How a Long-Lost Soldier’s Survival Story Riveted—and Confounded—’70s Japan

Slate ^ | Jan 31, 20225:45 AM | By Stephen R. Kelly

[thecodont]

Fifty years ago this month, one of the last Japanese soldiers from World War II finally came in from the cold. Two local hunters on the Pacific island of Guam stumbled across a hunched-over man in filthy clothing late one January afternoon as he was setting handmade shrimp traps in a remote jungle stream. The two men had lived through the brutal Japanese occupation of Guam during the war and knew exactly what they had found. Before the wild-eyed man could escape, they grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back, and marched him at gunpoint to the island authorities, who could scarcely believe the story he had to tell.

The hunters had bagged Lance Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army. He was the last survivor of a 20,000-man Japanese garrison that U.S. forces had obliterated when retaking the American territory in 1944. He had been on the run in Guam’s rugged interior for nearly 28 years, first as part of a small band of stragglers and later completely on his own. He hid by day in a dank, smoky tunnel he had dug himself with a fragment of an artillery shell. By night he foraged for coconuts, cane toads, and the occasional stray cow. He was 56 years old and weighed less than 90 pounds.

[thecodont]

Fascinating story.

[Mark17]

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/No_Surrender_My_Thirty_Year_War?id=ELBkAgAAQBAJ&gl=US

Another fascinating story.

[ExGeeEye]

“lance corporal”

smh.

Rikugun-Shōi (equivalent to US Second Lieutenant).

[texas booster]

A good find. Here are a few bits of the article that I found fascinating:

Yokoi was not the last of the emperor’s soldiers to come in from the cold. Two more would eventually emerge ...

I met with Mihoko (Hatashin, married in Nov. 1972) in 2019 in Nagoya, sitting in the house she and Shoichi built in 1973 with unsolicited donations that had poured in from all over Japan. Mihoko told me her husband avoided talking about the war or his experience on Guam, although he did volunteer to cook up a panful of field mice shortly after they married. She told him she would do all the cooking from then on.

Mihoko is shown in the documentary listening as Yokoi revealed his bitterness toward the officers he felt had abandoned him and his companions on Guam, his horror at the atrocities they committed there, and his frustration in trying to explain to his countrymen what had happened to their sons, brothers, and husbands on the distant island, and why they should still care.

“Japan isn’t the place he thought it was,” Mihoko says after a pause. “I think it’s a place that no longer needs to hear his story.”

It may be Slate but this is a good article.

[11th_VA]

I remember when this story hit the news. I always thought about that Gilligan’s Island episode based on the same storyline …

[Hazwaste]

I remember that one. Wasn’t he played by an Italian? I remember Ginger fogged his glasses. :)

[Clutch Martin]

There’s more to this story.

The locals were very aware of this chicken thief, he had been pilfering off semi rural locals for almost 30 years.

Various attempts were made using loudspeakers to coax him out of the boonies, to no avail. He finally relented, at the end of his tether with growth of income during the Vietnam era, as Guam was a forward logistics for air support, and naval assets, the locals began to finally climb out of the impoverished state of affairs after WWII.

So what happened? The local chamorro’s geared up for offshore fishing, and wild boar. Guns, hunting, potshots at the chicken thief... his days were numbered. The Lance Corporal heard the imploring loudspeakers, felt the buckshot buzzing by as his foraging was severely hampered by an increase of family pets and boar hunters. He turned himself in to the proper authorities as instructed through the loudspeaker broadcasts.

There were a few holdouts on other islands and in the Philippines which had a few who weren’t slain in open secrecy, and able to surrender.

[GeorgiaDawg32]

He was caught just a few months before I was stationed there. I remember walking through the jungle with some buddies and there were leaflets everywhere, in Japanese, telling anyone else left to come out of hiding.

None did.

[Fido969]

Do you think he could get back pay?

[JerseyDvl]

Bookmark

[JerseyDvl]

That looks like a great read.. Thanks for recommending.

[Deaf Smith]

Fascinating---

I recall Gilligans Island covering this.

The key to survival was watching John Wayne movies.

[rlmorel]

I was interested in this since I was familiar with the story of Onoda, who finally surrendered in the Philippines in 1974, the last holdout of WWII IIRC, and I had lived over there only a few years before that.

What the Japanese did during WWII was reprehensible, and I had a difficult time wrapping my head around this dilemma as I grew up, since I lived in Japan AND the Philippines for a few years each, and I really liked the Japanese people. Then in the Philippines, they had a very different outlook on them, for obvious reasons.

It confounded me, how could such seemingly nice, gentle, art-loving, sensitive people be the kind who would routinely do things like force a garden hose down a prisoner's throat, fill them with water, and stomp on them for enjoyment? They were a paradox to me, and it says something about human behavior I would rather not understand.

The Slate article has a link to the museum which has the artifacts from this man's life in the Guam jungle, and I post them here for your perusal.

Link to Nagoya City Museum page with articles displayed

Shochi Yokoi 1942

Shochi Yokoi 1972

Homemade clothes from tree bark thread (front)

Homemade clothes from tree bark thread (back)

His rifle he maintained

He was a tailor before the war, he made his own clothes on this loom he made from his own thread made from bark

Sample of fine thread he made from tree bark

Sample of coarse thread/twine he made from tree bark

Some items from the cave:

Some more items from the cave

His kitchen utensils

A container he made with cap

A container uncapped

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I was stationed TDY on Guam back in 1968-1969. I still remember the signs warning people NOT to go into the jungle.

[Mark17]

👍😊

[DoodleDawg]

Compare his fate to those of the five Americans who fled into the hills following the Japanese invasion. Four were eventually caught and executed immediately. The fifth lasted until the U.S. returned.

[ExGeeEye]

He was offered back pay, and refused it.

He was also offered the proceeds of private donations, and donated that for the maintenance of the Yasukuni Shrine.

[thecodont]

Thanks for the images. He was handy with a needle and thread; his tailor’s apprenticeship served him very well in the jungle. Very resourceful guy.

[rlmorel]

Pretty resourceful indeed.

Like I said, after years of looking at the conduct of the Japanese in WWII, I had difficulty feeling any sympathy, but over time, I came to pity many of them. They were put out there and left to die, often by starvation, or their own hand.

Obviously, I am not the only one to struggle with this.

One of my favorite stories (which illustrates that Westerners did notice this cultural disparity) was the famous journey the USS Astoria made to Japan in 1939 carrying the ashes of the highly respected Japanese ambassador Hirosi Saito who had died while in the USA. (You can read about it here: The Saito Cruise 1939

US-Japanese relations were quite difficult at that time, but this was a special case.

IIRC, even though this was a diplomatic mission, there was a lot of military tension on both sides.

When they prepared to go ashore, Captain Turner selected the biggest, brawniest sailors he could find to serve as the armed honor guard for the delivery of the ashes, and even (to the chagrin and irritation of the Marine Corps detachment aboard) took the biggest Marines and made them wear sailors uniforms (you can see below, wearing the flat hats!)

Anyway, it was a big to-do, the crew was treated on liberty by the Japanese quite well, but in the formal dinner party of all the ships officers held with prominent Japanese Naval officers, there was real tension and barely disguised (sometimes not disguised) hostility by the Imperial Japanese Navy representatives towards their American counterparts.

But to the point of our discussion of Japanese culture, and this includes Japanese women...one US Navy officer later said (I have to paraphrase, I don't have it exactly) "I could never understand how the Japanese women could be so beautiful and sweet, and the Japanese men could be such sons-of-bitches!"

Well, we would find out for ourselves just a few years later just how true at least one part of that statement was. On August 9, 1942, Japanese sent the USS Astoria to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound during the Battle of Savo Island. Quite an ironic turnaround there.