Remembering the war in New Guinea
"Tarzans" and "living spirits of the war dead": Japanese stragglers in New Guinea (Symposium paper)
Panel name: Fighting to the end
This page was contributed by Dr Beatrice Trefalt (University of Newcastle, Newcastle)
For a small group of Japanese soldiers on New Guinea, the war did not end in August 1945, and their return home, five and ten years respectively after the war had ended, is the topic of this paper. This is part of a larger project which considers the reception, in the thirty years after the defeat, of “lost soldiers” of the Imperial Army, and which traces the development of memories of the war, and the place of the Second World War soldier in postwar society. There are numerous examples of Japanese soldiers who didn’t know, or couldn’t believe, that the war was over, and who remained in hiding on the peripheries of battlefields for years after the end of the war. Such stragglers have often been, in the popular mind, sensational appendices to the conflict, and references to Japanese “hold-outs” pepper both fiction and film. They are often perceived as symbols of the fanaticism of soldiers of the Imperial Army, a fanaticism made particularly evident in these images by the fact that the last stragglers were not repatriated until the mid-1970s. In Japan, the image of the fanatical “hold-out” has had little relevance. The stragglers’ ambiguous identities – as mostly victims, but sometimes also as tragic heroes – have demanded complex negotiation, as has the sudden return, in a life increasingly removed from the defeat, of “that” war with the news of the discovery and repatriation of yet another such “misled” soldier. The stragglers, as such, provide much more than a comment on the mind-frame of Japanese Army soldiers: their return also illuminates developments in the processes of remembrance in Japan, and the place of a foreign battlefield, such as New Guinea, in these processes.
This paper presents two such groups of stragglers, repatriated from New Guinea in 1950 and 1955 respectively. It shows that, although in a sense these were soldiers who “fought to the end”, they were not praised as such at the time of their return – five and ten years after the defeat. Rather than being seen as patriots who refused to surrender when the rest of Japan did, these stragglers were, in 1950, distanced from the population, and portrayed as exotic beings, as jungle men. Five years later, however, they were portrayed as soldiers, but not just, plainly, as living heroes but as a moving image of the “fallen soldier”, in other words, as dead soldiers accidentally and unexpectedly alive – hence the admittedly cryptic title of this paper.
The difference in the reception of these stragglers within a relatively short period of five years cannot be explained by a significant distinction between the two groups. They became “stragglers” under similar circumstances, their motivation in hiding was the same, they survived for comparable reasons and they were found in the same way. Their first contact with Japan was through the Bureau of Repatriate Welfare (Hikiage Engokyoku) and it is to the Bureau that they first told their story. The Bureau has existed under a variety of names since taking over from the immediate postwar Demobilisation Ministries (and is now part of the Ministry of Health and Welfare), and it has been responsible for the repatriation of overseas Japanese, both civilian and military, since the war, as well as performing the functions of a War Graves Commission, collecting and repatriating the remains of soldiers in former battlefields (the so-called “bone-collecting missions”) and erecting memorials in those areas. Its records on the stragglers are, however, not particularly detailed, and there is little information on the actual circumstances of these particular stragglers. [1] The information presented here is, then, the same information that was presented to the Japanese population in the print media at the time of these stragglers’ return.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun, the group that was repatriated in 1950 consisted of the very last survivors of a division decimated in the battle at Finschhafen in September and October 1943, and in retreat towards Madang. Fatigue, hunger, attacks by New Guineans and disease took many others during the five months they wandered in the jungle. The eight soldiers that were left after that period benefited from the sympathetic support of the chief of an isolated village some one hundred kilometres inland from Madang. There they stayed until police was made aware of their existence in 1949. They were taken to Manus Island first, then to Brisbane, and on home. A photo accompanying the article describing their arrival in February 1950 shows a smiling group, wearing uniforms provided by the Red Cross. [2]
The four stragglers apprehended at the end of 1954 were the last remnants of a battalion ordered on a forced march from Wewak to Hollandia on 10 April 1944. Of the 89 men who set out, nearly thirty drowned while attempting to cross a river swollen by storm. Many more died of hunger and disease. They were still far from Hollandia, in Vanimo, when they found out that the Allies had taken Hollandia. By then, their number had dwindled to 21. In mid-June they decided to hide in the jungle and wait for the Japanese forces to recapture terrain. Initially, they survived on rations stolen from the stores of their enemy, but they were discovered and attacked. Five of them escaped deeper into the jungle and unwittingly crossed the border into Dutch New Guinea. They attempted to become self-sufficient and cleared some land. Their initial efforts met with limited success and they caught and ate wild pigs, but also lizards, snakes and caterpillars, all the while suffering from a lack of salt. In 1947, one member of the group died of malaria.
It was in 1951 that a New Guinean from a nearby village discovered them while he was out hunting. After overcoming initial diffidence on both sides, the stragglers and the villagers kept in regular contact from then on. Although the villagers told the stragglers that the United States and Japan were “friends” and that the emperor was alive, the stragglers did not grasp that the war was over. Three years later, in 1954, the villagers brought along on one of their visits a detachment of police, who took them into custody. It was only then that they learnt that the war was over, some ten years after they set off on their forced march. [3]
As far as the members of both groups were concerned, they were not deserters. They trusted that their command must know that they were still in the field, and so considered that the best thing to do would be to wait until the Japanese army recaptured the area. To surrender to enemy troops was not officially an option for soldiers of the Imperial Army. In any case, they were convinced that their captors would kill them if they did. In the mind of the New Guinea stragglers, the war was still going on and the best way to serve, and ultimately to survive and go home was to stay alive until the area was recaptured. In this sense, the stragglers on New Guinea were different from those who emerged from Guam, for example, who felt that they should have died with their comrades in the last-ditch battles of July 1944. The well-known straggler Yokoi Shôichi, who was found in Guam in 1972, considered himself a deserter, and when found, told postwar Japan that he was ashamed to come home when so many of his comrades had died in the last battle against the Allies. [4]
What makes a consideration of the stragglers particularly interesting, as outlined in the introduction to this paper, is the way in which the different responses to their return in the public forum, as expressed in the print media, can offer some insight into how these “lost soldiers”, these “living war dead” or these “soldiers who fought to the end” were considered or discussed by Japan five and ten years after the war had ended. The words “living war dead” are particularly suitable because, despite the trust these stragglers had that their army would come and find them, they were officially considered to have died in battle and their families had been notified of that fact.
The contrast between the reception of the first and the second group is striking, even if only five years separated their return. The 1950 New Guinea stragglers, who were, in fact, the first group of returnees to be considered “different” from other delayed repatriates (say, from China or the USSR), and so marked, in a sense, the earliest perception of the straggler as a different phenomenon – were made into exotic creatures, as were the numerous other stragglers who returned to Japan in the months before and immediately after the end of the Occupation. The Mainichi Shimbun, for example, announced their return from New Guinea with the following headline: “Tarzan lifestyle in the jungle: five years on mice and potatoes”, and proceeded to list in great detail, and with some poetic license perhaps, the more unusual aspects of the stragglers diet, including grubs and snakes, as well as the fact that they had worn nothing but loincloths for the last five years. The war was mentioned in passing, but the stragglers’ experience, at that time, was described neither as tragic nor as heroic, merely as curious. [5] They were not soldiers of the Imperial Army, but “ape-men”, primitive beings reminiscent more of the central figure of a particularly successful series of Hollywood films than of the many veterans and fallen soldiers that still figured prominently both in the daily life and in the consciousness of the Japanese population.
These early attitudes to stragglers were influenced both by the presence and censorship of the Occupation forces and by remnants of the harsh and negative attitudes towards returned soldiers that were characteristic of the early years of the Occupation. These negative attitudes were fostered partly by Occupation propaganda on, for example, the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in the Philippines, but also by the fact that it was often demobilised soldiers who were looting army stores or turning to criminal pursuits in the years immediately following the defeat.[6] The emphasis on the exotic, in the description of the stragglers in the early fifties, rather than on the soldierly, was ultimately a way to keep the soldier at arm’s length – in other words, to integrate the stragglers into the population not as soldiers, but as something more acceptable, even if that was something exotic.
The stragglers who returned from New Guinea in 1955 were portrayed quite differently. It is true that many of the exotic themes that greeted their counterparts in 1950 were there, such as lengthy descriptions of their diet, of their improvised shaving tackle and their minimal clothing. One article even included what might have been a file photo of a New Guinean in elaborate traditional attire (giving a slight “travelogue” flair to the article).[7]. But these themes were now supplemented with descriptions of the stragglers as soldiers. In other words, there was an new emphasis on the stragglers’ military bearing, on the fact that they trained with their rifles, that they strictly maintained their hierarchy, that a key aspect of their survival was their comradeship and the benevolence of their superior officer. It also praised the stragglers’ support of their dying comrade (the one who died of malaria in 1947) with the promise that the Japanese Army was on its way back and that soon they could go and fight elsewhere. In the headlines of the articles announcing their return, the stragglers were referred to as “living spirits of the war dead”.
The contrast, then, in the reception of the 1950 New Guinea stragglers as exclusively exotic, as Tarzans, with the reception of the 1955 stragglers, much more respectfully, as “living spirits of the war dead”, indicates that a shift had taken place in attitudes to the war, and to the place of the soldier in postwar Japanese society. This is further indicated by a new area of interest on the part of the media in 1955 in how the stragglers adapted to their old home, an area which had been left unexplored at the time of the return of the 1950 stragglers. The four stragglers were, in fact, so busy with public duties from the moment they got home that they were hospitalised only, one feels, as an afterthought, after three of them collapsed from strain. They were busy because they were giving public lectures about their life in the jungle, helping the Bureau of Repatriate Welfare collect data on the deaths of their comrades and personally delivering to grieving families mementos of their dead. In one particular article, we are told that one of these stragglers had received, in the month since he had returned, almost fifty letters, either congratulating him for making it home or asking him about information on the possible whereabouts of missing – presumed dead – husbands and sons in New Guinea. Another of the stragglers received similar missives, including several from single young women who saw him as a prospective husband – hardly a sign of a negative public image. [8]
The reception of the stragglers in 1955, then, was a great deal more positive than that of their 1950 counterparts. Indeed those who returned in 1955 did so in an atmosphere of relative comfort with the presence of the war in the public sphere, as given evidence by the unprecedented boom reached in the publication of memoirs of the war in that year and the one that followed. [9] This explosion in the publication of personal memoirs of the war both fostered this atmosphere of comfort, but also profited by it, and the negotiation of the integration of the soldier’s experience into public consciousness also took place in other arenas. For example, the burst of activity on the part of the Association of Bereaved Families regarding the return of the Yasukuni Shrine to the aegis of the state also attests to the much more positive image of the soldier at that time, as do the letters-to-the-editor of major daily newspapers that proposed that the new memorial at Chidorigafuchi be dedicated not to “unknown victims” of the war, but to “martyrs of the nation”. [10] This is why the 1955 stragglers were no longer just Tarzans: in the public forum, they had become reminders of the spirit of self-sacrifice, of patriotism and of comradeship, with which the war was remembered at that time. The war had, perhaps, a tinge of the “good old days”. Even so, however, there is little evidence that the 1955 stragglers were seen as particularly heroic for their refusal to surrender, although one commentary did compare them favourably with the cowardly postwar behaviour of wartime leaders, particularly Tôjô Hideki’s botched suicide attempt. [11]
This was a short-lived atmosphere, however. By the time two soldiers were found in Guam in 1960, another five years later, they were seen as soldiers, certainly, but there was a new emphasis on their basic humanity: what made them soldiers also made them into victims. By the time the last stragglers returned in the 1970s, the image of the soldier as victim – of both the wartime, and of a spiritless, materialist, shallow, ungrateful and, most of all, forgetful postwar nation, was the only publicly acceptable version of the soldier’s identity. In that sense, the stragglers who returned from New Guinea in 1955 did so in a particular atmosphere of remembrance that was sandwiched between the immediate postwar period and the coming of age of a generation who embraced the pacifist ideals of the left wing and of intellectuals such as Oe Kenzaburo.
As a final point on the return of stragglers from New Guinea, it is worthwhile mentioning that, as was the case with stragglers from all other areas in the Pacific, their return made Japan look inward rather than outward. This nation-centricity of remembrance is not particularly characteristic of Japan alone, even though it has been one of the constant criticisms of Japan’s war remembrance – or war amnesia. There was little discussion on the impact of stragglers on the place where they were hiding, even when that impact had been very real and very tragic, as was the case with the stragglers on the island of Lubang in the Philippines (the most famous of which was Onoda Hirô, who surrendered in 1974), where they were suspected of having committed close to thirty murders and of being responsible for various counts of theft and arson. The return of the stragglers from New Guinea to Japan in the early- and mid-1950s, unfortunately, says little about the place of that battlefield in the memories of Japan, apart from exposing it as one of the battlefields that provided the most incomprehensible loss. The many letters that reached the 1955 stragglers, begging for information on the death of lost ones, certainly provide evidence for that point.
In conclusion, the precarious position of the Japanese Army in New Guinea, particularly after it was forced into retreat and ran out of supplies, and its famous dogma of “no surrender”, probably produced many more stragglers than the two groups presented here. It is not unlikely that some survived for a length of time, but perished without ever being found. Rumours of the existence of stragglers in remote villages of New Guinea were not unusual into the 1970s. [12] In some areas of the south-west Pacific region, the mythical “bogeyman” that punishes unruly children has taken the shape of a Japanese straggler. Whether these stragglers were ever there is likely to remain a mystery. Had any come out much later than the 1950s, they would have been depicted as victims of an irrational and cruel wartime government, as messengers warning Japan of the tragedy of war and as reminders of the need to teach the children of the postwar generation the truth about the past, as Yokoi Shôichi in 1972, and Onoda Hirô and Nakamura Teruo in 1974 were. At the time the New Guinea stragglers came home, however, they could only be construed as Tarzans, or living “spirits of the war dead”.
Notes
1. See for example the Bureau”s latest offering: Kôseisho Engokyoku, Engo Go-jû nen,,Tokyo, Gyôsei, 1997.
2. Mainichi Shimbun, 14 February 1950.
3. See for example: Shûkan Asahi, 3 April 1955, pp. 80-81.
4. See for example Asahi Shimbunsha, 28 Years in the Jungle: Sergeant Yokoi Comes Home From World War II, San Francisco, Japan Publications, 1972.
5. Mainichi Shimbun, 14 February 1950.
6. See for example John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York, W.W. Norton and Co, 1999, p. 59.
7. Shûkan Asahi, 3 April 1955, p. 80.
8. Mainichi Shimbun, Evening Edition, 28 April 1955.
9. Takahashi Saburô, "Senkimono" o Yomu, Kyoto, Akademia Shuppankai, 1988.
10. Mainichi Shimbun, 7 December 1956.
11. Shûkan Sankei, 16 December 1956, p. 4.
12. I am grateful to several participants at the conference who shared their experience of such rumours.