This video is brought to you by Skillshare.
Hiroo Onoda - The Japanese soldier who didn't surrender until 1974.
Hiro Onoda was a Japanese intelligence officer in the imperial Japanese army
who refused to surrender until decades after World War II had ended.
In the Pacific theater there were many Japanese holdouts called Zanryū nipponhei, or "remaining Japanese soldiers."
They were motivated to continue on after the surrender of Japan in August 1945
because of their dogmatic, militaristic indoctrination, or simply because they were unaware of the surrender.
Hiroo Onoda was trained at the Nakano School as an intelligence officer,
where he was taught guerilla warfare and intelligence-gathering.
Onoda was sent to Lubang Island, near Luzon, in the Philippines in late 1944,
where he would soon meet up with a group of other Japanese soldiers already on the island.
Major Yoshimi Taniguchi had given him orders to live off the land, and forbade him to die by his own hand.
He would further reassure Officer Onoda by saying, "It may take three years, it may take five.
but whatever happens, we'll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead them."
Higher-ranked officers made Onoda unable to carry out his mission to sabotage the enemy airstrip and pier at the harbor.
This in turn made the U.S. conquest of the island, which was achieved in February 1945, easy.
Once U.S. forces were on the island, the large group split up into smaller groups of 3-4 men
and escaped into the jungle, and were either picked off by the U.S. troops or surrendered,
until it was just Hiroo Onoda and three others under his command who were left active:
Private Yuichi Akatsu, Corporal Shoichi Shimada, and Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka,
all of whom had set up base in the mountains.
After Japan had formally surrendered in September 1945, Onoda and his group came across a number of leaflets.
The first leaflet, left behind by locals, was discovered quite soon,
reading, "The war ended on August 15th. Come down from the mountain!"
However they concluded that it was an Allied propaganda trick.
After this conclusion, the group continued to raid local islanders for food and other resources.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army also dropped leaflets from the air with a surrender order.
But again, the group decided that they were a trick.
With a lack of knowledge of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
it may have seemed more unlikely that Japan was willing to surrender.
In 1949, Yuichi Akatsu escaped from the group and surrended to Filipino forces in 1950,
causing the remaining three to cautious to disloyalty.
In 1952, the search mission was expanded with letters and pictures from the group's families dropped from an aircraft,
but again, this was written off as a trick by the three soldiers.
Every piece of evidence the group came across increased their paranoia and hostilities.
While they were dressed in their Imperial Japanese uniforms,
the people they came across were in civilian clothing,
which they interpreted as Allied soldiers in disguise with the strategy of luring them out.
As a result, they didn't think twice when firing on the locals.
Corporal Shoichi Shimada was shot in the leg but recovered with the help of Onoda in 1953,
but on May 7th, 1954, he was killed by a search party when he fired upon his potential rescuers,
who returned fire on a beach at (???).
Now just two remained.
Onoda and Kozuka would continue the mission to sabotage, gather intelligence on, and attack the "enemy," which no longer existed.
But on October 19th, 1972 during a skirmish,
Kozuka was shot and killed by the police when he was burning a farmer's rice collection.
Lieutenant Onoda was now alone.
On February 20th, 1974, a determined Japanese explorer called Norio Suzuki found Onoda.
Onoda still refused to surrender.
However Suzuki had the idea to locate his original commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.
In March 1974 his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi,
traveled to the Philippines to fulfill his promise to return, and end his orders in person.
Onoda, still wearing his tattered army uniform from decades ago,
saluted the Japanese flag and handed over his samurai sword,
his functioning Arisaka Type 99 rifle, several rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, and his family dagger.
The Philippine government, under President Ferdinand Marcos, granted him a pardon,
taking into consideration that although he had killed 30 innocent people during his campaign on the island,
he thought the war was still carrying on.
When he returned to Japan, Onoda was very popular.
But he found it hard to adjust to the new post-war Japan,
and the decay of its traditional values.
He published an autobiography and in 1975 left Japan for Brazil,
where he raised cattle and later opened a series of training schools.
In his last years, Hiroo Onoda said in an interview:
"Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death."
"But as an intelligence officer, I was ordered to conduct guerilla warfare and not to die."
"I became an officer, and I received an order. If I could not carry it out, I would feel shame."
"I am very competitive."
This video was made possible by Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community with more than 17,000 classes.
Some of the apps that we use to bring Simple History to life are
Adobe Illustrator for drawing characters and Premiere Pro for editing.
Skillshare is a great place to learn these skills,
and with premium access at less than $10 a month,
you get unlimited access to high quality classes from experts.
So Skillshare is giving the first 200 people using the promo link
in the description below two months' free access to try it out risk-free.
Give it a shot!