Hiroo Onoda: The Japanese Soldier Who Continued Fighting World War II Until 1974
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Nearly thirty years after the Second World War had ended, a Japanese soldier finally walked out of the jungle on a small Philippine island and laid down his weapon. The date was 10th March, 1974, and the man was Hiroo Onoda, a former intelligence officer who had spent almost three decades fighting a war that the rest of the world had long since finished.
For the people living on Lubang Island in the Philippines, his presence had been a strange and often frightening reminder that the war had not entirely disappeared.
For Onoda himself, it had never ended at all.
Early life and military training
Hiroo Onoda was born on 19th March, 1922, in Kamekawa in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. His upbringing was typical of many Japanese boys who came of age during the country’s increasingly militarised 1930s.
As a teenager he went to work for the trading company Tajima Yoko and was posted to Wuhan in China in 1939, at a time when Japan was already deeply involved in the Second Sino Japanese War.
In 1942, Onoda was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. Unlike many recruits, he was selected for specialised training and attended the Futamata branch of the army’s Nakano School, an elite institution responsible for training intelligence officers.
The Nakano School was known for its unconventional curriculum. Recruits were trained in:
• guerrilla warfare
• intelligence gathering
• sabotage
• infiltration behind enemy lines
Perhaps most importantly, they were trained to operate independently for long periods of time.
Those lessons would shape the rest of Onoda’s life.
Orders for a desperate stage of the war
By late 1944, Japan’s position in the Pacific had become increasingly desperate. American forces were advancing through the Philippines, and Japanese commanders expected fierce fighting on many islands.
On 26th December, 1944, Second Lieutenant Onoda was sent to Lubang Island, southwest of Manila.
His mission was to organise guerrilla resistance after the expected Allied invasion. His instructions were very specific. He was ordered to:
• destroy the island’s airstrip
• sabotage the harbour and pier
• attack enemy aircraft or ships attempting to land
• continue resistance for as long as possible
Most importantly, he was given a direct order that he later quoted repeatedly.
He was forbidden to surrender.
He was also forbidden to take his own life.
His commanding officer, Yoshimi Taniguchi, reportedly told him that reinforcements would eventually return.
“You may have to wait three years. You may have to wait five,” Taniguchi said. “But whatever happens, we will come back for you.”
The invasion of Lubang
Events on Lubang did not unfold as Onoda expected.
When he arrived, he discovered that officers outranking him refused to allow him to destroy the airstrip and harbour facilities. As a result, when American and Philippine Commonwealth forces landed on 28th February, 1945, the island quickly fell.
Many Japanese soldiers were killed or surrendered.
Onoda refused to do either.
Instead, he retreated into the jungle with three other soldiers:
• Yuichi Akatsu
• Shoichi Shimada
• Kinshichi Kozuka
The four men climbed into the island’s forested mountains and prepared to continue the fight.
Leaflets announcing the war’s end
In October 1945, the group encountered their first sign that the world had changed.
A leaflet left behind by villagers read:
“The war ended on 15 August. Come down from the mountains.”
To the soldiers, it made no sense.
Japan had surrendered only two months earlier following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But isolated in the jungle, the men had no reliable way to confirm the news so they concluded the leaflet must be Allied propaganda.
Soon afterwards, more leaflets were dropped from aircraft. These included a surrender order signed by Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines.
Again, the men refused to believe it.
They reasoned that if the war had ended, Allied troops would not still be searching the island for them.
Life in hiding
For years the soldiers lived deep in the jungle.
They built huts from bamboo and leaves and survived on whatever food they could find. Their diet included bananas, coconuts, wild fruit, game animals, rice stolen from local farms and cattle taken during night raids.
Despite the passage of time, the group believed their mission continued, conducting occasional guerrilla attacks and raids, sometimes burning rice stores or firing on villagers whom they believed were enemy collaborators.
These incidents sometimes turned violent. Later investigations suggested that the group may have killed as many as thirty civilians over the decades, though the exact number remains disputed.
Attempts to bring them home
The Japanese government made several attempts to convince the soldiers that the war had ended.
Search teams visited the island repeatedly, more leaflets were dropped, letters from the soldiers’ families were scattered from aircraft and in 1952, family photographs were included in the hope that the men might recognise familiar faces.
None of it worked.
The soldiers carefully studied each message, convinced they were elaborate tricks.
The possibility that Japan had surrendered was simply too difficult to accept.
The group begins to disappear
Over time the four man unit slowly disintegrated.
In September 1949, Yuichi Akatsu secretly left the others. After living alone in the jungle for several months, he surrendered to Philippine forces in March 1950.
Onoda and the remaining soldiers viewed his actions as betrayal.
Their suspicion of the outside world only grew stronger.
Shimada is killed
In June 1953, Shoichi Shimada was wounded in the leg during a skirmish with local fishermen. Onoda treated the wound and Shimada recovered, but the group’s situation became increasingly dangerous.
On 7th May, 1954, Shimada was killed in a shootout with a Philippine Army patrol that encountered the soldiers during a training exercise.
The group was reduced to two men.
Kozuka dies in 1972
For another eighteen years, Onoda and Kinshichi Kozuka continued their routine of hiding, scouting and occasional raids.
One of their regular activities involved burning harvested rice as a signal to Japanese forces that they were still active.
On 19th October, 1972, while carrying out one of these raids, Kozuka was shot and killed by local police.
Onoda was now completely alone.
By that point he had spent 27 years in the jungle.
The arrival of Norio Suzuki
In February 1974, an unusual traveller arrived on Lubang.
His name was Norio Suzuki, a young adventurer who had decided to search for the missing soldier.
Suzuki had famously told friends he wanted to find:
“Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.”
Remarkably, after four days of searching the jungle, he found him.
When the two men first met, Onoda reportedly pointed his rifle at the stranger. Suzuki calmly introduced himself and explained that Japan had been worried about him for decades.
The two men spoke for hours and gradually developed a friendly rapport.
Yet Onoda still refused to surrender, insisting that he would only lay down his arms if his commanding officer personally ordered him to do so.
The final order
Suzuki returned to Japan with photographs proving that Onoda was still alive.
The government tracked down Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who was now working as a bookseller.
Taniguchi travelled to Lubang and on 9th March, 1974, he met Onoda in the jungle and read a formal order that began:
“In accordance with the Imperial Command, the Fourteenth Area Army has ceased all combat activity.”
After nearly three decades, Onoda’s mission was finally over.
The surrender
On 10th March, 1974, Hiroo Onoda walked out of the jungle and surrendered at Lubang’s radar base.
He handed over:
• his Arisaka Type 99 rifle, still fully operational
• 500 rounds of ammunition
• several hand grenades
• a dagger his mother had given him in case he needed to take his own life
Altogether he had remained in hiding for 28 years, 6 months, and 8 days after Japan’s surrender.
Only one other Japanese holdout, Teruo Nakamura, stayed hidden longer.
A formal ceremony was later held in Manila, where Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos granted him a full pardon for his actions during the years in hiding.
A hero’s welcome in Japan
When Onoda returned to Japan he was greeted by large crowds and intense media attention.
He published an autobiography titled No Surrender: My Thirty Year War, which became a bestseller.
The Japanese government offered him back pay covering the decades he had technically remained on active duty but Onoda declined the money, though he later donated funds he received from supporters to the Yasukuni Shrine.
Despite the attention, he found modern Japan difficult to recognise from the Japan he left in the 1940s
A new life in Brazil
In 1975, Onoda moved to Brazil, where a large Japanese community had developed.
He settled in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul and became a cattle rancher. In 1976, he married Machie Honoku and became active in the local Japanese Brazilian community known as the Jamic Colony.
He lived quietly there for many years.
Return to Japan
In 1984, Onoda returned to Japan after reading about a violent crime involving a Japanese teenager.
Concerned about the direction of the country’s youth, he founded Onoda Shizen Juku, a nature school designed to teach discipline, survival skills and outdoor living.
From then on he divided his time between Brazil and Japan.
A complicated legacy
Although many people admired Onoda’s dedication, his story also carried a more difficult side.
Some villagers on Lubang remembered decades of fear caused by the armed soldiers hiding in the mountains.
During a visit to the island in 1996, protests were organised by relatives of people who claimed their family members had been killed during the years of guerrilla attacks.
Onoda rarely spoke publicly about those incidents.
His final years
Over time his story became a symbol of the strange and lingering aftermath of the Second World War.
He received several honours, including Brazilian awards and honorary citizenship in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
On 16th January, 2014, Hiroo Onoda died in Tokyo at the age of 91.
Nearly seventy years after the war ended, his life remained one of its most unusual stories.
For almost three decades he had remained alone in the jungle, convinced that his orders still stood and that the conflict had never truly finished.
