Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese soldier who, for 29 years, after the end of the Second World War refused to surrender and remained hidden in the jungle of a tiny island in the Philippines. When asked at a press conference what he’d been doing he simply said, “Carrying out my orders”. His commanding officer had told him in 1944, “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you.”
The survival skills he mastered and his horror at the skyscrapers and video games of the unrecognisable Japan he returned to from his island time-warp sparked a second career running a well-drilled children’s nature camp outside Tokyo.
Having set off to war as a 22-year-old he returned to civilisation