50 years ago, March 9, 1974. Awaiting Orders, Sir.

quote:

---

“It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you,” Major Yoshimi Taniguchi promised a young Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda on February 28, 1945.

Taniguchi kept his promise—but it would take 29 years for him to fulfill.

On March 9, 1974, Onoda emerged from the Philippine jungle, his Imperial Japanese uniform—worn since 1945—tattered but in remarkably good shape despite the 29 years of depravation.

Officially declared dead in 1959, Onoda was tracked down by Japanese student Norio Suzuki in February of 1974. Onoda still refused to surrender, telling Suzuki that he would not return home until he received official orders.

Suzuki returned that spring, this time flanked by a Japanese delegation, the lieutenant’s brother, and Taniguchi. After nearly three decades on the run, Onoda was convinced to capitulate.

Onoda later recounted in his memoir No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, that as American forces landed on Lubang, a small strategic island 93 miles southwest of Manila Bay, his commanding officer, Taniguchi, gave the young lieutenant his final order—stand and fight.

That command drove Onoda and three enlisted men into the jungles of Lubang where they engaged in guerilla warfare in the subsequent months against locals and those believed to be in cahoots with the Americans.

Surviving off of bananas, coconuts, and pilfered rice from nearby villages, Onoda and the three soldiers continued to believe that they were at war, occasionally clashing with local residents and soldiers they took to be enemy guerrillas. Over the span of several years, 30 island inhabitants were killed by the roving Japanese soldiers.

Pardoned by President Ferdinand for the crimes committed by while still believing he was at war, the then 52-year-old soldier returned to an almost unrecognizable Japan. Although welcomed as a national hero, Onoda soon became disillusioned with the materialism and changes within the Japanese society.

The following year the former soldier moved to a Japanese colony in São Paulo, Brazil, seeking a more tranquil life raising cattle. There he married Machie Onuku, a Japanese tea-ceremony teacher. In 1984 the couple returned to Japan, founding the Onoda Nature School, a survival-skills youth camp. The pair moved back and forth from Japan and Brazil until Onoda’s death in 2014.

---