Teruo Nakamura
Teruo Nakamura was born in the then Japanese possession of Formosa – today’s Taiwan – in an aboriginal tribe in 1919. He was “the last of the last” of the Japanese holdouts, outlasting the more famous Hiroo Onoda by a few months before he was caught.
Nakamura was conscripted into a colonial unit in 1943, and posted to Morotai Island in the Dutch East Indies – present day Indonesia – in 1944. Soon after his arrival in Morotai, American and Australian forces invaded that island, successfully seized their objectives, and broke organized resistance while inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese defenders. The survivors fled into the jungle, where they suffered even more attrition from starvation and disease.
At war’s end, Nakamura was not among the Japanese survivors who surrendered to the Allies in Morotai, so he was presumed dead and officially declared so in 1945.
However, Nakamura’s unit had been ordered to disperse into the jungle and conduct guerrilla warfare. By the time Japan surrendered, Nakamura and his remaining comrades were deep in the island’s jungle, cut off from communications with Japanese authorities, and thus had no means of receiving official notice of war’s end. As with holdouts elsewhere, they dismissed leaflets airdropped over the jungle, advising of war’s end, as enemy propaganda.
Nakamura stayed with his steadily dwindling group until 1956, when he set off on his own and built himself a hut inside a small field that he hacked out of the rainforest, and in which he grew tubers and bananas to supplement his diet. As a result of his aboriginal tribal upbringing, he was particularly self-sufficient and capable of surviving in the wilds. He remained 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 Nakamura on December 28, 1974, thus bringing the longest known Japanese holdout to an end.
Unfortunately for Nakamura, Japan did not reciprocate the loyalty he had amply exhibited with his nearly three decades long holdout in obedience to the last orders he had received from the Japanese authorities. In contrast to Hiroo Onoda whose holdout had ended a few months earlier, and who was lionized and celebrated as a paragon of conscientious devotion to duty, Nakamura garnered relatively little attention in Japan.
It did not help that 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.
Moreover, 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 – equivalent to U$1186 in 2017 – for his three decades long holdout in service to Japan. Teuro Nakamura returned to Taiwan, where he died of lung cancer five years later, in 1979.