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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

Surrender of Anatahan castaways. WW2 Wrecks

13. The Anatahan Castaways Surrendered in 1951

When the authorities learned from Kazuko Higa that the castaways did not believe that the war was over, they contacted their families, who wrote letters informing them that the war had ended years earlier. The castaways surrendered in 1951, and returned to Japan, where their story became a sensation. Kazuko Higa was nicknamed “The Queen Bee of Anatahan” by the Japanese press and found temporary fame selling her story to newspapers and recounting it to packed theaters. After the public lost interest, however, she fell into prostitution and abject poverty. She died at age 51 while working as a garbage collector.

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.