Ninja (33 page)

Onoda arrived in Lubang with a cargo of explosives aboard a motorized sailing boat whose captain kept making the dangerous crossing because he made money importing cows from the island. He, a newly trained lieutenant, was supposed to lead about two hundred men divided into army, radar, intelligence, and naval sections. But he had no authority to command. He could only lead if others followed, and they didn't. They had high hopes of leaving Lubang, and objected to an attack on the airfield because it would be needed when—not if—Japan started to win. Nor would they agree to guerrilla war. They were true Japanese! They would repulse the enemy or die fighting! With little help, Onoda shifted his explosives to a base at the foot of a mountain and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Two days later, on January 3, 1945, a yell from the mountaintop summoned him. There, through his binoculars, he saw an astounding sight: the U.S. fleet heading north—battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, some 150 troop transporters, and more landing craft than he could count. The invasion of Luzon was about to begin. It was perhaps Onoda's coded shortwave radio message—no one is certain, even now—passed from base to base, that triggered the Japanese response: waves of kamikaze pilots, who sank 25 U.S. ships. It was the beginning of a long, hard campaign, for the Japanese had already withdrawn into Luzon's interior, where they would continue resisting until almost all were killed.

On Lubang, Onoda failed to fulfill the first part of his mission. He had set charges on the pier, but they didn't work. He could not get the other men to help destroy the airfield. Besides, he soon realized that blowing holes in the runway would delay landings by no more than a day or two. But he did what he could. He recalled the story of how the great Kusunoki Masashige, defending Chihaya Castle in 1333, set up straw men to draw the fire of the enemy (the incident detailed in chapter 5). Kusunoki's statue, remember, stood outside the Nakano headquarters.

I decided to take a leaf out of Masashige's book. With Lieutenant Suehiro's assistance, I gathered up pieces of airplanes that had been destroyed and laid them out to look like new airplanes, taking care to camouflage them with grass. As I think back on it, the scheme sounds rather childishly simple, but it worked. After that, when enemy planes came, they invariably strafed my decoys on the airfield. At that time, they were coming over every other day, and we utilized the other days to put together fake airplanes. I considered it good guerrilla tactics to make attacking planes waste as much ammunition as possible.

A suicide group turned up, seventy of them, boats laden with explosive, expecting to be fed. But food could come only from the locals, and they were unwilling to help. The Japanese did what so many had done: They stole, and further alienated the locals. “My heart was sinking,” Onoda writes. “What can you do with a bunch of idiots?”

At the end of February, American troops arrived, with a sea and air bombardment, followed by a battalion-strong landing. All Onoda could do was retreat into the hills to avoid detection, while the others, “babbling about dying for the cause,” succumbed to disease or got shot. At one point, he helped twenty-two sick men prepare charges to blow themselves up when the U.S. troops appeared. “Later, I came back to the place and found no trace of either the tent or the twenty-two corpses. Nothing was left but a gaping hole in the ground. I just stood and stared at that awful hole. Even the tears refused to come.” After three months, only three dozen remained alive, with him the only officer. They decided to split into groups. Onoda was left with just two others, living on iron rations for the next six months, shooting a cow for meat now and then, keeping in occasional contact with the other groups.

In mid-October, they found a leaflet in Japanese: “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!” None of them believed it, because only a few days earlier one of the groups had been fired on. How could that happen if the war was over? This was a delusion embraced by all, but already Onoda was in a class of his own. He decided he would go on with his self-selected task, to keep clear of the other “disorderly, irresponsible soldiers” and “to study the terrain so that I could be useful when the Japanese army launched its counter-attack.”

At the end of 1945, they saw their second surrender leaflet, dropped by a B-17 bomber. It was an order to surrender signed by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, “the Tiger of Malaya,” conqueror of Singapore and ex-commander of the Fourteenth Area Army. Nothing could have carried greater authority. But Onoda was in the grip of his faith. He pounced on an obscurity in a sentence, which said those who surrendered would be given “hygienic succour” and “hauled” to Japan, whatever that meant. Also it said that Yamashita was responding to a “Direct Imperial Order,” which neither Onoda nor anyone else had heard of. “I could only conclude that the leaflet was phoney. The others all agreed with me. There was no doubt in our minds that this was an enemy trick.”

In 1946 many of the Japanese surrendered, while the others were all short of food and kept begging Onoda for his carefully limited supplies. He told them sternly, “You men made pigs of yourselves when you had rice, so now you don't have any. Don't come asking me to give you any of ours. I was sent here to destroy the airfield, and I still plan to do it. We're eating as little rice as possible. If we give you rice, we'll all be in trouble.”

There were more leaflets urging surrender, and Onoda heard people calling in Japanese. Those who had surrendered also left pencil-written notes. But still he and his three companions refused to believe the war had ended. “We thought the enemy was simply forcing prisoners to go along with their trickery.”

They were now the only ones holding out on Lubang and formed a tight-knit group: Corporal Shimada, the oldest at thirty-one, tall, fit and cheerful; Private Kozuka, twenty-five, very reticent, rarely speaking unless spoken to; Private Akatsu, twenty-three, a shoemaker's son and the weakest both emotionally and physically, in a word a liability; and twenty-four-year-old Onoda, who kept them together not by giving orders but by persuasion, always taking care to match the workload with the strength of the men. Each had a knife, a rifle with several hundred rounds, a bayonet, two hand grenades, and two pistols.

They established a routine: moving around the mountains, steering clear of local groups coming up from the plains and coasts to work, entering campsites in search of rice, always examining signs—ashes, leaves, tree stumps, footprints—to assess how long the workers had been there and whether they would be returning, sometimes taking rice, and if so always moving to a new location, staying only a few days in any one place, working in a rough circle.

In all this, Onoda's training was of little use. Guerrilla warfare was almost impossible. It took all his time and energy just to survive. He needed to know how to make fire without much smoke, how to make a net, how to hunt for food, how to sneak bananas from plantations, how to kill and butcher cows (more on this important subject later).

So life continued for another three years. Eventually, Akatsu, the weakest link and the least trustworthy, could not take it anymore. “Unlike me, he had no assignment, no objective, and the struggle to keep alive here in the mountains may well have come to seem pointless to him.” So he disappeared, presumably to surrender. As it happened, he was on his own for six months before giving himself up, not that Onoda knew it at the time. But the following year Onoda found a note left by Akatsu saying that Filipino troops had greeted him as a friend.

Soon after Akatsu vanished, the three survivors heard a loudspeaker telling them in Japanese they had “seventy-two hours” to surrender, or a task force would come after them. Again Onoda found a reason to doubt. Japanese didn't refer to three days as seventy-two hours—“still more proof that the war had not ended.” Anyway, he could not contemplate surrender, for a very good reason:

I had come to this island on the direct orders of the division commander. If the war were really over, there ought to be another order from the division commander releasing me from my duties. I did not believe the division commander would forget orders that he had issued to his men. Supposing he had forgotten. The orders would still have been on record at division headquarters. Certainly somebody would have seen to it that the commander's outstanding orders were properly rescinded.

After that, Onoda speeded up the trips around their circuit, firing on locals whenever they saw any, for “we considered people dressed as islanders to be enemy troops in disguise or enemy spies.” Their confidence grew, for they knew the whole area intimately. It would take a battalion or two to find them. Patrols of fifty or a hundred were no threat. Far from it—Onoda relished the challenge. They were only three men, but they were healthy, motivated, and fit. “We were making a force of fifty look silly. That is the kind of warfare I had been taught at Futamata.”

They got used to their life and even had times of contentment, sitting in a shelter, listening to the familiar sounds of the forested hills, talking about the old days in Japan. Shimada would describe his daughter (“I guess she must be old enough to like boys now”), wonder if the child his wife had been expecting was a boy or a girl, reminisce about dancing at a festival.

In February 1952 a small plane circled overhead, calling their names through a loudspeaker. It dropped leaflets, including letters and photographs from the families of all three men. One was from Onoda's oldest brother, Toshio. It mentioned the man who had brought the letter to the Philippines, said the war had ended, told Onoda that his parents were well—all proof enough, surely, that the war was over and that the men could surrender at last with their integrity intact.

Not a bit of it. “My reaction was that the Yankees had outdone themselves this time. I wondered how on earth they had obtained the photographs. That there was something fishy about the whole thing was beyond doubt, but I could not figure out exactly how the trick had been carried out.”

In this way, Onoda shored up his illusory world, an illusion that could be sustained not simply by remaining committed to the ethos of wartime Japan as promulgated by the Nakano School but also by becoming an ever-more-expert shadow warrior, indeed far more expert than any other. He was the ultimate ninja, the man with a mission who would do anything to survive and fulfill it.

A month later they heard another loudspeaker. This time it was (supposedly) a journalist, from
Asahi Shimbun
, wanting an interview. He kept repeating that he was Japanese, and ended by singing a Japanese war song.

“They're at it again,” commented Onoda, and the three remained hidden.

Later, they scouted out the area where the man with the loudspeaker had been and found a newspaper. Circled in red was a story about a lieutenant colonel coming to the Philippines to persuade the government to stop its “punitive missions” to capture Japanese soldiers on Lubang. The three men read the newspaper. Well, it looked genuine. Equally obviously, it was a trick. The enemy must have gone to a lot of trouble inserting a
false
article in a
genuine
newspaper. But it just wasn't good enough. “Punitive missions” indeed! If they were punitive, the war must still be going on. And there was something funny about the broadcasting schedules. Too many light-entertainment programs. Poisoned candy, said Onoda. “It looked good, but it was deadly.”

June 1953: In an exchange of fire with some fishermen, Shimada was shot in the right leg. Onoda carried him into the forest and bound the wound with cow fat as a poultice. It took him four months to recover, but he walked with a limp and was not his old self. It was like a premonition, which almost a year later was fulfilled. They spotted a search party of thirty-five down on the shore and retreated, but then argued about whether to stay or move across the island. They stayed, and sliced up some fruit, which they put out to dry. A little later, Onoda saw something move nearby. An intruder. Onoda fired, and the man dived for cover. Shimada stood still, aiming. A shot rang out, and he fell forward, killed outright by a bullet between the eyebrows. Onoda and Kozuka fled.

Ten days later, near the spot where Shimada was killed, a plane dropped leaflets, and a loudspeaker called, “Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended.” This merely angered them, for they were now utterly gripped by their own version of reality. “We wanted to scream out to the obnoxious Americans to stop threatening and cajoling us. We wanted to tell them that if they did not stop treating us like scared rabbits, we would get back at them some day, one way or another.”

Later, back in the same spot, Onoda recalled Shimada's friendship, which had lasted almost ten years. “I vowed that somehow we would avenge Shimada's death. . . . I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand. For the first time since I came to Lubang, I was crying.” With powerful emotions added to his peculiar brand of loyalty, what could ever convince him that the world was not as he believed it to be?

Not, for instance, a flag he found on which the names of family members had been written. But why were they
slightly misspelled
? He pondered until the explanation occurred to him. It ran as follows: His bosses would obviously be trying to contact him to help reoccupy the airfield; they wanted the Americans to know this so that they (the Americans) would shift troops away from other areas; so the flag was allowed to fall into enemy hands; and the enemy were now using the flag to entice Onoda out; knowing they would do this, the Japanese had deliberately made a mistake in the spelling of the names in order to warn him not to take the message seriously. “Today all this sounds ridiculous, but I had been taught in Futamata always to be on the lookout for fake messages.” Moreover, Onoda had taught Kozuka to be equally skeptical. The two supported each other in their paranoia.