sorry, i was just wonderin, not to be a real pain in the BUTT.:mrgreen:
No problem at all.
It is extreme, but you have to remember that from a young age the Japanese people were brain-washed into thinking their Emperor was a God, and after a life-time of being taught that surrender was wrong, it would have been hard to think, ‘Oh well, we lost, better get on with my own life.’ I guess they thought in terms of a collective people and not as an individual. I don’t think our Western minds will ever be able to understand the minds of the Japanese of this time-frame…
Maybe they were just figured they were lucky that no offices were coming around…
One cultures brainwashing is another cultures, er culture. Once upon a time in the west, sounds like a movie, we had the code of chivalry, or even farther back, the 300 Spartans.
Its human nature to project our values onto other cultures and call it brainwashing I think.
Good points though.
The last Japanese soldier I remember surrendering happened in 1971. He and a few other remained hidden in the forrest of Guam island. One by one the others died and this individual gave up in hope of returning home some day. Many others had emerged from, or been found dead, in the jungles and forrests of the Phillipines, Burma, ect… Most of these were found or surrendered in the 1940s and a few in the 1950s. Only a handfull were documented as surviving into the 1960s. Occasionally timber cutters, hunters, or miners still find the remnants of those who held out for years hidden away.
i believe the history channel did a documentary on this case a few years back
It was front page news when he ‘came out’ back then. The story lasted a couple days in the papers and weeks in the periodicals.
In a reversal, when Guam was recaptured in 1944 at least one USN sailor rejoined US forces as the Japanese were eliminated. He was part of a section of communications technicians who choose not to surrender when the Japanese occupied Guam in December 1941. The others were either captured or died of malnutrition & disease.
the Japanese told their soldiers that americans would use the “surrender” trick, when the war was not actually over, so many thought the message of wars end was nothing but a trap. I know that Lt Hiroo Onoda was found in 1974 in the phillipines. as late as 2003 the japanese govt had sent people into the jungles to find “holdouts” as they are called, still out there stealing food, and sometimes attacking local police/troops.
Lieut. Onoda held out until I think it was 1974. There is even a book about him in English called NO SURRENDER-MY 30 Year-WAR.