While Disco Was Sweeping the World and the Godfather Part II Was Playing in Theaters, a Japanese Soldier Was Still Fighting WWII
1974 was a good year in film, that saw the release of iconic movies such as Blazing Saddles, The Longest Yard, and The Godfather Part II. It was also the year when Disco entered the mainstream and became the dominant music genre of the mid to late 1970s. While moviegoers were thrilled to Al Pacino’s captivating depiction of Michael Corleone, and partygoers were riding the white horse while dancing to Disco classics such as Karl Douglas’ Kung Fu Fighter, a WWII Japanese soldier was still holding out in the jungles of Indonesia.
Teruo Nakamura was born in the then Japanese possession of Formosa – today’s Taiwan – in an aboriginal tribe in 1919. He was conscripted into a colonial unit in 1943 and posted to Morotai Island in the Dutch East Indies – today’s Indonesia – in 1944. He got there just in time for an American-Australian invasion, which inflicted catastrophic losses upon the Japanese defenders. The survivors fled into the jungle, where most perished from starvation and disease.
At war’s end in 1945, Nakamura was among those presumed dead, and was officially declared so. However, his unit had been ordered to disperse and conduct guerrilla warfare. When Japan surrendered, Nakamura and his comrades were deep in the island’s jungle, cut off from contact, and thus received no official notice that the war was over. The Allied victors airdropped leaflets over the jungle, advising of war’s end, but Nakamura and his comrades dismissed them as fake news and enemy propaganda.
Nakamura’s group dwindled steadily as the years went by. In 1956, he set off on his own, constructed a hut in a small field that he hacked out of the rainforest, and grew tubers and bananas to supplement his diet. Because of his aboriginal tribal upbringing, he was particularly self-sufficient and adept at surviving in the wild. Nakamura stayed in the jungle, isolated and alone until he was spotted by a pilot in 1974. That led to a search mission by the Indonesian military, which eventually tracked down and arrested the holdout on December 28th, 1974.
Unfortunately for Nakamura, Japan did not reciprocate the loyalty he had exhibited by holding out for nearly three decades in obedience to his last orders from Japanese authorities. In contrast to Hiroo Onoda, another holdout who had surrendered a few months earlier and became a national celebrity and nationalist hero, Nakamura attracted little attention in Japan. For one thing, Onoda was an ethnic Japanese citizen, while Nakamura had been a colonial soldier, from what by 1974 was the independent nation of Taiwan. Although he expressed a wish to be repatriated to Japan, Nakamura had no legal right to go there, and so was sent to Taiwan instead.
Worse, as a member of a colonial unit rather than of the Japanese Army, Nakamura was not entitled to a pension and back pay under Japanese law. Whereas Hiroo Onoda had been awarded about U$160,000 by Japan, equivalent to about U$850,000 in 2017 dollars, Nakamura was awarded only U$227, or U$1186 in 2017 dollars, for his three decades-long holdout. He returned to Taiwan, where he died five years later of lung cancer, in 1979.