Hiroo Onada, the Japanese officer who fought on in the Philippines for almost 30 years after the end of the Second World War, has left a long shadow on the history of the region. But the reality is that, while a fairly significant number of Japanese soldiers and sailors (almost 130, by my count) were indeed left stranded behind enemy lines by the rapid advance of Allied forces, the great majority of them did not "fight on" in any significant way. They were, rather, mostly concerned with staying hidden and surviving – for a variety of reasons, in that some feared they might suffer punishment for the "crime" of surviving rather than laying down their lives for emperor and homeland, while at least one other – Teruo Nakamura, the only former Japanese soldier known to have certainly outlasted Onoda – was effectively left stateless by the ending of the war. Nakamura was an aboriginal Taiwanese, a member of a group heavily recruited by the Japanese (the imperial power in Taiwan from 1895-1945) because of their supposed opposition to the ethnic Chinese whom the Japanese were fighting on the mainland.

Anyway, I covered the history of Japanese holdouts in some detail in an essay that you can read here, and the only other example I could find of Japanese who actively fought on after 1950 was that of two men who joined forces with communist guerillas in Malaysia in 1945 and were not repatriated until 1990, almost 16 years after Onoda's surrender.

As the following passage from my essay shows, these men have been very largely forgotten, for a couple of understandable reasons, although in fact their case was quite an extraordinary one that deserves significantly greater investigation:

It would be perfectly possible to make the case that Shigeyuki Hashimoto and Kiyoaki Tanaka, not Teruo Nakamoto, were the last true Japanese holdouts from World War II. The two men returned to Japan in the first days of 1990 after belatedly laying down their arms at a jungle base on the Malaysian-Thai border on 2 December 1989. They had been fighting first the British and then the forces of the Malaysian government ever since the surrender of the Japanese forces in the Malay peninsula in August 1945.

There seem to be several reasons why Nakamoto – who was by then 71 – and Tanaka – 77 – are so poorly remembered and so seldom considered alongside the likes of Yokoi, Onoda and Nakamura. One is that neither man had been a soldier of IJA; they had been civilians, sent to Malaysia to work for a private company, who only took up arms after the end of the war. Another is that they had been perfectly aware at the time that Japan had surrendered; these men fought on not out of ignorance, but for an ideology. That made it hard, indeed pretty much impossible, to view them as unfortunate victims of Japanese militarism in the way that other Japanese holdouts were characterised.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the ideology that the two had dedicated nearly half a century to fighting for was an unpopular one. Hashimoto and Tanaka had joined forces with communist guerrillas dedicated to the overthrow of the Malaysian government. They had, certainly, fought long and hard – they were the sole survivors of a group of 15 who had gone into the jungle to continue the fight against European imperialism at the war’s end. But despite achieving considerable success during the 1950s, Malaysia’s communists had been unable to achieve their strategic aims; defeated by an innovative, if brutal, British counter-insurgency campaign, the cause that they fought for had faded into political irrelevance during the 1960s.

The two fighters’ return to Japan passed largely unnoticed; they were met by only a handful of reporters and some family friends. “In the case of Lt. Onoda and Sgt Yokoi,” the sociologist Eikoh Fukuda suggested, “I think Japanese in the early 1970s were still moved that men could sacrifice their lives to the emperor and to the war he sent them off to fight… Today, World War II is ancient history to most Japanese and such blind loyalty is considered foolish.” All of which probably came as a considerable disappointment; one of the two men, Bayly and Harper report in their book on the end of Britain’s Asian empire, left instructions in his will that his ashes should be scattered in the Malaysian jungle that had been his home for so many years, and the Chicago Tribune reported the fragile Hashimoto – who arrived at Tokyo International Airport in a wheelchair – as saying: “We are Japanese, so we never forgot about Japan, not even for one day.”

As for the way in which the holdouts were treated after their discovery, this varied quite considerably depending on the date on which they were located, but as Beatrice Trefalt, the main historian to investigate the phenomenon, comments, most were in effect considered an embarrassment by a postwar Japan in which the older virtues of unquestioning loyalty to a militaristic government were viewed with suspicion. In the case of Nakamura and his colleagues (several of whom surrendered decades earlier than he did), there was also a racist element to their treatment:

The veterans also revealed an ugly side to the country’s treatment of its Taiwanese soldiers. Nakamura himself dropped angry hints that he had fled into the jungle because he feared that the Japanese survivors in his group were plotting his murder, and while his former comrades in arms had been permitted to settle in Japan, it emerged that they had had to pay their own hospital bills on reaching Tokyo, and had spent the past few decades labouring for low pay on road gangs: “Everyone was quite unfriendly. We really got done over, didn’t we?”

Sources

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire. London: Penguin, 2007

Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975. Abingdon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003