Saturday, February 14, 2009

Cousin Jesse's Peeps: Lt. Hiroo Onoda



When you are looking at the biography of very interesting people, it has an impact on you as an individual. You want to know how this person felt when they were faced with difficult decisions like what JFK faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You want to know how this person was able to overcome shortcomings or loss. Well I intend to focus on people in, Cousin Jesse's Peeps, that are unique individuals that may not be very popular in history textbooks, but are far more important to absorbing history than chopping cherry trees or living in log cabins.

In order to truly understand the Japanese soldiers mindset, you have to know a little about the culture of Japan. At the time of World War II, the majority of people in Japan believed in Shintoism, a religion that is an almost cult like belief in deities of natural forces and veneration of the Emperor as a descendant of the sun goddess. Through the Bushido code, the Japanese culture looked down upon surrendering as a disgrace and they believed that the highest honor was to die in battle. There were no concerns of death for a soldier, because that was what was expected of you. This is dramatically shown through the example of young kamikaze ("divine wind") pilots that were given just enough gas in their plane to reach a target and crash dive into it, the whole time knowing that they will die as soon as they leave the airstrip. The Japanese Empire at its greatest strength, controlled most of the Pacific territory, including some of mainland China. So there were Japanese soldiers spread out throughout the Pacific, in places like the Philippines, Guam, and South East Asia. Japan was so spread out that, when the atomic bombs hit Japan and Emperor Hirohito gave his speech that called for an end to the war, there were some people who were never notified that World War II had ended and they continued to fight.



One soldier that followed the Bushido code very strictly was Lt. Hiroo Onoda; 23 years old at the time, he was a Japanese soldier that was sent to the Philippines in December 1944 to conduct sabotage missions and guerrilla attacks on the American soldiers that were landing in the Philippines. While Lt. Onoda was in the Philippines, the majority of his fellow soldiers were captured or killed and he found himself and three other Japanese soldiers alone in the jungle. However following the Bushido code, these soldiers refused to surrender and continued to run guerrilla attacks on soldiers, farmers and fishermen that were in the area. A few months later the US drops top secret bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan decides that its time to surrender, but meanwhile Lt. Onoda and the three other soldiers are unaware of the Japanese surrender and they continue to do what they were trained to do, guerilla warfare.

For years Onoda and the three other soldiers ignored leaflets that were dropped, saying the war had ended and they ignored pictures of their families and pleas for them to return. They thought that it was war propaganda, trying to convince them to come out of hiding so they could get captured. As the years went along, one by one the other three soldiers surrendered or were killed in scrambles for food as the soldiers would do guerrilla warfare runs on unsuspecting farmers or fishermen. It wasn't until 1972, that anyone made contact with Onoda and this was a young Japanese college dropout, Norio Suzuki, that was actually trying to find Onoda. Once he found Onoda, he had difficulty trying to convince him that the war had ended in 1945 and that he needed to surrender and come home. Onoda refused to surrender until a commanding officer told him that the war was over. Suzuki went back to Japan and brought back Onoda's commanding officer to tell him to lay down his arms. So 29 years later and finally Onoda's war ended and he walked out of the Jungle that he called home for so long. This extreme example of dedication to one's nation shows that some cultures are able to use religion and belief systems as a controlling mechanism with no strings attached.

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