Fascinating. If you find more, I'd appreciate a ping.
MANILA, May 27 (Reuters) - Japanese officials were waiting to meet two elderly men in the southern Philippines on Friday after reports they could be the first Japanese soldiers left over from World War Two to be found in 30 years. The Philippines, invaded by Japan in 1941, was the scene of heavy fighting at the end of the war as Japanese soldiers with fierce loyalty to the emperor fought U.S. troops across the sprawling country, which has thousands of remote islands. Japanese media reported the two men had been living in mountains near General Santos City on the island of Mindanao and had contacted a Japanese person who was in the area searching for the remains of World War Two soldiers. "Two officials from the Japanese embassy in the Philippines will meet them today and try to confirm their identities," government spokesman Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference in Tokyo. Japanese embassy press attache Shuhei Ogawa told reporters the name of one of the men was reported to be Yoshio Yamakawa from the western city of Osaka. He said the other man had the surname Nakauchi. Both men were reported to be 86 years old, he said. Japanese officials were waiting at a hotel in General Santos for the men, who were being brought to the meeting by a Japanese mediator. "If they come, we will ask them if they can speak Japanese and if they want to return to Japan," said Shinichi Ogawa, the Japanese consul for nearby Davao City. The Sankei Shimbun newspaper, quoting an unidentified source, said there were around 40 former Japanese soldiers living on Mindanao, all of them hoping to return home. ( AIT's note here: the report I saw said "57") The last known Japanese straggler from the war was found in 1975 in Indonesia. In 1974, former Japanese army intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda was found living in the jungle on the Philippine island of Lubang. He was unaware of Japan's defeat in 1945. (With reporting by George Nishiyama in Tokyo)