up suddenly almost every day. Then in July, the real rainy season sets in. For two hours at a time it may rain so heavily that you cannot see more than ten yards away. This goes on for about twenty days, and sometimes the rain is accompanied by winds of nearly typhoon force.

  In August there are more and more clear days, but the atmosphere is steaming hot. In September there is not much wind, but the rainfall is as heavy as in July. This goes on for about twenty days. Then there are blue skies for a day or two at a time over a period of two or three weeks, and finally in mid October the rainy season ends.

  From then until the following April is the dry season. At first it rains a little once or twice a month; then there is no rain for several months. The coolest months are January and February, but even then the thermometer goes up to 85° or so in the daytime. The most comfortable time of the year is about like the hottest part of the summer in Tokyo. During this season only, we wore undershirts underneath our jackets.

  In the dry season, we looked around the island carefully and decided where we would spend the next rainy season. There were several conditions that had to be met.

  FOOD, WEATHER AND CLOTHING

  Note: Ratings are on a scale of te
n, except for clothing, in which case 1 indicates loincloth only, 2 indicates jacket and trousers, and 3 indicates jacket, trousers and underclothes.

  The first, of course, was that the place had to be near a supply of food. There should be banana fields and coconut groves in the neighborhood, and the campsite should not be too far from a place where the cows grazed. At the same time, it had to be a spot to which the islanders did not come.

  It also had to be a place where the smoke from our fire was not directly visible to nearby villages, and a little noise not audible. If possible, there should be a breeze. The most desirable location was on the cool eastern side of a mountain.

  It was not easy to find a place that had all of the qualifications, and once we had found it, we had to go through a period of anxiety before we built our hut and settled in. The reason was that the rainy season was irregular. Some years it would rain all through May; other years we would be well into June before the first drop fell. If we built our camp before the rain started, there was a danger that the islanders would discover us. We had to wait until we were sure they would not come into the mountains.

  When we thought the rainy season was about to start, we would go to the place we had picked to see whether we still thought it was all right. Then we would camp nearby until it began to rain, at which point we would set up our hut as rapidly as possible. We called the hut a bahai, the Tagalog word for “house.”

  The first step in building the bahai was to find a large tree to which the whole structure could be anchored. After we selected the tree, we stripped it of branches, which we used to build a frame. Rafters were placed slantwise against the ridgepole and covered with coconut leaves. The later were folded in two lengthwise and inserted between strips of split bamboo or palm branches. Everything was tied together with vines.

  The bahai was built on slightly sloping ground, the upper part of the ground serving as the “bedroom.” For beds, we first put down a few straight tree branches, then covered them with bamboo matting made by hand, and finally spread over the matting some duck sacks that we had requisitioned from the islanders.

  The lower part of the bahai was the kitchen. Our “stove” consisted of several flat rocks placed together to form a platform for the fire and a pole above them from which our pot could be hung. Next to the hearth was a sheltered area where we could keep firewood and our rifles. Such walls as the bahai had were made of palm leaves, in the same fashion as the roof. Working with bolo knives, Kozuka and I could build the hut in seven or eight hours.

  Before we started building huts like this in the early rainy season, we slept in tents, but often the wind blew the rain in until we were soaked and shivering all over. When that happened, we would warm ourselves up by singing army songs at the top of our voices. This was safe, because the noise of the wind and the rain drowned out the noise we were making. One of the songs we sang started with the words:

  Troops advancing in the snow,

  Tramping over the ice . . .

  We were so cold at times like this that the song seemed appropriate, even on our snowless southern island.

  The bahai was much more comfortable than the tents, but by the time the dry season approached, the roof had rotted so badly that a good deal of rain leaked through.

  When the rainy season ended, we took the bahai apart and either burned the pieces or strewed them about in a hollow. Since it would not do merely to leave them there, we covered them with mud and spread branches and fallen trees over the spot. If we piled up a fair number of branches, they were enough camouflage to keep any islanders who might wander past from becoming suspicious.

  We washed off the stones near the hut to remove any oil or dirt and covered the ground where the hut had been with branches that we had saved for this purpose. It was particularly important that no one find the place until after we had time to move to a new location, so we pulled vines over the branches to make access as difficult as possible without making the camouflage obvious.

  When Shimada, who was an energetic worker with plenty of strength, was still alive, we built our hut deep in the jungle. After his death, we usually settled for a place near the edge of the jungle. We also simplified the hut so that it would be easier to dismantle and hide. Actually, there were not so many satisfactory locations that fulfilled the most important condition, which was that we be near a banana field, and during the whole thirty years, we used the same few places three or four times each.

  In the dry season, we slept in tents or in the open. When we stayed in the open, we picked a place with about a ten-degree slope, and Kozuka and I slept side by side. To keep from slipping downhill during the night, we put our baggage or a log below our feet. Our rifles were always within easy reach. We took off our shoes, but during the whole thirty years, I never once took off my trousers at night. I always kept a little pouch with five cartridges in it attached to my belt.

  In the early stages, we covered ourselves at night with our tents or clothing. Later we sometimes used the dried hides of cows. At one point we had quilts of a sort that we had made by piecing together bits of rubber that had floated up on the south shore. If it suddenly started to rain while we were sleeping out, we simply got wet. There was nowhere else to go. When this happened, we were cold, and the next day the joints of my legs ached. If my midriff got cold at night, I usually developed a tendency toward diarrhea.

  There was a big cave on Snake Mountain, and the islanders had built a number of cabins in the mountains near their fields, but we did not use these as shelters from sudden rains, because there was too much danger of being discovered.

  Rainy season huts had to be anchored to a tree to keep them from blowing down. Five posts supported the roof of folded palm leaves. Ditches were dug at the lower end, for use as a fireplace, and along the sides, for drainage. Small piles of coconut lees (lower right) were used to keep ants at bay.

  When it was not raining, I slept on mountain slopes where the inclination was ten to fifteen degrees. It was necessary to put my backpack or a log under my feet to keep from sliding down. I chose a place with bushes or trees for cover and slept fully clothed.

  The reason why we slept on sloping ground was simply that this way, if we were suddenly awakened, we could see what was around us without raising up. Actually, during my entire thirty years on Lubang, I never once slept soundly through the night. When we slept on the ground outdoors, I shifted my body often to keep my limbs from getting numb.

  I kept a sort of calendar, which after thirty years was only six days off the real calendar. My calendar was based largely on memory and the amount of food left, but I checked it by looking at the moon. For instance, if I picked ten coconuts on the first of the month and we used one a day, the day we used the last one would be the tenth. After making this calculation, I would look at the moon and see whether it was the right size for that day of the month.

  When search parties were looking for us and we were moving around every day, I tended to lose track of the date. When that happened, I would start by looking at the moon and then try, in consultation with Kozuka, to figure out how many days had passed since some known date.

  The moon was our friend in another respect as well, because we usually moved from one encampment to another at night. Kozuka often said, “The moon isn’t on anyone’s side, is it? I wish the islanders were the same way!”

  Our haircut routine was another help in keeping track of the date. Kozuka once mentioned that back home the people had always celebrated the twenty-eighth day of each month as sacred to a local Buddhist deity. He said they had always eaten a special noodle dish on that day. This reminded me that when I was a boy, the barbers had always put out signs toward the end of the year asking people to have their children’s hair cut by December 28 to avoid the year-end scramble. I suggested to Kozuka that we commemorate his hometown’s monthly celebration by cutting our hair on the twenty-eighth of every month, and that is what we did. Somehow this seemed all the more appropriate to me beca
use on the days when we did cut each other’s hair, we were for a short while children again. Afterward, we often figured the date by counting the number of days since our last haircut. This was easy to remember.

  We were particularly careful with the last haircut of the year, because it was a psychological boost to open the year with our heads looking spic and span.

  On New Year’s Day we made our own version of “red rice,” that is, rice cooked with red lentil beans. This is served in Japan on festive occasions. We had no lentil beans, but there was a kind of string bean that grew on Lubang that we used as a substitute. On New Year’s Day, we also made a special soup out of meat and papaya leaves, flavored with citron. This was intended as a substitute for the meat and vegetable soup called in Japanese ozōni, which is always served in the New Year season.

  On the morning of the first day of the year, we bowed in the direction of the emperor’s palace, which we considered to be north by northeast. We then formally wished each other a good year, renewed our pledge to do our best as soldiers, and repaired to our feast of “red rice” and ozōni.

  We also celebrated our birthdays, and I remember one or two birthdays that I commemorated by giving myself a newly made cap.