RT
@VoicesofWW2: In March 1974, the world watched Hiroo Onoda walk out of the jungle in the Philippines, 29 years after World War Two ended. He was treated like a hero. Books. Interviews. A national welcome in Japan.
Everybody called him the last Japanese soldier.
He wasn't.
Nine months later, on a remote Indonesian island, soldiers found another man still living in the jungle, still fighting a war that had ended in 1945.
His name was Teruo Nakamura. And almost nobody remembers him.
Nakamura wasn't even Japanese in the way most people assume. He was born in Taiwan in 1919, when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. He belonged to the Amis, one of Taiwan's indigenous peoples. His Amis name was Attun Palalin.
In 1943 he joined a Japanese army volunteer unit made up of Taiwanese indigenous men and was sent to the island of Morotai in what is now Indonesia.
In September 1944, American and Australian forces landed on Morotai. The Japanese defenders were scattered into the jungle. Nakamura was one of them.
Back home, he was declared dead.
He wasn't.
For years he lived in the jungle with other stragglers. Eventually he went off on his own. He built a small hut. He cleared a patch of land and grew his own food. He hid from anyone he saw.
The war ended. He didn't know, or didn't believe it.
Decades passed. The 1950s. The 1960s. Men walked on the moon. Nakamura was still in the jungle on Morotai, keeping his rifle in working order.
In 1974, a pilot flying over the island spotted his hut. That December, Indonesian soldiers moved in and found him. He was 55. He had been alone in the jungle for roughly 30 years.
Then things got strange.
When Onoda came home, Japan welcomed him like a legend. Nakamura was a different story. Taiwan was no longer Japanese. Nakamura was now technically a citizen of a country he had never lived in as an adult. It no longer used the language he had grown up being taught in school.
He wasn't sent to Japan. He was sent home to Taiwan.
The Japanese government initially gave him only a tiny payment for decades of service. After the public found out, people were outraged and donations poured in.
His homecoming was quiet. His wife, believing he was dead, had remarried years earlier. The village he came back to barely resembled the one he left.
He lived just a few more years. He died in 1979.
Onoda became one of the most famous soldiers of the 20th century.
Nakamura held out longer, came home to a country that had changed its name, its flag, and its language, and was largely forgotten.
The real last soldier of Imperial Japan was a Taiwanese indigenous man that history mostly overlooked.
