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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

26. Uwano Became a Soviet Citizen

However, Uwano had eventually accepted Japan’s defeat, and surrendered to the Soviets. Between the Soviet Union’s paranoid penchant for excessive secrecy, exacerbated by Cold War tensions, as well as bureaucratic ineptness, neither the Japanese government nor Uwano’s family was notified. After his release, he settled in the USSR instead of returning to Japan. He got naturalized as a Soviet citizen, ended up living in the Ukrainian SSR, married, and had three children. In 2006, an aging Uwano asked friends to contact the Japanese government, and when it sent officials to interview him in Kiev, the story of his survival finally came out.

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.