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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

23. Kinoshita Killed Himself After He Was Captured

Awaiting the day when Japanese forces would return to recapture the Philippines and rescue him, Kinoshita struggled to stay alive in the Luzon jungle, unaware that the war was over. He waited for 11 years, until 1955 when he was caught by Philippine police while raiding a villager’s sweet potato patch. He was too ashamed to return to Japan in defeat, so he begged his Filipino guards to kill him. They refused, but a month after his capture, a 33-year-old Noboru Kinoshita managed to commit suicide by hanging himself.

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.