The Case of Japan

■ First publishing in Annalisa Oboe, Claudia Gualtieri and Robert Bromley (eds), Working and Writing for Tomorrow: Essays in Honour of Itala Vivan. Nottingham, CCCP, 2008 13 Is War an Inevitable Part of History? The Case of Japan a ne day in 1972 Sho¯ ichi Yokoi, a corporal from the Japanese Imperial Army who Ohad somehow become separated from his unit at the time of Japan’s surrender in August 1945, took a short cut across a fi eld of reeds on the island of Guam in the Mariana Islands of the Western Pacifi c. In doing so, he departed from his usual habit of walking in the water along a river, so that his scent would not be picked up by dogs. He was returning from an expedition in search of food to his underground dwelling, concealed by deep jungle from the eyes of villagers, the lights of whose houses he could see from near where he lived. For nearly 28 years he had escaped detection, and after two surviving colleagues died in 1964 he apparently had no contact with any other human being. But his tiny lapse of security in walking straight across the reed fi eld brought to an end his life as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. He was spotted by hunters, who apprehended him and brought him to the local authorities. This led to him being repatriated to Japan, where the discovery of this ‘living fossil’ from the Asia-Pacifi c War made him an instant media sensation. Schoolchildren throughout the country were fascinated by his strategies for survival. Yokoi, who had been a tailor in civilian life before the war, had fashioned himself a loom, on which he had woven cloth from local tree fi bres and made clothes from it. He had avoided starvation by foraging and hunting for food in Guam’s sub-tropical jungle and rivers. Why had he shunned all human contact and lived this lonely subsistence life for so long? Well, it appears that he genuinely did not believe that Japan had surrendered in 1945. But then, when he realised that there was no more fi ghting on the island, but unconvinced that the war was over, he was afraid that if he gave himself up and was sent back to Japan, he would be court martialled for cowardice. He also calculated, from his knowledge of Japanese history since the nineteenth century, that since Japan had been involved in wars at intervals of around ten years, in due course Japanese forces would be back on Guam and he could join them. But ten 146 IS WAR AN INEVITABLE PART OF HISTORY? THE CASE OF JAPAN years came, and then another ten, and he was nearing the end of his third decade on the island with no sign of Japanese forces returning, when he was discovered. Ten months after his return to Japan, Yokoi married and settled down to a happy married life, making pottery, practising calligraphy and tending his garden. He even stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1974. He wrote his autobiography, some of which he dictated to his wife. And 25 years after his remarkably happy return to normal society, he died in 1997.1 In 1974 another straggler from the Japanese Imperial Army was discovered on Lubang Island in the Philippines. His name was Hiroo Onoda, and unlike Yokoi he came from an elite intelligence unit. By all accounts he was imbued with a fanatical dedication to the Emperor, well beyond the loyalty also felt by the more pragmatic and ‘normal’ Yokoi. He too, had outlived a number of colleagues who had been with him in the earlier years after the war. Indeed, his group had made themselves a considerable nuisance to local residents, engaging in occasional raids on their settlements at night. In 1972 his last remaining colleague was killed in a shoot-out with Philippine police. Then in 1974 a young explorer and adventurer named Norio Suzuki went looking for him on Lubang and eventually made contact. Onoda told Suzuki he would only give himself up if he received an order to do so from his commanding offi cer. The commanding offi cer, now a businessman dealing in books, came to Lubang and gave him, orally, the order to surrender. Onoda returned to Japan, provided a second media sensation that largely eclipsed that surrounding Yokoi, because Onoda was seen to exemplify the kind of extreme self-denying fanat- icism cultivated under the wartime Emperor System – something that was hard to comprehend for the younger generation of Japanese. Onoda stayed some while in Japan, but found the soft life of a nation that had discovered material prosperity not to his taste, and after an interval left to take up farming in Brazil.2 WAR AS NORMALITY, PEACE AS NORMALITY Yokoi and Onoda were admittedly extreme examples of individuals whose minds had internalised war, and a particular ideology of war, as a normal state of affairs. Their return to Japan, long after the war had fi nished, was a sensation in part because most Japanese servicemen had quickly returned to an ordinary civilian life after the war’s end, despite their indoctrination in the self-sacrifi cing and ruthless ideals of the Emperor System during the war itself. To discover men who had held out for so many years in primitive conditions, not admitting that the war was indeed long over, or that they could substitute wartime normality for peacetime normality, was something that ordinary people in Japan found diffi cult to comprehend, though amazement was mixed with awe. But even between Yokoi and Onoda, a major difference became apparent: Yokoi quickly and happily fi tted back into peacetime normality, whereas the steely Onoda needed the quasi-wartime challenges provided by making a living from the land in faraway Brazil. There are many examples in world history where war seems to have no end – where war has become the normal state of affairs. Europe experienced the Hundred Years War. In parts of Africa, such as areas in the eastern Congo, war seems to have become endemic. In Japan before the Tokugawa settlement was imposed over the whole country in the early seventeenth century, wars between different warlords 147.

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