Fifty years ago, one of the last Japanese soldiers to have fought in World War II suddenly resurfaced. On a late January afternoon on the Pacific island of Guam, two hunters came across a hunched man, covered in dirty clothes, setting homemade shrimp traps in a stream. at the edge of the jungle. Both men had experienced the brutal occupation of the island of Guam by the Japanese during the war, so they understood immediately what they had just discovered. Before the wide-eyed man could escape, they grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back and led him, at gunpoint, to the island's authorities who had to hard to believe the story he began to tell them.
The hunters had just captured Shoichi Yokoi, Private First Class of the Imperial Japanese Army. He was the last survivor of a garrison made up of 20,000 Japanese soldiers annihilated by the American army when it reconquered its territory in 1944. He had been on the loose in the wild lands of Guam for nearly twenty-eight years, d first with a small band, then completely alone. During the day, he hid in a cold, damp and smoky tunnel he had dug for himself with a fragment of shell. At night he searched for coconuts, cane toads and occasionally picked up a stray cow. He was 56 years old and weighed less than 40 kilos.
The discovery of Yokoi in 1972 astonished the Japanese for whom, for a long time, the last soldier of the imperial army had died or had returned home. More than 5,000 men, women and schoolchildren greeted him with flags when he finally returned to Tokyo on a cloudy winter afternoon. Seventy million others, the percentage equivalent to 200 million Americans today, watched him live on television shuffling to the microphone on the airport tarmac and their deliver another shock.He announced to his compatriots that he was ashamed to return home alive.
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I first heard of Yokoi's story when I was a reporter in Guam in the mid-1970s. At first it was the details of his survival that amazed me: the fact that he survived to the massive American invasion, which cost the lives of 90% of the Japanese defenders. The deadly cat-and-mouse game he had played half his life as American soldiers and vengeful Islanders hunted down the survivors. His relentless will to move on, even after the death of the last of his companions.
But in recent years I have become increasingly interested in the larger questions raised by his ordeal. What was he so ashamed of? What did the Japanese of 1972, whose new constitution forbade the use of force to resolve international disputes, whose emperor was no longer considered a god and whose country had become the world's third largest economy, think of this traveler time from such a different past? And perhaps more importantly, at a time when we Americans are plagued with questions about character, purpose, and the resurgence of nationalism, what kind of country produces a man who would rather spend several decades in a stuffy, smelly hole rather than surrender?
Even fifty years later, the answers are not simple.
Shoichi Yokoi was born in 1915 to a poor rural family near the dusty industrial city of Nagoya, and grew up during one of the deepest recessions in his country's history. His mother left her alcoholic husband when he was only three months old and raised her only son with great difficulty. Yokoi was tossed from one member of his family to another without ever being welcome until he was 15, when he was apprenticed to a tailor in Toyohashi, 65 kilometers southeast of Nagoya. The hours of work were so long and the food rations so meager that when Yokoi was called to do his three days in 1935, he was turned down. For a man who was going to set a record in the field of human endurance, he was off to a bad start.
Learning how to cuff pants or how to handle a tape measure may not seem like the best preparation for a life on the run, but Yokoi knew how to put her knowledge to good use. When the tropical heat and humidity of Guam tore his uniform to shreds, he found a way to strip the fibers from the bark of the trees and weave them into a sort of burlap. He made surprisingly well-tailored shirts and trousers, with pockets, belt loops and buttonholes sewn in the rules of the art.
These clothes protected him from the tropical sun and swarms of mosquitoes. Their manufacture, which took several months for each set, allowed him to remain sane. "It may have been good for my mental health to stick to daily chores," he later wrote. Every moment of these activities gave me simple pleasure and a sense of satisfaction.”
His innovations in survivalism did not stop there. Not only did he learn how to dig tunnels with primitive tools as well as ways to prevent them from flooding or collapsing, but he made a filter out of coconut husks to reduce the smoke from his cooking fires. underground, likely to betray him. He also learned how to remove poisonous glands from cane toads that provided him with much-needed protein, and later proceeded to raise these giant batrachians in his tunnel to control the cockroach population and keep him company.
He made traps to catch freshwater prawns, eels and field mice, and concealed the entrance to his tunnel under a bamboo mat strong enough to support a man's weight, yet invisible to the eye. naked. He also found out the hard way that trying to start a fire by rubbing two pieces of bamboo together can be exhausting, unless he adds just the right amount of powder from his remaining balls. This feeble soldier with unpromising origins turned out to be a genius of survivalism.
As the original Shoichi Yokoi cave was destroyed by a typhoon, a reproduction was built in the same location. It has become a tourist attraction in Talofofo, Guam. | Groverva via Wikipedia
When Yokoi returned to Japan in 1972, her toolkit sparked such interest that tens of thousands of Tokyoites lined up for hours to see her during her display at a downtown department store (she can be seen online on the website of the Nagoya Municipal Museum). But as the public learned of the immensity of the ordeal he had suffered, his interest shifted from the contents of his tool kit to the man and the strength he had to show.
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Yokoi had grown up in a Japan steeped in resentment. Despite its victory against Russia in 1905 (the first time that an Asian country defeated a Western power) and its alliance with the victors of the First World War (it was the only Asian power to sign the Treaty of Versailles), its leaders did not felt disrespected. They resented the limits placed on their fleet by the United States and the United Kingdom, and resented the racism that Japanese emigrants faced in the United States, where hysteria over the "Yellow Peril" led to a ban on Japanese immigration in 1924. As Americans today know well, a sense of injustice can be a powerful motivator.
Beginning in 1930, an appalling series of assassinations and failed coups linked to ultranationalist elements in the Japanese military undermined the democratic institutions that had developed in the 1920s. the promotion of an unconditional devotion to an emperor of supposedly divine nature and a mentality which put Japan before all else, and which justified absolute imperialism. In 1931, a group of Japanese army officers staged an attack on a Japanese-owned railway in Manchuria and blamed the Chinese. The incident served as a pretext to annex the entire province.
In 1938, the increasing death toll in the war Japan continued to wage in China forced the Imperial Army to lower its physical standards enough to spear Yokoi. Given his less than robust physique, he was assigned to a logistics unit behind the front lines and was sent first to China and then to Guam, where he took part in a last ditch attempt to defend Japan's Pacific Empire. in full collapse. When the Marines crushed his poorly trained unit on the beaches of Guam in 1944, he retreated with a few other survivors to the southern half of the island, covered in forested hills.
Shoichi Yokoi in his Japanese army sergeant uniform. | Wikipedia
The Japanese had invaded Guam a few days after Pearl Harbor, making it the first American territory to fall into enemy hands since the War of 1812. They were running it like a concentration camp. When in the post-war period, like the two hunters, surviving islanders discovered soldiers left behind, like Yokoi, they often killed them.
Realizing that life on the surface was increasingly risky, Yokoi and his small group, which did not cease to decrease, buried themselves underground from the 1950s. In 1964, the last two companions of Yokoi, with whom he had fallen out with, died under mysterious circumstances. Guam's medical examiner later ruled that they had been poisoned, likely by ingesting improperly prepared cycad seeds that contain a toxin that Yokoi and his companions all knew was deadly.
Yokoi remained alone for the next eight years. He tinkered with his shrimp traps, reared his cane toads, and watched these curious devices, which he would later learn were called jet planes, whirring past the entrance to his tunnel. He could only notice that none of them had Japanese markings. During his early years in the jungle, he had heard loudspeakers announcing that the war with Japan was over. But in the militaristic, ultra-nationalist country that had shaped its personality, members of the Imperial Army were expected to fight to the death. Surrender, he had been explicitly told in his first years in the army, dishonored not only the soldiers but also their families back home.
On the front, this draconian decree had led to an appalling number of deaths. Of the approximately 20,000 Japanese defenders stationed in Guam when the US Marines landed on the morning of July 21, 1944, 18,382 perished, according to later US counts. Many died in totally unnecessary suicide attacks shouting the battle cry “banzai!”. Less than 1,600 of them were captured alive. About 150 fled into the jungle, trapped between their desire to live and their refusal to surrender. Yokoi was the last to come out alive. He hadn't surrendered, but he hadn't kept his last bullet to himself either.
From the moment it was discovered, the American and Japanese press made a great deal out of Yokoi's story, which was worthy of Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving's romantic character. He had never watched television, had not known that men had walked on the Moon and had never heard of the atomic bomb. He didn't know what to do with the little packets of paper he found on his breakfast tray at Guam Memorial Hospital – it was salt and pepper. He delighted reporters at the first press conference after his capture by asking if Franklin Roosevelt was still President of the United States. Roosevelt had been dead for over twenty-six years.
Yokoi was in surprisingly good shape. Certainly he was abnormally thin and very bent, because of his subterranean existence, and it would take him months to straighten up. He was also missing seven teeth, he suffered from mild beriberi and a crushed vertebra in his lower back, due to a tunnel collapse that had nearly killed him. His low caloric intake had also annihilated all sexual appetite; it would take him months to regain an erection. He had been deprived of salt for more than a quarter of a century and had rarely eaten red meat.
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If his blood protein level was low, he was not malnourished. He had been obliged to exercise regularly to obtain food and find firewood. He carefully boiled the water he drank and washed himself every night in the stream where he fished. All of this had earned him a healthy heart and a parasite-free body. He spoke oddly well for someone who had only spoken to cane toads for eight years.
While the Japanese were fascinated by the story of its survival, they were divided on its meaning. Many of his countrymen saw him as a victim of the dreaded pre-war educational system that had made war acceptable and free thought subversive. The neo-nationalists simply called him a deserter. Someone sent him a razor blade and a letter suggesting he cut his wrists. Younger Japanese – in 1972, half the population had been born after the war – admired his endurance but found his sacrifice incomprehensible.
Yokoi itself does not provide a simple answer. Despite all he had endured, his loyalty to Emperor Hirohito, the man who had sent him to die in Guam and then surrendered to the allies and was still on the throne when he returned, had not wavered. . Yokoi remained unclear on when he finally realized the war was over, and what had happened to his last two companions in the jungle. Although he dismissed any suggestion that he might be a hero, and grew tired of all the attention he got—tourist bus companies had added stops at his home in Nagoya to meet on demand -- he embarked on a low-budget legislative campaign in 1974 with a platform that rejected the consumerism, short skirts and pollution of modern Japan. He suffered a defeat. Stinging.
However, this wrinkled and full of contradictions survivor had not finished surprising others or surprising himself since he found love, at 57 years old. Her family having decided that she needed a wife, she had used the services of a professional matchmaker. The third candidate was a 44-year-old woman from Kyoto named Mihoko Hatashin. It was love at first sight. They married in November 1972 and as unlikely as it seems, it was in Guam that they went on their honeymoon.
They lived together for the next twenty-five years, until Yokoi's death in 1997. Officially, he died of a heart attack. But he had suffered a long period of decline caused by a form of Parkinson's disease that doctors associated with his long ordeals in the jungle, and he had stopped eating. Some believe he starved himself to death to avoid becoming too much of a burden for Mihoko. He was 82 years old.
Yokoi was not the last soldier of the emperor to reappear like this. Two others would emerge after him: a brash Japanese officer who laid down his sword in a melodramatic ceremony in the Philippines two years after Yokoi's discovery, and a Taiwanese aborigine recruited by the Japanese army, turned farmer and found in Indonesia at the end of 1974. But Yokoi was the first to emerge after a twelve-year period, during which Japan had more than succeeded in putting World War II behind it and becoming a living democracy. And now he was bringing war, with all its violence and blind devotion to extremist ideologies, with surprising and often painful force.
Fifty years later, the shock wave of what was dubbed “the Yokoi explosion” is still echoing in Japan. Japan's public radio and television network NHK aired a thirty-minute documentary about him in November 2021, based on a wealth of newly discovered recordings made shortly after his return. The journalists had also found Mihoko, now 93 years old, and had her listen to these recordings.
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I myself met Mihoko in 2019 in Nagoya. We chatted in the house she and Shoichi had built in 1973 with unsolicited donations that had come from all over Japan. Mihoko told me that her husband avoided talking about the war or his experiences in Guam, but offered to cook a pot of field mice shortly after they got married. She had told him that from then on, she would be the one cooking.
In the documentary, Mihoko is seen listening to Yokoi reveal his bitterness toward the officers he blamed for abandoning him and his companions in Guam, reminisce about the horror he felt at the atrocities they committed there, and his frustration as he tried to explain to his countrymen what had happened to their sons, brothers and husbands on that remote island, and why they should still care.
"Japan no longer corresponds to the idea he had of it," Mihoko said after a silence. I think it's a country that no longer feels the need to listen to Yokoi's story."
