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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

Invasion fleet landing Allied troops on Morotai Island. Wikimedia

5. Japan’s Longest Holdout Was Teruo Nakamura

“The last of the last” Japanese holdouts was Teruo Nakamura, who outlasted the more famous Hiroo Onoda by a few months. Born in 1919 into an aboriginal tribe in Formosa, today’s Taiwan, which was a Japanese possession at the time, Nakamura was conscripted into a colonial unit, and posted to Morotai Island in today’s Indonesia, in 1944. American and Australian forces invaded the island soon after his arrival, and captured it, while inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese defenders. Nakamura was among the few Japanese survivors, and he fled into the jungle.

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.