Hiroo Onoda, the Imperial Army officer who refused to accept Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and spent 29 years living as a fugitive on a jungle island in the Philippines, has died in Tokyo at the age of 91.
Onoda, who died of heart failure after ten days in hospital, was the last but one of the so-called stragglers – Japanese soldiers whose fear or fanaticism led them to hold out for decades, dressed in ragged uniforms and armed with rusting weapons. Having gone to Lubang Island in 1944 at the age of 22, he emerged in 1974 only when his former commanding officer personally ordered him to surrender.
He was greeted as a hero on his return to Japan, published a successful