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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

Japanese soldiers cheering to celebrate a victory. Pinterest

35. Some Japanese Convinced Themselves That the Surrender Was Fake News

Some Japanese took a different route, neither killing themselves in shame nor obeying orders to put down their weapons and turn themselves in to Allied forces as prisoners of war. Instead, they convinced themselves that the surrender was “fake news”. They had been so strongly indoctrinated with bushido-based notions of fighting unto death and avoiding the ignominy and dishonor of surrender, that it was inconceivable that their leaders could have accepted the ignominy and dishonor of surrender. It thus followed that the orders to surrender could not have come from their government, but were an enemy ruse.

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.