By the time Onoda returned to Japan, he became something of a legend in Japan. People wanted to see a man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times. Japanese publishers were keen for the rights to Onoda’s story. He astonished most of them byturning down some of the more handsome offers and choosing a publisher whom he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had enjoyed in prewar times.
Onoda kept neither diary nor journal, but his memory seems to have been remarkable. Within three months of his return, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections ranging from the most important events to the tiniest details of jungle life. In July, 1974, articles began running in serial form in a weekly. His memoir, entitled No Surrender: My Thirty - Year War was published in Japanese and English translation. He himself made sketches for all of the diagrams and drawings in this book, as well as for many others appearing in a Japanese children’s edition.
He writes in his memoir that in a normal military school in Japan, recruits were taught not to think but to lead troops into battle, resolved to die if necessary. The sole aim was to attack enemy troops and slaughter as many as possible before being slaughtered. Soldiers were supposed to give their lives for the cause, not grovel in enemy prison camps. However, he was recruited for secret operations and the training he got was different: the aim was to stay alive and continue to fight as guerrillas as long as possible, even if this entailed conduct normally considered disgraceful. He says:
I came to the conclusion then that I would probably go off to the Philippines and carry on my guerrilla warfare in the mountains until I died there all alone, lamented by no one. Although I knew that my struggle would bring me neither fame nor honor, I did not care.
In 1959, 15 years after he went to Philippines, a search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Onoda and his surviving friend thought that the newspapers were doctored up by the American secret service to eliminate any news they did not want them to see. For them, the newspapers seemed to confirm that the war was still going on. Why? Because they told a lot about life in Japan. Their thinking was that if Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.
When they arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips in Japan. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. They took this at face value. They sincerely believed that if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. He writes:
I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk. Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!” The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? ... There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous. Who said we had lost the war?
They had been stuck in 1945. Only after Onoda returned to Japan and looked out the window of his hotel at the streets of Tokyo did he realize that he had been living in an imaginary world. On his return he was cheered by a crowd of up to 8,000 people – a moment that was played out live on NHK, the country's national broadcaster. At that time, more progressive views of the war, which included atonement for crimes, were becoming more widely held. His re-emergence offered a useful propaganda tool for the country's powerful conservatives about old Japanese virtues of bravery, loyalty, pride and commitment that had been widespread during wartime.
He returned to a hero’s welcome in Japan, but found himself unable to adjust to modern life there. He received back pay from the Japanese government for his twenty-nine years on Lubang, but it amounted to very little. He moved to Brazil for a calm life of raising cattle on a ranch. In May of 1996, Hiroo Onoda returned to Lubang, and donated $10,000 to the school there. He then married a Japanese woman, and the two of them moved back to Japan from Brazil to run a nature camp for young people. On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure at the age of 91.
Onoda wasn't the only soldier who found it difficult to believe that the war had ended. Many Japanese groups continued fighting long after the country's surrender. Twenty-one soldiers were rounded up on the island of Anatahan in 1951. Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-Japanese soldier, endured 29 years in the jungle after the end of World War Two, on Morotai, in present-day Indonesia. The key difference, says Seriu, is that many other Japanese holdouts "found ways to live in the formerly occupied country," and even started families in some cases. Onoda, on the other hand, "refused to live in collaboration with the inhabitants [of Lubang]."
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