17. “I Was Really Good at Hide and Seek“
In January 1972, two Guamanian men came across Shoichi Yokoi in the jungle. They took him for a local villager and were ready to move on, but a paranoid Yokoi assumed that they were about to attack him, so he attacked them first. In his emaciated state, after decades spent in a hole in the ground, sustained by a diet of lizards and snails, he was not in the best of shape. The duo beat him up and subdued him, then carried him out of the jungle and back to civilization, where his story finally came out.
Asked how he had managed to escape detection and capture 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“. Yokoi was famous by the time he arrived back in Japan. Despite 28 years of isolation in a Pacific jungle, his mind was still sharp. He swiftly parleyed his celebrity into a successful media career and became a popular TV personality and an advocate for an austere lifestyle. He succumbed to a heart attack in 1997 and was buried under a gravestone that had been commissioned by his mother in 1955 when he had been officially declared dead.
