Parties on Hiroo Onoda's island

Heard of Hiroo Onoda? Hiroo was one of the several thousand soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army who were sent to fight on the scores of islands in the Pacific against the Allies in World War II. Their orders were to fight till death, and never to surrender.

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Japan lost the war, and became an ally of its old enemies. The world changed, empires broke up, the Cold War began, hot wars broke out in Korea, Vietnam and West Asia, the Russians went into space, the Americans to the moon, women burnt bras, babies boomed, Beatles sang, Japan made cars—without Hiroo or his marooned buddies getting any wiser.

The post-war Japanese and their new American friends knew there were Imperial Army troopers left behind by time and war. They dropped leaflets on the islands to inform “anybody out there” that the emperor’s war had ended long ago. Hiroo and his buddies read a few of those, but dismissed them as enemy propaganda. They sat in the bushes through rain, shine and sounds of overflying airplanes, keeping their powder ready for an enemy who never came. Till an explorer found Hiroo in 1974, and convinced him that the war had ended three decades earlier.