This peculiar story never led to anything. It seems to have been a hoax, though it has also been speculated it was an attempt by MILF – the Moro Islamic Liberation Front – to lure journalists into the interior of Mindanao in order to hold them for ransom.

Both the men you mention had been members of the 30th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, which suffered heavy casualties in the last days of the war; both had been declared dead, but were supposed to have survived for 60 or more years in the island’s most mountainous districts after one of them married into a local tribe. Initial excitement soon gave way to scepticism, however, after the pair failed to turn up at a meeting, arranged by a mysterious “mediator,” which they had apparently agreed to attend in a hotel in the port city of General Santos.

According to a report published in the Daily Telegraph (London) at the time, the story of the two men’s survival first gained purchase after a Filipina woman working for a logging group told her Japanese husband that she had seen two elderly Japanese in the island’s interior. A version of the same story published a few days later by CNN adds the intriguing details that the husband was the same man as the mediator who arranged for the two men to come out of the jungle, and notes that he subsequently told the Yomiuri newspaper that although he had tracked down the two men in the mountains, they were not Japanese.

Nothing more seems to have become of the story, and the two men were never formally identified, interviewed, shown to be from Japan, or indeed shown to have actually existed at all.

I covered the account, and the tale of other Japanese holdouts who were found, or emerged, after the war, in a much longer essay which you might find it interesting to check out. You can find it here:

Final straggler: the Japanese soldier who outlasted Hiroo Onoda