I'm listening to Hardcore History and am stuggling to comprehend just what people like Hiroo Onoda thought they were accomplishing by fighting alone for nearly 30 years with no contact from command. How did they decide what operations to undertake? Why didn't they ever make an effort to contact Japanese command? How did they rationalize nearly three full decades of radio silence, with no new instructions or orders being delivered?
That 'radio silence' isn't really what happened. What happened was a bit more extreme than that. In Hiroo Onoda's own words, there were actually plenty of attempts to make contact. In fact, the Japanese government flew Onoda's family in to shout into the hilltops for him. Japanese newspapers explaining both the surrender and life in post-war Japan were delivered and dropped - entire stacks of them. Onoda and the men with him, and those like him in similar situations, interpreted these to be some sort of disinformation campaign.
The reason for this is fairly simple: the idea of a Japanese surrender seemed to be a literal impossibility. It isn't that Onoda had some idea of what the end of the war would look like if Japan surrendered, and then found ways to tell himself that things hadn't yet reached that state. It was more that it wasn't at all a possible outcome. When Onoda shipped off to war, domestic, internal propaganda had been hammering home that literally every single Japanese person would die fighting before the country surrendered. According to Onoda, the average Japanese citizen on the street expected all 100 million Japanese to die in defense of the country, surrender was simply not an option. The term "100 million" was used in a number of ways in this exact 'until the last man' context. Onoda took that at face value. Because Japan still existed, still had Japanese newspapers, it must not have surrendered, and everything delivered or transmitted to him therefore must be doctored by the OSS.
A (likely ghost written) autobiography is available, https://www.amazon.com/No-Surrender-Thirty-Year-Hiroo-1974-12-06/dp/B01N07LQ16/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=dancarlin-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=aa8f275dc60fd8b95fbdeffcd35d0420&creativeASIN=B01N07LQ16
Follow up question:
How did the soldiers who did surrender know that they were in fact properly ordered to surrender instead of being lied to by Allied propaganda?
Follow upto the follow up question: Did Allied propaganda actually try to lie to the Japanese troops before the actual surrender?