Apr 14, 2022 (BBC) - A new film, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, tells the strange story of Japan's controversial WW2 hero.
December 1944: in the final months of World War Two, a Japanese lieutenant named Hiroo Onoda was stationed on Lubang, a tiny island in the Philippines. Within weeks of his arrival, a US attack forced Japanese combatants into the jungle – but unlike most of his comrades, Onoda remained hidden on the island for nearly 30 years. The Japanese government declared him dead in 1959, but in reality, he was alive – committed to a secret mission that had instructed him to hold the island until the imperial army's return. He was convinced the whole time that the war had never ended.
When he returned to Japan in 1974, Onoda received a hero's welcome – he was the last native Japanese soldier to return home from the war, and his memoir, published soon after, became a bestseller. His experience is told in Arthur Harari's epic, three-hour film Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, which has won critical acclaim and created controversy since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, and opens in the UK this week. With the German film director Werner Herzog due to publish a novel based on his story in June, and Filipina-Australian filmmaker Mia Stewart to complete her own documentary later in 2022, it is evident that Onoda is an alluring subject. But with its themes of war, nationalism, and "fake news" more relevant than ever, his story remains as fascinating and contested a subject as it did upon his re-emergence nearly 50 years ago.
Onoda was conscripted into the Japanese army in 1942, where he was selected for guerilla combat training. At the Futamata branch of the Nakano Military School, his training defied the widely distributed Senjinkun battlefield code instructions, which forbade Japanese combatants from being taken prisoner and instructed them to die fighting or via self-sacrifice instead. "You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand," he was told upon being sent to Lubang in late 1944 – as recalled in his 1974 memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. "Under no circumstances are you to give up your life voluntarily."
Onoda's mission was to destroy the Lubang airfield and a pier by the harbour, plus any enemy planes or crews who attempted to land. He failed, and as enemy forces took control of the island, he and his fellow troops retreated into the jungle. The war was soon over – but the leaflets that were dropped on Lubang to inform stragglers of Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, were dismissed as fakes, by Onoda and the three remaining servicemen who stood by him. They remained hidden in the wilderness among stinging ants and snakes, living on a diet of banana skins, coconuts and stolen rice, convinced that the enemy was trying to starve them out.
