Adventurer Norio Suzuki was on a quest. Bored of his life in Japan, he had set off to the Philippines determined to find a man many presumed had been dead for years. That man’s name was Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, an intelligence officer with the Imperial Japanese Army who had been sent to the island of Lubang in 1944 to hinder an Allied invasion expected to take place in early 1945.
.jpg)
What made Suzuki leave his home and trek through the forests of Lubang in search of this particular Japanese soldier? Because the year was 1974, and Lieutenant Onoda was still stubbornly fighting the Second World War nearly thirty years after everyone else had packed up and gone home.
Born on the 19th of March 1922, Hiroo Onoda grew up in the village of Kamekawa on the island of Honshu. Like many young men eager to see action, Onoda enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army in 1940. He was sent to the Nakano School, a training facility in Tokyo that specialized in turning out elite commando units. It was here that Onoda was taught the art of guerilla warfare, alongside history, philosophy, covert operations, propaganda and martial arts.
As the tide of the war began to turn against Japan, it was decided in December 1944 that Lieutenant Onoda’s singular skills would be best deployed in the Philippines. As the Americans prepared to invade, Onoda landed on the island of Lubang. His orders were simple – sabotage the island’s harbours and airstrips to render them unusable to Allied forces.
Unfortunately for Onoda, the superior officers he made contact with on arrival at Lubang had other ideas. They would need those harbours and airstrips to evacuate their men, they argued. Instead of being allowed to carry out the orders he had been given back in Japan, Onoda was instead ordered to help with the forthcoming evacuation.