The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

thousands of leaflets throughout the Pacific region, announcing that the war
was over and it was time for everyone to go home. Onoda and his men, like
many others, found and read these leaflets, but unlike most of the others,
Onoda decided that they were fake, a trap set by the American forces to get
the guerrilla fighters to show themselves. Onoda burned the leaflets, and he
and his men stayed hidden and continued to fight.
Five years went by. The leaflets had stopped, and most of the American
forces had long since gone home. The local population on Lubang attempted
to return to their normal lives of farming and fishing. Yet there were Hiroo
Onoda and his merry men, still shooting at the farmers, burning their crops,
stealing their livestock, and murdering locals who wandered too far into the
jungle. The Philippine government then took to drawing up new flyers and
spreading them out across the jungle. Come out, they said. The war is over.
You lost.
But these, too, were ignored.
In 1952, the Japanese government made one final effort to draw the last
remaining soldiers out of hiding throughout the Pacific. This time, letters and
pictures from the missing soldiers’ families were air-dropped, along with a
personal note from the emperor himself. Once again, Onoda refused to
believe that the information was real. Once again, he believed the airdrop to
be a trick by the Americans. Once again, he and his men stood and continued
to fight.
Another few years went by and the Philippine locals, sick of being
terrorized, finally armed themselves and began firing back. By 1959, one of
Onoda’s companions had surrendered, and another had been killed. Then, a
decade later, Onoda’s last companion, a man called Kozuka, was killed in a
shootout with the local police while he was burning rice fields—still waging
war against the local population a full quarter-century after the end of World
War II!
Onoda, having now spent more than half of his life in the jungles of
Lubang, was all alone.
In 1972, the news of Kozuka’s death reached Japan and caused a stir. The
Japanese people thought the last of the soldiers from the war had come home
years earlier. The Japanese media began to wonder: if Kozuka had still been
on Lubang until 1972, then perhaps Onoda himself, the last known Japanese
holdout from World War II, might still be alive as well. That year, both the