No Surrender by Hiroo Onoda

Author:Hiroo Onoda [Onoda, Hiroo; Terry, Charles S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612515649
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

The search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Most of them were recent, and a lot of them contained articles about the crown prince’s marriage. The newspapers, which covered a period of about four months, made a stack nearly two feet high. We thought they were reprints of real Japanese newspapers doctored up by the American secret service in such a way as to eliminate any news the Americans did not want us to see. This was all we could think so long as we believed that the Greater East Asia War was still going on.

And in a way the newspapers confirmed that the war was still going on, because they told a lot about life in Japan. If Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

When I arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the war was going badly for Japan, and in the homeland the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. I took this at face value, as I am sure many other young Japanese men my age did.

I sincerely believed that Japan would not surrender so long as one Japanese remained alive. Conversely, if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered.

After all, this is what we Japanese had all vowed to each other. We had sworn the we would resist the American and English devils until the last single one of us was dead. If necessary, the women and children would resist with bamboo sticks, trying to kill as many enemy troops as they could before being killed themselves. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. “Struggle to the End!” “The Empire Must Be Protected at Any Cost!” “One Hundred Million Dying for the Cause.” I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk.

When I became a soldier, I accepted my country’s goals. I vowed that I would do anything within my power to achieve those goals. I did not, it is true, come forward and volunteer for military service, but having been born male and Japanese, I considered it my sacred duty, once I had passed the army physical examination, to become a soldier and fight for Japan.

After I entered the army, I became a candidate in officers’ training school. When my brother Tadao came to see me there, he asked me whether I was prepared to die for my country. I told him I was. At that time, I renewed my oath to myself that I would give my all. It was a solemn oath, and I was resolved to carry it out.

By 1959 I had been in Lubang for fifteen years, and the only real news I had received from Japan during that time was the newspaper left by Yutaka Tsuji, who claimed to be a reporter from the Asahi Newspaper. I was not even sure that this news was genuine.

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