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40 Facts About the Japanese Who Refused to Surrender After WWII Had Ended

Khalid Elhassan January 3, 2019 25 min

Hiroo Onoda - Ishinosuke Uwano — Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who kept fighting for nearly three decades after WWII had ended. Observer

Japanese prisoners of war in Soviet custody. The Moscow Times

28. Ishinosuke Uwano in Sakhalin Island

Ishinosuke Uwano was drafted into the Japanese army, and posted to the then-Japanese southern half of Sakhalin Island in 1943 – the northern half belonged to the Soviet Union. When the Soviets invaded Sakhalin’s southern half in 1945, the Japanese put up a fierce resistance, before they were overwhelmed. Uwano held out, but was eventually captured and shipped to Soviet camps in Siberia. There, the Japanese POWs labored for years, until they were repatriated to Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Uwano was not among the repatriated.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.