Consider this article when you have a moment. The subjects of the article are Japanese soldiers from the Imperial Japan era of WWII that somehow missed the surrender broadcast, or did not believe the broadcast was genuine due to their complete conditioning (AKA brainwashing) by the Imperial Japanese state.
A few salient examples:
- Private Bunzo Minagawa, who survived on Guam from 1944 to 1960 without surrendering. He finally surrendered on May 11, 1960, sixteen years after the war ended.
- Sergeant Tadashi Ito, his commanding officer, surrendered twelve days later.
- Corporal Shoichi Yokoi, another subordinate of Ito, was captured on Guam in January 1972, twenty eight years after the war ended.
- Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, an intelligence officer posted to Lubang island in the Philippines in December 1944 with orders to not surrender, commit suicide, or give up attempting to sabotage enemy forces unless ordered otherwise by a superior officer. He was sent with orders regarding specific objectives that, had they been accomplished, would have made the allied recapture significantly more difficult, but the immediate superior officers already stationed on Lubang countermanded his objectives. When the allied forces landed, all but four soldiers of their force were killed, leaving second lieutenant Onoda in command. He ordered his men into the hills, where they continued to conduct guerrilla operations throughout the late '40s, '50s, 60's, and early 70's. The last of his soldiers, Kozuka was shot by a Philippine policeman in 1972 while the pair were burning rice, leaving Onoda alone. In 1974, a college dropout named Norio Suzuki left Japan on a world tour to find "Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order" and he accomplished at least one of these, namely finding Onoda. However, Onoda still would not surrender, having been given express orders not to do so without a superior officer's command. Suzuki went back to Japan and, with the help of the government, found Major Taniguchi, Onoda's superior officer, who traveled to Lubang to relieve Onoda of his duty. Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda served twenty nine years and five months after the end of the war, for a total of thirty years and three months of active duty.
- The worst case (in my opinion) is that of conscript Private Teruo Nakamura, or Attun Palalin in his native language. Palalin was conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army in his home country of Taiwan in 1943. He was stationed on the island of Morotai, a northerly Indonesian island situated to the West of Borneo and to the East of New Guinea. He was officially declared dead by the Japanese government in March 1945, but he survived on the island with other Japanese holdouts well into the 1950s. He left however, to live on his own sometime in 1956. He survived, believing that the war was still on, until December 18, 1974 over thirty years after the war had ended. His former government wrote him a check to cover his pension and back pay, totaling 68,000 yen, the equivalent of 227 1974 dollars, or 1,100 2012 dollars.
Now, I know this is no one's fault, but these men were all the victims of state propaganda. They were told that Japan was invincible, that Japan would never surrender. Indeed for an individual to surrender was to shame oneself. It was inconceivable that a red-blooded man of Nippon would do so. And yet, even facing overwhelming evidence to the contrary, these men chose to believe their nation's propaganda over the truth staring them in the face.
So I ask you, what exactly does living under a rock mean to you?
