Surrender after 60 years: two soldiers ask to go home

By Deborah Cameron Herald Correspondent in Tokyo
May 28, 2005

Fearful of court martial ... Tsuzuki Nakauchi, of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Photo: Reuters

As young conscripts they pledged never to to surrender. Yesterday as old men they emerged from their hiding place in the Philippines - two Japanese Imperial Army soldiers, asking to go home.

Discovered after a chance encounter with a Philippines businesswoman who had friends in Japan, the men reportedly have documents that show they were attached to the army's 30th Division. Until yesterday they had been listed among Japan's war dead.

Word of the exiles became public yesterday, but the efforts to trace their history date from December when a businesswoman from the Philippines rang a friend in Japan to ask for help in getting the men home.

The men are Yoshio Yamakawa 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85.

They made contact with the outside world through a 93-year-old former military doctor, Kyodo News reported.

"I also want to go back to Japan but we are worried about a court martial," the doctor reportedly said.

As Japan prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the epic of the lost soldiers is a reminder of 4000 other Japanese military in the Philippines who never accepted surrender and fled to the mountains.

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In the years immediately after the war signs posted in many areas warned travellers that Japanese soldiers were still present. They had dug in, ignoring pamphlet drops in 1945 telling them that the war had ended and also eluding American troops and many search parties.

Two years ago Japan authorised a mission to the Philippines to try to find what was thought to be the last five or six soldiers living in exile but it came back empty handed.

Japan's Foreign Minister, Nobutaka Machimura, yesterday said embassy officials from Manila had gone to the island of Mindanao to meet the latest group and that it was almost certain they were Japanese.

"I am glad that they were able to survive for 60 years," said Goichi Ichikawa, 89, who is chairman of a group of army survivors.

The Government has not released information about whether the men had spent the past 60 years in isolation or whether they had set aside their uniforms and taken up lives as ordinary civilians in the Philippines. The men had written their names in Japanese, a Government spokesman said.

News of their possible repatriation to Japan reopens one of the most intriguing mysteries of the postwar years. For the families involved, it is as though these men have returned from the dead.

When another soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, gave himself up in Guam in 1972 after years living in a cave, he said he was the last survivor in a group of three who had stayed together after the war.

At the time he said: "We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive," according to the Pacific Wreck Database, which lists rediscovered Japanese soldiers and also records the wrecks of aircraft and other military equipment.

The most celebrated case of a Japanese to be found after the war was Hiroo Onoda, who with a small band of men got into sporadic gun fights with villagers and Philippines soldiers.

He gave himself up in 1974 but had to be persuaded that the war was really over.