26 Facts About Hiroo Onoda

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese soldier who served as a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

One of the last Japanese holdouts, Onoda continued fighting for nearly 29 years after the war's end in 1945, carrying out guerrilla warfare on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974.

Hiroo Onoda initially held out with three other soldiers: one surrendered in 1950, and two were killed, one in 1954 and one in 1972.

Hiroo Onoda was contacted in the jungles of Lubang by a Japanese explorer in 1974, but still refused to surrender until he was formally relieved of duty by his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who flew from Japan to the island to issue the order.

Hiroo Onoda surrendered on 10 March 1974, and received a hero's welcome when he returned to Japan.

In 1984, Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan, where he died in 2014 at the age of 91.

Hiroo Onoda was born on 19 March 1922, in Kamekawa, Wakayama, in the Empire of Japan.

Hiroo Onoda trained as an intelligence officer at the Futamata branch of the army's Nakano School, where he was instructed in guerrilla warfare.

On 26 December 1944, Hiroo Onoda was sent to lead guerrilla warfare operations on Lubang Island in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

Hiroo Onoda's mission was to destroy the island's airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion, as well as to destroy any enemy planes or boats that attempted to land.

When Hiroo Onoda arrived on Lubang, he encountered officers who outranked him and prevented him from carrying out his mission, which aided United States and Philippine Commonwealth forces in capturing the island when they landed on 28 February 1945.

Hiroo Onoda's group studied them to determine whether they were genuine, and decided they were not.

Shimada was wounded in the leg in a shootout with local fishermen in June 1953, after which Hiroo Onoda nursed him back to health.

On 19 October 1972, Kozuka was killed in a shootout with local police while conducting a recurring raid in which he and Hiroo Onoda burned piles of rice harvested by the villagers, which they intended as a signal to fellow Japanese forces that their group was still alive and carrying out its duties on Lubang.

On 20 February 1974, Hiroo Onoda encountered Norio Suzuki, a Japanese adventurer who was traveling around the world and had told friends he was looking for "Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, a panda, and the abominable snowman, in that order".

Hiroo Onoda later described their meeting in an interview: "This hippie boy, Suzuki, came to the island to listen to the feelings of a Japanese soldier".

Hiroo Onoda named Major Yoshimi Taniguchi as such, although in truth Onoda's immediate superior was Lieutenant General Shizuo Yokoyama, the commander of the Eighth Division who had issued his orders.

Hiroo Onoda was thus relieved of duty, and on 10 March 1974 surrendered to Philippine forces at Lubang's radar base.

Hiroo Onoda turned over his sword, a functioning Arisaka Type 99 rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition and several hand grenades, as well as a dagger his mother had given him in 1944 to kill himself with if captured.

Hiroo Onoda had held out for 28 years, 6 months, and 8 days after Japan's surrender in 1945.

Hiroo Onoda, who had been declared dead by the Japanese government in 1959, received a hero's welcome upon his return to Japan in 1974.

Hiroo Onoda was reportedly unhappy at receiving such attention and at what he saw as the withering of traditional Japanese values.

Hiroo Onoda wrote No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, a best-selling autobiography published in 1974.

Hiroo Onoda married in 1976 and assumed a leading role in the Colonia Jamic, a Japanese Brazilian community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul.

On 16 January 2014, Hiroo Onoda died of heart failure resulting from pneumonia at St Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga commented on his death, saying "I vividly remember that I was reassured of the end of the war when Mr Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan".