I was trying to think of this man’s name. When he was found he refused to leave the post until his commanding officer ordered him to. Fortunately the C. O. was still alive; he was brought down to the Pacific island and ordered the soldier to leave. What was the soldier’s name?
Hiroo Onoda
Thanx 
Had that name right on tap, for some reason.
One thing I’ve never seen is any followup that might have indicated some degree of mental illness on Onoda’s part. It doesn’t seem possible that someone compos could maintain his beliefs so long.
There wasn’t just one. There were lots of them scattered around many Pacific islands. I think most of them were just being loyal Japanese soldiers that believed they were following orders rather than being mentally ill. There were some semi-reputable reports of holdouts even after Hiroo Onoda but they were never confirmed. What is known is that there were many that lasted into the 1950’s - 1970’s. That is well beyond what a reasonable person would do but it happened.
“Loyal Japanese” I can accept. But most had opportunities to see that things had changed in five, ten, twenty years or more. A mindset that says, “I have to stay in war mode and wait for a superior officer to find and relieve me,” and resists trying to find out the current situation, for probably more than half their lives is not… normal.
That a superior officer was used to finally to convince many of these holdouts to surrender doesn’t mean that was what they were specifically “waiting for”. They probably weren’t waiting for anything, except ultimate Japanese victory. They were merely carrying out the things they were trained and instructed to do. While some were told via PA systems the war was over, etc., they had no reason to believe it was true. In fact, Japan losing was impossible to comprehend so dismissing anything contrary was trivial.
Note that some holdout groups continued to fight on by joining various guerrilla groups in Burma, Malaysia, etc. The official end of the war didn’t mean you had to stop fighting.
It’s possible that he may have had a perseverant personality disorder, but IANA shrink. He probably truly believed that Hirohito was a deity and that to surrender was an offense against heaven. The Wiki article says that he was samurai. Even though that class was in decline when Onoda was born in 1922, he surely would have been deeply inculcated into the bushido code. As the Jesuits say, “Give me a child until he is seven …”
Maybe he simply got used to living off the land and came to like it. After all, American lore is full of Jim Bridger mountain man trapper types who eschewed civilization.
Didn’t roads full of Honda bikes and Toyota trucks clue them in that Japan had, actually, won? 
He (Onoda) wrote a book, IIRC. I wonder if it’s been translated to English… and I wonder if he explains his mindset to any degree.
Answer, Yes - “No Surrender: My Thirty Year War.” On Amazon. I might just pick it up.
Wow, he just died two years ago. I knew he was alive in the 1990s but not that long. What a long, strange trip of a life.
I think there may be a different explanation. The longer you have gone on fighting (or at least holding out) in these circumstances, the more difficult it is to stop, because by doing so you are admitting that you were wrong or mistaken for all those years, that you have wasted much of your life, that you have killed people (if indeed you have killed people) for no good reason, etc, etc. Plus, the loss of face, the loss of self-respect. Plus, you’re scared to stop, because what you’re doing now is what you have done, by this point, for most of your life, and you don’t know what it would be like to live not doing this. But you’re old, and tired, and lonely, and maybe sick.
So, you get to a point where you really, really want or need to stop, but you really, really need something to happen, something to change that you can point to as a justification for your decision. The order of your old C.O. serves that purpose but, if he were dead, no doubt something else could have served that purpose. All you need is something that you can use as a mechamism to break your psychological log-jam.
I read it back in the 70s and I remember it being fascinating. The writing is iffy and clearly being dictated to someone or written with their help (memory says it was a reporter who helped convince him to come out) but he seemed to strike me as pretty frank; that there were almost moments when even he had to admit “what the Hell was I thinking?”.
Worth picking up; at least used and/or cheap.
Yeah, but it is hard for me to imagine going for 20 years without any contact with newspapers or such. Wouldn’t even the most isolationist holdout occasionally go into town for something or other? I don’t blame them for thinking that the leaflets from the sky were just enemy propaganda, but wouldn’t the local newspaper be more reliable, especially if the international news has been silent on the war for years?
He may have believed that voluntary surrender would eventually lead to his being executed for desertion and cowardice upon being repatriated.
UDS, that’s a very good way of looking at it.
Even though it was unintentional, this had to be one of the most fucked up social experiments in history,
I am falling back on memory but ---- I believe (as he reported it) that he honestly thought the war was still going on and that he was basically stuck behind enemy lines. One of the other soldiers he was with (he didn’t begin this adventure alone) being killed by villagers/islanders didn’t help dissuade the illusion.
The only reason I remember this as a kid in the 70s was because after he surrendered they used the idea in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man…
I think you’re looking at this through the ADD eyes of a 21st century person. Someone back then didn’t have anywhere near the amount of mental stimuli that we enjoy/hate today.
Decent synopsis here
STORY OF HIROO ONODA