Japan WWII soldier who hid in jungle until 1974 dies

Japan WWII soldier who hid  in jungle until 1974 dies

TOKYO: A Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for three decades, refusing to believe World War II was over until his former commander returned and persuaded him to surrender, has died in Tokyo aged 91.
Hiroo Onoda waged a guerilla campaign in Lubang Island near Luzon until he was finally persuaded in 1974 that peace had broken out.
Leaflet drops and other efforts to convince him the Imperial Army had been defeated were unsuccessful, and it was only a visit from his former commanding officer, who ordered him to lay down his arms, that brought an end to his one-man war. 
Onoda was the last of several dozen so-called holdouts scattered around Asia, men who symbolised the astonishing perseverance of those called upon to fight for their emperor.
He and three other soldiers continued to obey that order long after Japan’s 1945 defeat.
Tokyo and Manila searched for the remaining two over the next decade, but ruled in 1959 that they were already dead.
Onoda later explained that he had believed attempts to coax him out were the work of a puppet regime installed in Tokyo by the United States.
The regular overflight by US planes during the long years of the Vietnam war also convinced him that the battle he had joined was still being played out across Asia.
It was not until 1974, when his old commanding officer visited him in his jungle hideout to rescind the original order, that Onoda’s war eventually ended.
Asked at a press conference in Japan after his return what he had been thinking about for the last 30 years, he told reporters: “Carrying out my orders.”
But the Japan that Onoda returned to was much changed. The country he had left, and the one he believed he was still fighting for, was in the grip of a militarist government, bent on realising what it thought was its divine right to dominate the region. Crippled by years of increasingly unsuccessful war, its economy was in ruins and its people were hungry.

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