'ON THIS DAY' WEEK

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March 9, 1974:

Last Japanese soldier in the Philippines surrenders, 29 years after World War II ended.

Hiroo Onoda c 1944

Hiroo Onoda (1922 – 2014) was a Japanese soldier who served as a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. One of the last Japanese holdouts, Onoda continued fighting for nearly 29 years after the war's end in 1945, carrying out guerrilla warfare on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974.

Onoda initially held out with three other soldiers: one surrendered in 1950, and two were killed, one in 1954 and one in 1972. The men did not believe flyers and letters from their families stating that the war was over. They survived on wild fruits, game, and stolen rice, and occasionally engaged in shootouts with locals and the police. Onoda was contacted in the jungles of Lubang by a Japanese explorer in 1974, but still refused to surrender until he was formally relieved of duty by his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who flew from Japan to the island to issue the order.

The Japanese government offered him a large sum of money in back pay, which he refused. When money was pressed on him by well-wishers, he donated it to Yasukuni Shrine.

Onoda was reportedly unhappy at receiving such attention and at what he saw as the withering of traditional Japanese values. He wrote No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, a best-selling autobiography published in 1974. In April 1975, he followed the example of his elder brother Tadao and left Japan for Brazil, where he became a cattle farmer.

He married in 1976 and assumed a leading role in the Colônia Jamic ("Jamic Colony"), a Japanese Brazilian community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul. After reading about a case in which a Japanese teenager murdered his parents in 1980, Onoda returned to Japan in 1984 and established the Onoda Shizen Juku ("Onoda Nature School"), an educational camp for young people in Fukushima Prefecture.

After the war, Filipino media interviewed villagers who had lived on Lubang during Onoda's time in hiding and alleged that he and his men had killed up to 30 civilians. Onoda did not mention these deaths in his autobiography. In 1996, he visited the town of Looc on Lubang after his wife Machie arranged a US$10,000 scholarship donation on his behalf to the local school. The town council presented Onoda with a resolution asking him to compensate the families of seven people whom he had allegedly killed, and about 50 relatives of the alleged victims staged a protest against his visit.

After 1984, Onoda spent three months of the year in Brazil and the rest in Japan.

On 16 January 2014, Onoda, aged 91, died of heart failure resulting from pneumonia at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo.

Hiroo Onoda only emerged from the jungle in 1974 after being personally ordered by his commanding officer.

Onoda surrendering his sword to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos at a ceremony on 11 March 1974

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