Although the following book review focuses on the subject’s experiences as a post-war hold out, there is a lot more about Japan’s deficiencies and especially on Guam, as well as aspects of Japanese post-war character and attitudes.
Japan’s simple soldier of misfortune
Private Yokoi’s War and Life on Guam by Omi Hatashin
Reviewed by David WilsonImagine being driven into hiding and feeling on edge for 28 years. That dreadful destiny befell poor Shoichi Yokoi, the Japanese soldier and latter-day celebrity.
Conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941, Yokoi was eventually transferred to Guam. When American forces reconquered the western Pacific island in the 1944 Battle of Guam, Private Yokoi went on the run, dodging pursuers real and imagined.
Do not commit the easily made mistake of muddling this famous fugitive who modestly deemed himself “good at hide-and-seek” with two other high-profile imperial diehards who slightly outlasted him. One, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, led a guerrilla task force on the Philippine island of Lubang near Manila, and was repatriated in March 1974. The other, Private Teruo Nakamura, from the Ami tribe of Taiwan, was found growing crops alone on the Indonesian island of Morotai in December of the same year.
Onoda refused to give up until he received the order from his commanding officer. Because Onoda perfectly jibed with the stereotype of the fervent no-surrender patriot, on his return to his home country he was thoroughly well received. In contrast, Nakamura and Yokoi faced accusations of cowardice. Yokoi even received a razor with a note, which charmingly said: “You are the shame of the Imperial Army. Die.”
This book sets the record straight about the military minnow notable not for shamefulness but “great intelligence, extreme resilience and formidable self-composition”, the introduction says. The first 17 chapters, which stretch from his early life to the end of his paranoid jungle vigil, represent the full English translation of his autobiography originally printed by Japanese publisher Bungei Shunju in 1974. The introduction and three sections entitled “Afterwards”, which report how he adjusted to late 20th-century Japan, owe their existence to Omi Hatashin, Yokoi’s nephew by marriage turned piecemeal biographer.
The comprehensive portrait of one of 20th-century Japan’s most remarkable figures opens with disarming, fairytale simplicity. “I was born on 31 March 1915 to a tailor named Yamada in a village which was later annexed to Nagoya City in central Japan,” Yokoi writes, then reveals that his parents divorced when he was three months old. He evolved into a lonely, introspective boy who would later paint his childhood as hard.
Following his real father’s trade, he trained to be a tailor and stoically accepted having his career interrupted by the draft. His first army stint, which only lasted a year at the start of the war when Japan was on the rise, unfolded uneventfully at a Hong Kong provisions depot. His second, which began in 1941, took him to the 29th Transport Regiment in Liaoyang, Mukden province, “Manchuria”. There, he served on guard duty as a “private superior”, and later as a lance corporal.
Yokoi divulges little about this period. Apparently little happened. Clearly, he had little idea about the havoc that the Imperial Army was wreaking on the mainland and beyond. He would soon find out just what chaos his side could foment.
In 1944 at 26, redrafted, Yokoi wound up aboard the redoubtable Akimaru - one of the most luxurious semi-cargo cruisers in Japan then - on a starvation ration mystery voyage across the Pacific. Narrowly surviving a torpedo attack, the Akimaru limped to Guam, which struck Yokoi as “fantastically beautiful”. But early one “disgracefully fine and clear” morning, the American forces unleashed hell, bombing paradise ferociously and ending the Japanese three-year occupation with brutal efficiency. Yokoi slipped into the jungle.
Bedeviled by diarrhea but determined to continue, Yokoi hunted mostly at night, wearing clothes woven from native plants, hiding in a cave. If he fell into the hands of the islanders, he might suffer reprisals, he feared - probably because of the cruelty that his side inflicted during their occupation. Not that Yokoi, who comes across as a good if brainwashed soldier prone to beating aberrant subordinates, talks about that.
Instead, Yokoi focuses on how he ingeniously carved out his survival while his comrades wandered off, were shot or succumbed to sickness - incidents described in heartbreakingly understated asides. Venturing ever deeper into the jungle, he racked up decades and refused to believe microphone broadcasts that the war had ended. In his mind, they were a trap.
In January 1972, however, Yokoi was finally found by two fishermen out checking their shrimp traps. The fishermen managed to surprise, subdue and extract the scrawny, prematurely aged Robinson Crusoe from the jungle after a brief tussle that inflicted minor bruising.
Fame and bewilderment followed. “Sortie after sortie of press squadrons were flown from Japan to Guam for the sole purpose of interviewing me,” Yokoi writes. “I found myself suddenly ambushed by battalions of journalists for the first time and a series of questions was fired at me like bursts of machine-gun bullets.”
Following a media tour of Japan, Yokoi married and settled down to a quiet life of pottery and organic gardening in rural Aichi Prefecture - at least after a fashion. Because he had captured popular imagination, despite the cowardice accusations he remained in demand and blossomed into a TV personality.
In 1991, Yokoi received an audience with Emperor Akihito. The greatest honor of Yokoi’s blighted life, the audience moved him so much that he could hardly speak beyond saying that he had survived. Six years later, the old soldier would die of a heart attack at 82.
Reminiscent of the true-life air crash survival thriller Alive, the core of this book is Yokoi’s jungle phase, which makes riveting reading. Just look at his account of how he tackled cockroaches during a later underground stint.
“At night, about 150 cockroaches emerged, flew inside the hole and mated,” he writes. “I had no pesticide. I had no alternative but to crush them by hand one by one. But there were simply too many in the hole to get rid of in this way. An idea of keeping toads inside the hole came to my mind some time later. Toads seemed to like eating cockroaches. When I caught a cockroach and showed it to a toad, it eventually approached my hand and ate the cockroach. I was unable to chat with toads, but toads were my only allies and friends.”
This passage underscores Yokoi’s confession that he metamorphosed into “a half-wild animal”. Forever foraging, the future advocate of austere living had little time to daydream about women or stew in self-pity.
Some of the boldest observations the survivor makes illuminate the truth about Japanese might. Despite conquering Asia, the Japanese military machine needed work. Tell the line about supreme efficiency to the marines who invaded.
“I think that Japan’s war plans were utterly reckless or too ignorant of the power of their opponent,” Yokoi writes. He recounts how Japanese tanks hid behind foxtail grass, which grew tall on Guam but straight. Consequently, the tanks were perfectly visible from the sky - a simple fact that even small children could grasp, in Yokoi’s view.
US airmen duly rumbled the deception and unleashed a rain of incendiary bombs. As a result, the grass ignited. The fire spread, destroying all the tanks and plentiful stored ammunition.
As if the tank charade was not absurd enough, on the roadside the Japanese erected palm trees pointing towards the sky like anti-aircraft guns, and ringed them with straw dolls dressed like soldiers. The mock-up meant to suggest imposing defenses owed their inspiration to the tactics of an archaic 14th-century battle, pathetically enough.
“Our enemies did not bother about such childish disguise as the reality was clearly visible from the air. Is there any explanation for this stupidity other than that the Japanese officers were suffering from a retarded or arrested development of imagination?” Yokoi asks.
His biographer drives home just how shoddy the Japanese war effort was, describing the nation’s capabilities as “hopeless and miserable”. Kamikaze aircraft were manufactured by malnourished teenage girls too weak to tighten-up the rivets, resulting in many aircraft and, for that matter submarines, falling apart.
