Today in History:
Japanese WWII Soldier Found Hiding in Guam Jungle (1972)
Shoichi Yokoi
Sh?ichi Yokoi (Yokoi Sh?ichi), (March 31, 1915 – September 22, 1997) was a Japanese sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during the Second World War. He was among the last three Japanese hold-outs to surrender after the end of hostilities in 1945.
Early life
Yokoi was born in Saori, Aichi Prefecture. He had been an apprentice tailor until he was drafted in 1941.
War years and post-war survival
Yokoi was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941. Initially, he served with the 29th Infantry Division in Manchukuo. In 1943, he was transferred to the 38th Regiment in the Mariana Islands. He arrived on Guam in February 1943. When American forces liberated the island in the 1944 Battle of Guam, Yokoi went into hiding with ten other Japanese soldiers. He would remain in hiding until 1972. Seven of the original ten holdouts eventually moved away. Only three remained in the region. Later these last three separated, but they visited each other until about 1964, when Yokoi found his two friends dead, apparently of starvation. The last eight years he lived entirely alone.
Yokoi survived by hunting, primarily at night. He used native plants to make clothes, bedding, and storage implements, which he carefully hid in his cave.
On the evening of January 24, 1972, Yokoi was discovered in the jungle. He was found by Jesus Due?as and Manuel De Gracia, two local men who were checking their shrimp traps along a small river on Talofofo. They had initially assumed that Yokoi was a villager from Talofofo, but managed to surprise and subdue him, carrying him out of the jungle with minor bruising.
"It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive," he said upon his return to Japan. The remark would become a popular saying in Japanese.
For twenty-eight years, he hid in an underground jungle cave, fearing to come out of hiding even after finding leaflets declaring that World War II had ended.
Yokoi was the third-to-last Japanese soldier to surrender after the war, preceding Hiroo Onoda and Teruo Nakamura.
Later life
After a whirlwind media tour of Japan, he married and settled down in rural Aichi Prefecture. Having lived alone in a cave for twenty-eight years, Yokoi became a popular television personality, and an advocate of austere living. He was featured in a 1977 documentary called Yokoi and His Twenty-Eight Years of Secret Life on Guam. He would eventually receive the equivalent of $300 in back pay, along with a small pension.
In 1991, he was granted an audience with Emperor Akihito. He considered the meeting the greatest honor of his life.
Yokoi died in 1997 of a heart attack at the age of 82. He was buried at a Nagoya cemetery, under a gravestone that had been commissioned initially by his mother in 1955.
Pic 2: This newspaper photograph was described as Yokoi's first haircut in 28 years; but the image is also a document of his first ordinary contact with another person and a step in the transformation from solitary soldier to the role of celebrity.
Source: encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com
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