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HIROO ONODA, LAST TO SURRENDER

1922

Hiroo Onoda was born in Kainan, . LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

1939

When Hiroo Onoda turned seventeen, he went to work for a trading company in China. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1942

May: Drafted into the Japanese military, Hiroo Onoda attended a school for guerilla warfare. Being taken as a prisoner of war was considered by the Japanese to be a failure deserving of death, and in addition to this, what Onoda was being told was that it was the duty of a lurking guerilla fighter to stay alive at any cost. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

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1944

December 26, Tuesday: George Smith Patton, Jr. relieved the defenders of Bastogne. The German offensive through the Ardennes had stalled. On or about this date, my friend Hans Theodore Zink, a US citizen who had been inducted into the German army, searched out a contingent of US soldiers and surrendered. He would finish out the war, and give up his adolescence, as the Geneva Protocols representative of a POW camp in the desert of the American Southwest.

Japanese naval vessels bombarded United States positions on the coast of Mindoro, Philippine Islands.

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Destroyer Kiyoshimo, by naval vessels and Army aircraft, Philippine Islands area, 12 degrees 20 minutes North, 121 degrees 0 minutes East

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HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

Apprentice Officer Hiroo Onoda was sent to the small tropical island of Lubang, which is approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila in the . His orders were straightforward. He was to do anything to hamper enemy attack on the island. This included destroying the Lubang airport and the pier at the harbor. He was sent in alone, ordered not to die by his own hand, and was told to take as many years as was needed to accomplish his mission. When he landed, he found a group of Japanese soldiers that had been sent there previously. The officers in this group outranked Onoda and prevented him from carrying out his assignment in a timely manner. This just made it all that much easier for the Americans to take control of the island when they landed on February 28, 1945. Within a short period of time, all but four of the Japanese soldiers had either died or surrendered. Onoda, having just been promoted to Lieutenant, ordered the men to take to the hills. The war ended shortly thereafter, but the four surviving soldiers would not know of this for quite some time. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

1949

September: The first of the four Japanese war holdouts on Lubang Island in the Philippines to give up was Private First Class Yuichi Akatsu. He got fed up with the whole thing and stormed off. The remaining men figured that there was no way that this weakling could survive on his own. Yet, unbeknownst to them, Akatsu managed to live six months on his own before surrendering to the Philippine Army. HIRU ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

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1950

The remaining three Japanese diehards on Lubang Island in the Philippines found a note left by Akatsu stating that he had been greeted by friendly troops. He even led a group of soldiers into the mountains in search of the remaining men. However, nothing was more important, to these people of this mentation, than loyalty. Hiroo Onoda and his men quickly concluded that Akatsu was now working with the enemy, and retreated to the other side of the mountain. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

1952

Japanese companies licensed the technology of the transistor from the USA.

The end of the occupation of the Japanese home islands by the US Army, as Japan returned to full independence (was this a clever hoax?).

Letters and photographs of family and friends were dropped all over Lubang Island in the Philippines from an airplane. The Japanese war holdouts there concluded that the enemy had finally outdone themselves with this clever trick — to the eyes of those trained in guerilla warfare, this had to be a clever hoax. HIRU ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

1953

June: Shimada, a member of the group of Japanese diehards from World War II on Lubang Island in the Philippines, was shot in the leg during an altercation with local fishermen. They both got away, so the search for them in the jungles would need to continue even longer. The other surviving uncaptured combatant, Hiroo Onoda, would be able to nurse the injured corporal back to health. LAST TO SURRENDER

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1954

May 7: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, the war came to an end for Corporal Shimada as he was shot dead by a search party sent in to find these Japanese holdouts. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

At 5:30PM, the 10,000 French soldiers remaining alive at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. By that point, an estimated 8,000 Viet Minh and 1,500 French had perished. These French prisoners would be marched for up to 60 days to camps some 500 hundred miles away. Nearly half would perish during this march, or during their captivity. France would proceed to withdraw completely from Vietnam, ending a bitter eight year struggle against the Viet Minh in which 400,000 soldiers and civilians from all sides would have perished.

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May 17: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, more leaflets were dropped. A loudspeaker blurted out “Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended.” Clearly, to the Japanese war holdouts, this was another trick by the Americans. They were sure that the war was still on and they intended to get even with the enemy for Shimada’s death. Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka were positive that the Japanese would be landing on the island any day and that control would be taken back from the Americans. One day, Onoda’s own brother stood by at the microphone and pleaded for them to give up. Onoda could not see the speaker’s face from his great distance and concluded that the Americans had gone to a really great length to trick him this time. They believed that the Americans had found a man that was built and sounded just like his brother, but was really an impostor! LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

The United States Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that 6-year-old Linda Brown had been unfairly treated when the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas had obligated her to attend a substandard all-Black school. It further ordered that “separate but equal” had been nothing more than an operating fiction, and that therefore schools across the country must be desegregated.

At the Army-McCarthy hearings, Army Counselor John G. Adams refused to testify about a “highlevel” meeting wherein Adams had been advised to make a written record of his dealings with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Adams was refusing at the order of President Dwight David Eisenhower. The subcommittee decided to go into recess until May 24th.

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1965

The Japanese Government made another generous gift of 3,800 Yoshino trees to another First Lady devoted to the beautification of Washington DC, Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. American-grown this time, many of these were planted on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Lady Bird Johnson and Mrs. Ryuji Takeuchi, wife of Japan’s Ambassador, reenacted the planting ceremony of 1912.

Late in the year, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka “requisitioned” a transistor radio from a local and listened to reports from Peking. Oddly, with their minds still trapped in 1945 war time, they did not believe anything that they heard on the radio regarding military or foreign relations. Yet they followed the horse races, and understood that Japan had risen to be a great industrial power. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

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1972

October 19: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, each autumn, to continue their World War II military assignment, Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka would attempt to torch the sheaves of rice collected by farmers in the fields. This time the two Japanese soldier diehards were intercepted on this errand by local police, who managed to kill Kozuka. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

1974

February 20: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, war holdout Hiroo Onoda encountered a young Japanese university dropout named Suzuki living alone in a tent. Suzuki had left Japan to travel the world and told his friends that he was “going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.” Onoda approached cautiously and the two soon struck up a conversation that lasted many hours. The two became friends, but Onoda said that he was waiting for orders from one of his commanders. Suzuki left, promising to return. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

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March 9: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, war holdout Hiroo Onoda went to an agreed-upon place and found a note that had been left by Suzuki. Along with the note, Suzuki had enclosed two photos that they had taken together the first time that they met along with copies of two army orders. The next day, Onoda decided to take a chance and made a two-day journey to meet up with Suzuki. His long hike paid off handsomely. Suzuki had brought along Onoda’s one-time commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who ordered Onoda to surrender his sword. World War II was finally over.

Onoda would return to Japan and receive a hero’s welcome. He would be a media sensation and would be hounded by a curious public everywhere he went. After publishing his memoirs, he would use his newly found fortune to raise cattle in . He would then marry a Japanese woman and move back to Japan, to run a nature camp for children. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: May 26, 2013

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HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

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