Hiroo Onoda

Hiroo Onoda was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who continued to fight on Lubang Island in the Philippines for nearly three decades after the Second World War ended. He had been ordered to conduct guerrilla operations and not to surrender or take his own life.

Onoda rejected repeated attempts to convince him that the war was over until 1974, when his former commanding officer travelled to Lubang and formally relieved him of duty. His surrender became an international sensation and a striking example of the endurance of wartime obedience and isolation.

In John Man’s Ninja, the unification campaigns of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu reduced the independent military role of ninja communities, but their reputation continued to evolve in manuals, theatre, fiction and film. Man follows that reinvention into the modern age and closes with Hiroo Onoda, whose decades-long survival in the Philippines became a very different expression of secrecy, endurance and absolute commitment.