5. Japan’s Longest Holdout Was Teruo Nakamura
“The last of the last” Japanese holdouts was Teruo Nakamura, who outlasted the more famous Hiroo Onoda by a few months. Born in 1919 into an aboriginal tribe in Formosa, today’s Taiwan, which was a Japanese possession at the time, Nakamura was conscripted into a colonial unit, and posted to Morotai Island in today’s Indonesia, in 1944. American and Australian forces invaded the island soon after his arrival, and captured it, while inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese defenders. Nakamura was among the few Japanese survivors, and he fled into the jungle.