A Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, believing the Japanese surrender in 1945 to be a hoax, held his post until 1974

A Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, believing the Japanese surrender in 1945 to be a hoax, held his post until 1974.

Hiroo Onoda- the Imperial Japanese soldier.who hid in the Philippine jungle for almost 30 years after WWIl ended. March 11, 1974.

Except "holdout" implies he was resisting the ending of the war. Teruo Nakamura like most of these guys had simply built a new life in the jungle often due to fear of being taken captive and reprisal returning home.

Onoda became legendary because he was actually what people imagine a Japanese holdout to be, holding

an area under orders, actively fighting the war, with his uniform and military gear in order and unlike others he

never chose to surrender or was taken captive but had to be ordered to stand down.

And after he came back to Japan, got married, and lived abroad in Brazil to have farm with horses since he couldn't completely got along in Japan. On the side note, actually

one of his mate had lived with him until just a month before he surrendered but got shot and killed by Philippine police.

Attun Palalin (Teruo Nakamura) was from Taiwan and conscripted into the imperial Japanese army. He was

sent to Indonesia very late in the war and ended up setting up camp near what became an Indonesian air

force base so he thought the warplanes he kept seeing were enemies.

He had a rifle but only used it to hunt animals every now and then. He just stayed in hiding for the longest time and no one knew he was there because he wasn't really waging war on the local population. He didn't get much attention when he was found because he was not Japanese and his native Taiwan had been taken over by Chinese. It's really sad.

He's considered a holdout but the reality is that he was an abandoned conscript. If I'm remembering correctly, his wife had remarried but she intended to divorce the new husband to honor that marriage but he insisted that she didn't because he knew decades in the jungle alone screwed him up.

Initially he stayed there with a couple of other Japanese soldiers who were killed over the years. At some point a Japanese traveler found him and

discussed, telling him the war was over. The soldier told him he could not surrender unless he received a direct

order from his superior, to they found his superior who came and relieved him of his duties.

From my reading on the subject he knew that either the war was still going or Japan had lost. People think

the jungle is horrible and dangerous and compared to a warm bed and a hot woman it is, but it's not hell.

Everything one needs to survive is present and in quite great quantity. By its nature, the soil is good for for growing.

By its nature, fresh water and animal life for protein is available. I figure he was sold a apocalyptic

view of a post war Japan that lost the war before he left, nobody came back for him so he just kept going. After

returning he did campaign for a return to "traditional values" and decry the state of Japanese youth, so assume he felt in the jungle a American occupied Japan would be so different to his upbringing (being one of the

"haves' of the system' that he preferred to keep a little bit of his vision of Japan alive in the jungle.

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