Japanese holdouts

[Peter H]

About the Japanese soldiers who stayed on duty after 1945:

http://www.wanpela.com/holdouts/registry.html

[Larso]

I think I've posted this before but one of the guys from my regt was part of the peace keeping/observer force on Bouganville a few years ago. The local villagers told him that it was only a few years before that, that the last of the Japanese stopped coming out of the mountains to steal crops etc

[Sewer King]

One of my foremen in construction work had been a US Air Force sergeant in Guam during the Vietnam War, working on ordnance for the B-52s then secretly bombing Cambodia. He recalled stories of food or other things gone missing because of the Japanese holdout, probably Sergeant Yokoi. I myself was nine years old at that time and Yokoi was the first of these diehards I had ever heard of. I remember a news picture of him crying upon his return to cheering crowds in Japan in 1972.

I read Onoda's No Surrender, which seems fairly easy to find since it was translated into English and published by Kodan-sha.

There is a recent book by Stephen C. Mercano, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano (Brassey's, 2002), about the Imperial Japanese Army intelligence school. Onoda had been a graduate of Nakano and applied his training in his long holdout in the Philippines. The Nakano school reportedly also had some tie to use of biological weapons, like that rumored of British SOE, although not known to have been used against the western Allies.