Jul 3, 2023
Hiroo Onoda: The Last Man Standing—Because He Refused to Sit Down
Hiroo Onoda wasn’t just the guy who didn’t get the memo—he’s the guy who didn’t get the memo, the telegram, the smoke signal, or the blaringly obvious signs that the entire world had moved on. And I’m not talking about your uncle who still refuses to use anything but a flip phone. Onoda took “stubborn” to levels that would make a mule look like a yes-man.
Onoda, bless his heart, was a Japanese intelligence officer sent to a little speck of land called Lubang Island in the Philippines during World War II. His mission? To wage guerrilla warfare and resist the Allied forces for as long as it took for Japan to win the war. Now, that’s a hell of a pep talk—except someone forgot to include a crucial little detail: the war ended in 1945.
But did Onoda pack it up and go home? Oh no. Our boy was so committed to the cause that he stayed in the jungle, fighting a war that was as over as disco. And by “stayed,” I mean he held out until 1974. Yes, you read that right—nineteen-seventy-four. While everyone else was grooving to the Bee Gees and watching “Happy Days,” Onoda was still dodging imaginary bullets, convinced that every rustle in the bushes was the enemy and not a coconut falling off a tree.
Let’s just pause to think about this. This man lived off bananas, coconuts, and the occasional stolen cow for 29 years, all while rigorously following orders that no one even remembered giving. And if that isn’t the definition of dedication, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t even commit to a gym membership for three months.
The locals on the island tried to convince him to give it up, but Onoda wasn’t buying it. Leaflets dropped from planes? Fake news. Radio broadcasts? Propaganda. The arrival of 8-track tapes and bell-bottoms? Obviously some kind of Allied psy-op. Onoda believed in his mission with the kind of blind faith that only comes from spending three decades talking to your imaginary war buddies and living in a jungle hut that’s one step away from being a sandcastle.
It wasn’t until his former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, literally had to be flown in and ordered Onoda to stand down that he finally, finally, called it quits. And even then, Onoda only agreed because it was a direct order from a superior. Talk about chain of command!
So, Onoda returned to Japan a hero—though more for his sheer persistence than anything else. Imagine being the guy who missed 30 years of history. He came back to a world with color TV, moon landings, and Richard Nixon doing the backstroke in a sea of corruption. And while most of us would be like, “Hey, what’s Netflix?” Onoda was more like, “So, who’s running the show in Manchuria now?”
After coming back, Onoda did the only logical thing: he moved to Brazil to become a cattle rancher. Because after almost three decades of fighting imaginary wars, there’s no better career move than wrangling cows. He later returned to Japan, wrote a book, and opened a survival school, where he presumably taught people how to avoid reality for as long as humanly possible.
So here’s to Hiroo Onoda, the man who was really, really good at following orders—even when the rest of the world was throwing in the towel. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that sometimes, you’ve got to let go and accept that maybe, just maybe, the war is over. Unless, of course, you’re still stuck in 1974. In which case, rock on, brother. Rock on.