Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- Japan may have surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945, but many Japanese soldiers did not get word until much later.
- The culture of death before surrender that permeated the Japanese military caused many to continue to fight even after Japan’s formal surrender.
- Hiroo Onada was one such holdout. He engaged in a guerrilla war in the jungles of the Philippines for nearly 30 years.
The idyllic islands of the Pacific Ocean typically have little role to play in the wider world aside from offering white shores and blue oceans that come about as close to paradise as it gets. But in World War II, these islands were bloodily contested. They represented strategic positions for the Allies, who could establish bases for bombing raids on the then-Axis Japan. In turn, Japanese soldiers were sent to these islands to defend them at all costs. Many, including a lieutenant named Hiroo Onada, were instructed to fight until killed; surrender was not an option. Hiroo Onada and others obeyed these orders literally. In fact, Onada continued to fight for 29 years after World War II ended.
Twentieth-century Japan had transformed the ancient concept of Bushido — a military code of conduct presented in some texts as “a way of dying” that demanded samurai be prepared to lay their life down for their lords — into a full-on propaganda tool to stir up nationalism and a culture of death before surrender. Surrender was so anathema to World War II Japan that Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech did not even feature the word “surrender.
” Instead, he characterized the coming capitulation as “enduring the unendurable and suffering the unsufferable.”This attitude led Lieutenant Onada and his men to go into hiding on the mountains of Lubang Island in the Philippines after Allied forces took the island back from Japanese control in February of 1945. Major Yoshimi Taniguchi was evacuating the island with other Japanese soldiers but instructed Onada and other men to stay and fight. “It may take three years, it…
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