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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

Shoichi Yokoi at a police station after his capture. World War II Multimedia Database

20. Yokoi’s Capture

In January of 1972, two local men came across Yokoi in the jungle. They assumed he was a fellow local and were about to move on, when a paranoid Yokoi, assuming they were about to attack him, decided to attack them first. They beat him up and subdued him, then carried him out of the jungle and back to civilization, where his astonishing story finally came out. Asked how he had managed to hide for so long in such a small island, only two miles from a major American airbase, Yokoi replied “I was really good at hide and seek“.

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.