A Japanese WWII Sergeant Kept Fighting in Guam for 28 Years After the War Ended
Shoichi Yokoi (1915 – 1997) was a sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, who got posted to Guam in 1943. The following year, the island was invaded by US forces, and after it was captured, Yokoi went into hiding with nine other Japanese soldiers. They refused to surrender at war’s end. The group gradually dwindled over the years, until Yokoi’s last two remaining companions were drowned in a flood in 1964, and he was left as the last Japanese WWII holdout on Guam.
Most Japanese holdouts did not believe that the war was over, but Yokoi knew by 1952 that the war had ended with Japan’s surrender. He simply could not bring himself to swallow his pride and return home as a defeated soldier. He also convinced himself that Japan would rise again and attempt to retake Guam, in which case he would be ready and in place to assist with the reconquest. So Yokoi patiently awaited that day, surviving in the jungle, spending his days hiding in an elaborate hole in the ground, and emerging at night to hunt lizards and gather tubers and snails for sustenance.
He waited, and waited, and waited some more. By the time his holdout was over, he had waited for nearly three decades. It finally came to an end in January of 1972, when a pair of local men came across Yokoi in the jungle. They assumed he was a local villager and were ready to move on, but a paranoid Yokoi thought that they were about to attack him, so he attacked them first. However, after decades of rough living in a hole in the ground, Yokoi was not in the best of shape, and lost the fight. The two men beat him up and subdued him, then carried him out of the jungle and back to civilization.
When Yokoi’s astonishing story finally came out, he was asked how he had managed to hide for so long in such a small island, only two miles from a major American air base, Yokoi replied “I was really good at hide and seek“. He was famous by the time he arrived back in Japan. Despite 28 years of isolation in a Pacific jungle, his mind was still sharp, and he swiftly parleyed his celebrity into a successful media career, becoming a popular TV personality and an advocate for austere living. Shoichi Yokoi died of 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.