[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 …

[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.

[JerseyDvl]

Bookmark

[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.

[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.