Unfortunately not. Nakamura, who was indeed from Taiwan, and was a member of the aboriginal ethnic minority on the island whom the Japanese considered likely to be loyal to them, and opposed to the Chinese, was only occasionally forthcoming about his experiences, and he died only five years after emerging from the jungle. He was not well-educated, was an enlisted man, and had not actively sought to fight on after 1945, being concerned merely with his personal survival – while Onoda was an officer, n implacable resister, and hence a major celebrity at the time of his return to Japan, all of which perhaps explains why he so quickly produced his book. He served mainly on the Indonesian island of Morotai.

I covered Nakamura's story (along with those of other Japanese holdouts) in some detail in a long essay that you can read here, if you're interested in the subject as a whole. He is most interesting on the ways in which the Taiwanese members of his unit interacted with the Japanese. There are a lot of unexplained features relating to his long stay on Morotai – he did not spend the whole of the period alone, and the extent to which he was known to, and associated with, the indigenous islanders remains a bit of a puzzle, too. But if you are solely interested in Nakamura, this is what I had to say about him. Sources are at the foot of the original essay:

Nakamura had grown up in Formosa (Taiwan) – then a Japanese possession that had been seized from China at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. Born in 1923, he was a member of the indigenous aboriginal peoples who by then comprised only a small minority of the island’s population. His real name, it appears, was Attun Palalin, but he adopted a Japanese one when he was conscripted (or volunteered; there seems to be no consensus here) and joined the war effort in 1943. After completing basic training, he was sent with his unit to the Indonesian island of Morotai a few months before it was attacked by the advancing Americans.

Nakamura, then, was not Japanese, and he and his comrades occupied an at best marginal position in the Imperial Army’s order of battle. One of his motives for joining up in the first place – to fight in a war that only about 8,500 Taiwanese took a direct part in – may have been to elevate his status; indigenous men who joined the Imperial forces ranked above the local Chinese in the eyes of the island’s administrators. But it was a decision that also placed him in a position of considerable danger. Taiwan’s “special volunteer soldiers” were earmarked by their Japanese superiors to spearhead dangerous missions, and expended as cannon fodder in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. As Trefalt points out, Nakamura’s very survival “thus inescapably brought into the public sphere the legacies of Japanese imperialism.”

The wartime choices forced on Nakamura’s unit were similar to those made by many other IJA troops confronting Allied landings on small islands. Forced to make the best of limited supplies, faced by overwhelming numbers, and lacking proper air support, they either sacrificed themselves in hopeless attempts at defence, or retreated into the interior. Morotai – an island of about 700 square miles, five times the size of Onoda’s Lubang – was large enough to make the latter option a realistic one, and Nakamura was fortunate that his unit was ordered to disperse and commence a guerilla campaign soon after the invasion happened. By the time the war actually ended, 11 months later, he was part of a dwindling group of soldiers that seems to have repeatedly dispersed and coalesced, breaking into ever smaller parties to hunt for food deep in the jungle, and regularly losing members to starvation and disease. According to the survivors of one of these small parties – nine men who were discovered and repatriated in 1956 – Nakamura possessed a high degree of self-sufficiency. He went off to live on his own in the jungle between 1946 and 1947, returned to the main group in 1950, and then disappeared again a few years later.

It was generally supposed by the other troops that Nakamura had died somewhere in the jungle. In fact he survived and lived on alone, catching fish in the rivers, maintaining his rifle (but not using it to hunt for fear of being heard and found by local people), and eventually settling down in a remote cleft in Morotai’s southern mountains. There he gradually hacked out a clearing in the rainforest in which he could cultivate red peppers, bananas, taro and paw-paw.

It is difficult to know quite how alone Nakamura was during these years. Some local testimony suggests that he continued to roam in search of food to supplement his diet, and was spotted in the jungle from time to time – a distant figure, all but naked on a hillside. Planes from an Indonesian air base on Morotai also overflew the jungle on occasion, and, over the years, their pilots logged evidence of human activity in some oddly remote areas. But knowledge of the possible existence of Japanese stragglers on the island remained confined to the base until the worldwide publicity that accompanied Onoda’s surrender in 1974 jogged some memories, and word of the pilots’ sightings at last reached the members of a Bureau of Repatriate Welfare bone-collecting mission that called at Morotai late in the same year.

Word was passed to the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, and thence to Tokyo, which formally requested the help of the Indonesian government. It proved to be not too difficult to pinpoint Nakamura’s position from the air, but actually reaching his clearing on foot was a different proposition. It took the men of an Indonesian army unit three days to trek through the jungle from the nearest road, and – confronted by an unknown adversary who was quite possibly armed – they chose to adopt some unorthodox tactics when approaching him.

The 11 soldiers who reached what would be dubbed “Nakamura City” on the morning of 18 December 1974 had made careful preparations for their encounter with the lonely soldier. They had memorised the words of the Japanese national anthem – which they sang in unison as they emerged from the jungle – and, in addition, had equipped themselves with a photo of a geisha. (They were not the only ones to assume that a man who had spent years alone in the jungle would be interested in women; Norio Suzuki had gone to Lubang equipped with a small stock of softcore pornography, which he attempted to share with Onoda – an offer that his quarry brusquely rejected.) As things turned out, however, there was no need for touches such as these. Nakamura – who was “painfully thin and plainly terrified” – offered no resistance, though, like Yokoi, he seems to have remained convinced for several days that he faced execution on his extraction from the jungle.

Nakamura was taken to Jakarta and hospitalised. Indonesians, meanwhile, woke to newspaper reports that made much of the ingenuity he had displayed in surviving for so long. He had built himself a sturdy shack, and carved a rough map of his surroundings on a stone; he had attempted to tame a wild boar and a moleyu bird for company. According to the people of Dehegila, the jungle village closest to his base, he had even made friends with a local hunter, who occasionally brought him gifts of salt and sugar. In time, the villagers would erect a statue to commemorate Nakamura’s life on Morotai, remembering him as “the good Japanese,” who, during his first weeks in the jungle, had rescued a local girl when she was attacked by other members of his unit.

For much of the rest of the world, however, Japan’s final straggler was something of a disappointment. Nakamura’s robust self-sufficiency was admirable in its own way, but it paled in contrast to Onoda’s nearly 30 years of active service, and he possessed nothing of the Japanese lieutenant’s flair for the dramatic, or his ease in front of the world’s press. It was even difficult to decide who, precisely, Nakamura was. By the time that he walked out of the jungle, history had rendered him effectively stateless. The Japanese empire that he had served was long defunct. Taiwan had become the seat of a Chinese nationalist government. And though he himself expressed a wish to be “repatriated” to Japan, he had never been there, and – it emerged – had no right to live there, either.

Of all the stragglers who staggered from bolt-holes across the Pacific in the years 1945-1974, then, Teruo Nakamura was the most marginal and the hardest to categorise. But if Hiroo Onoda was interesting largely for his dogged adherence to a state, a mindset and a way of life that had vanished in the 1940s, Nakamura stands as a sort of mirror image of him. His story is worth telling less for what he did during his long years in the jungle than for what his emergence meant for 1970s Japan.

Awesome write up and awesome story! Thanks for sharing.

Thank you so much guys!