Sixty years on, Japanese soldiers found on island

[Hawk]

Sixty years on, Japanese soldiers found on island


May 28, 2005

TOKYO: Two men claiming to be World War II Japanese soldiers have been found hiding on a Philippine island.


Japan is sending embassy officials to Mindanao to meet them.

"Embassy officials will check whether they were truly former soldiers" of the now defunct army, Japan foreign ministry spokesman Hatsuhisa Takashima said.


Japanese media said the two men had been living in guerilla-controlled mountains until late this month.

It is not known if they knew of Japan's surrender in August 1945 to Allied forces.


The two men contacted a Japanese national who was on the island collecting the remains of dead Japanese soldiers.


They said they wanted to return to Japan.


But Japan's Sankei Shimbun daily said the men were afraid of facing a court martial for deserting the front lines.


Japan was stunned in 1974 when former imperial army intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda was found in the jungle on the Philippine island of Lubang. He did not know of Japan's surrender 29 years earlier.


After being repatriated, Mr Onoda emigrated to Brazil.


Another former soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, was found on Guam in 1972. He returned home and died in 1997.

http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/st...toryid=3192211

Japanese soldiers 'hid' for 60 years
Peter Alford Tokyo correspondent
May 28, 2005
JAPANESE consular officials are trying to confirm two Imperial Japanese Army soldiers are alive and ready to go home after hiding in the southern Philippines for the past 60 years.

The officials were last night waiting in a hotel in General Santos City, in southern Mindanao province, for the pair, who failed to keep an appointment yesterday afternoon.

The former soldiers are thought to be Yoshio Yamakawa, 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85, both presumed dead at the end of the Pacific war in August 1945.

They apparently identified themselves to a Japanese man who was in Mindanao to recover the remains of war dead. He told officials the old men could speak Japanese, signed their names in kanji characters and had army documents and equipment that verified their stories.

Terashima Kawaguchi, who leads a group representing Japanese ex-servicemen from the Philippines theatre, believes Yamakawa and Nakauchi were among four lost soldiers he sought last year in a remote mountainous area between General Santos and Davao. Mr Kawaguchi heard about the men while visiting Mindanao in August but failed to make contact with them.


"They would have known the war was over but they were living with their local families and those families didn't want them to go back to Japan," Mr Kawaguchi said yesterday. "They were also worried about being punished by court martial."

Yamakawa and Nakauchi belonged to the 30th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was shipped to Mindanao in March 1945 and immediately plunged into savage battles with advancing US forces and Philippines guerillas.

By the end of April the division had been broken up into small bands. Of the 15,000 who had landed in March, an estimated 3000 survived until Japan's surrender in August.

A previous Japanese straggler, former intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda, was found in 1974 on the Philippines island of Lubang, where he stayed at his post refusing to accept Japan had surrendered.

Mr Onoda did not find life in Japan to his liking and in 1975 migrated to Brazil, where he still lives at the age of 83.

In 1972, Shoichi Yokoi was cornered in a remote area of Guam and handed over to the Americans. Yokoi had dodged the US troops since they invaded in 1944, originally with two companions but alone for the final eight years.

Yokoi told his captors: "I am ashamed to be alive." But he was welcomed back to Japan as a heroic figure and died in 1997.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...E31477,00.html

[HARDCORE]

A very interesting and enlightening piece!

VERITAS