Published in Nikkei Asia 3/11/2021
It is Sunday night in a small market town in southwest France where the geese easily outnumber the human population. The cinema here has over 100 seats, but thanks to the pandemic only four are occupied. This tiny detachment of hard-core cinephiles seems totally appropriate for the film on view.
Directed and co-written by Arthur Harari, Onoda:10,000 Nights in the Jungle is a French film with dialogue in Japanese and a smattering of Tagalog.
It tells the true story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued fighting World War II until the mid-1970s. He laid down his weapons only when his long-retired commanding officer gave him a direct order to surrender. Initially with three comrades, then finally alone, Onoda had carried on patrolling the Philippine island of Lubang for nearly 30 years after the war ended.
Onoda in home-made camouflage gear. All photos courtesy of Le Pacte.
Onoda was no ordinary soldier. He had been trained at Futamata, an extension of the famous Nakano School for spies. There, he studied espionage, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, psychology and ethnology. Instead of automatically following military routine, Futamata graduates were expected to think freely for themselves. The “glorious death” of ritual suicide was ruled out; if captured they were required to use the opportunity to spread disinformation.
According to Bernard Cendron and Gérard Chenu, whose 1974 book was the source material for the film, Onoda’s instructor told him: “The fight may last many years, never give up, even if you have lost all your comrades, even if you have to eat roots.”
Receiving his orders at Futamata.
That’s exactly what he did. Conserving his ammunition, moving from location to location in the island’s rugged and densely forested center, he prepared for the day when Japanese forces would retake the territory. In 1974, when asked what he would have done if not ordered to surrender, he replied that he was well-supplied and fit enough to last another 30 years. The fact that he lived until 2014 suggests he was probably right.
There was a dark side to his obsession. He and his tiny band of hold-outs terrorized the islanders — there was a native population of 14,000 — by burning their crops and “requisitioning” their belongings. An unknown number were killed, as were two of Onoda’s comrades. As far as he was concerned, these were the necessary costs of guerrilla tactics behind enemy lines. When he finally surrendered, he was astounded by the generous attitude of the Philippine people and the amnesty conferred by President Ferdinand Marcos.
Mourning a comrade shot to death.
Onoda’s return to Japan was sensational. He went from being regarded as a relic of a bygone era to a media phenomenon. Crowds greeted him at Haneda Airport. Placards thanked him for his “long and loyal service to the emperor.” For the nationalist right, he was a reminder of traditional Japanese virtues which had been abandoned. For the radical left, he symbolized Japan’s imperialist aggression, now taking the form of commercial incursions into Southeast Asian markets.
The film is not concerned with such controversies, nor with Onoda’s subsequent life. The closing shot is of the helicopter taking him from a world where it is always 1944 to one he can barely imagine. Harari explains why the story attracted him: “Not because it was about war, ideology, Japan, extremism, but because it spoke to me intimately in its relationship to reality.”
Highly skilled in the techniques of survival, Onoda knew how to make shoes out of grass, brush his teeth with coconut shells and construct a waterproof hut out of branches and banana leaves in a day. His greatest talent, though, was for manufacturing his own reality and forcing events to conform with it. In essence, he was a mid-20th century Don Quixote.
Keeping well groomed…
When his brother and sister come to the island to look for him, he watches from afar and wonders what cruelties the Americans have inflicted on them to make them cooperate. The Japanese newspapers dropped by helicopter are, he assumes, cunningly devised fakes. A photograph of his parents left by a search party couldn’t be authentic: they are standing in front of a large modern house. He has no idea that the old family home was bombed flat in the war.
Even when he requisitions a transistor radio from a village and learns about the bullet train and other technological marvels, his faith is not shaken. How could Japan have lost the war if it is now the world’s third economic power? Hadn’t the entire Japanese nation sworn to die gloriously rather than face defeat?
From what he hears on the radio, the European colonialists have been chased out of Asia, and now the Americans are being soundly beaten by the Vietnamese. Surely, Japan’s wartime “Co-prosperity Sphere” must be going from strength to strength!
Onoda devised a kind of alternate history reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. In this world, Mao Zedong’s China and Japan have made a mutual support agreement. The White Russians in Siberia have rebelled against the Soviets and declared independence with Japanese support. Somehow it all fitted together.
Cendron and Chenu had the opportunity to interview Onoda in 1974. When they asked him if ever felt his mission was foolish or useless, he answered with a smile. “What is useful and what is useless? Do you think that someone who spends all his days in an office always doing the same work which he doesn’t enjoy — do you think he feels useful?”
Psychologists talk of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. History shows that human beings are highly suggestible and malleable. Onoda’s world made sense to him when he arrived on Lubang, aged 22, and nothing much changed in the next three decades. We too patrol our tiny islands, choosing what to believe and disbelieve and calling the result reality, with online interactions reinforcing the process.
Ready to accept the surrender order from his long-retired senior officer.
Onoda’s story, as told by Harari, is not about one eccentric individual from the past, but about a feature of human nature that is very much with us today. It enables us to establish our identities but could also condemn us to perpetual conflict.
The film is almost three hours long, but the time passes quickly, as it did for Onoda, who was always busy. We leave the world of the cinema and enter a different kind of unreality where we must wear masks and show our passes sanitaires (health passes) to get a drink.
One of Onoda’s comments resounds in my mind: “There are some dreams from which it is better not to wake up.”