Onoda's War

 N.B. – This is a companion piece to a blog post I wrote several years ago, titled: M.I.A. – Second World War Japanese ‘Hold Outs’

 

ONODA: 10,000 NIGHTS IN THE JUNGLE – Directed by Arthur Harari (Bathysphere, 2021)

 To all intents and purposes, this film is a biopic of the life of Lieutenant Onoda Hirō (1922-2014), the Japanese soldier who remained a ‘hold out’ on the island of Lubang in the Philippines for 30 years after the end of World War 2 – remarkably not surrendering until March 1974. But the film’s director, Arthur Harari, describes it as a work of historically-inspired fiction. It is based upon Bernard Cendron and Gérard Chenu's biography Onoda: Seul en Guerre dans la Jungle (Arthaud, 1974), and Bernard Cendron collaborated in the writing of the screenplay. Harari has said he didn’t read Onoda’s own account, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (Kodansha, 1974), preferring to give his own interpretation of the story and the themes it suggested to him. Harari has said that he was inspired by writers such as Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote  tales of adventure about sailors marooned in the south seas. And, although it is a war film, much like Letters From Iwo Jima (2007), Harari acknowledges that it takes many of its visual cues from Hollywood Westerns, as well as the films of Akira Kurosawa. When Harari first heard the true story of Onoda Hirō he thought it sounded like a joke. Harari is certainly not alone in that respect, even at the time of Onoda’s surrender, the racist caricature of the doggedly stupid and fanatical Japanese soldier still slinking about the jungle, parting the bows of the bushes to peer out at the modern world, was a commonplace visual trope repeated on various TV comedy sketch shows and sitcoms, such as The Dave Allen Show, and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (‘The Last Warrior’ episode), in which the equally caricatured British Army theatre troupe dress up as the three little maids from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado in order to coax a Japanese ‘Hold Out’ to emerge from his hiding place and surrender. But, while this film does have its moments of dark humour, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle is definitely not a comedy, nor is Onoda a figure to be laughed at.

 

Film trailer for the UK release of Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (April, 2022)

The film is actually a very sympathetic portrayal of a lost figure. An impressionable young man who finds a sense of purpose and self-worth in a mission that is morally misguided. In many ways, Onoda is a modern-day Lord Jim. The film begins in a very Conradian way, with echoes of the opening pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as we hear the older Onoda’s husky voice narrating a kind of flashback in which he parallels the arrival of Suzuki Norio, the young man who eventually rescues him, with his own arrival on the island of Lubang in 1944. We meet Onoda early on in the film as a young man, still in Japan, who has failed to become a fighter pilot. He thinks he has failed because of his fear of heights, but he is told by Major Taniguchi – a surrogate father-figure who recruits him into a special commando school – that the real reason he failed to become a pilot was because of his fear of dying. In this new elite, secret unit made up of social misfits and ne’er-do-wells he is taught that his fear of death will be his greatest strength, because he is charged with a special mission in which he must paradoxically remain loyal to the task assigned to him whilst at the same time he must be his own officer, giving and obeying his own orders, doing whatever it takes to survive and carry out his overarching orders – hence, perversely he is both free of, and yet also unbreakably bound by military discipline. The entire film is structured around such dualities and paradoxes. Situations and character couplings are constantly paired down to this sort of pairing. Onoda and his second-in-command, Kozuka, become a steadfast unit of two – Kozuka almost making it to the end of the mission with him in 1974. Onoda and Suzuki, the drop-out student tourist who eventually finds Onoda and persuades him to leave the jungle become a mirror image of each other in the sense of reality versus potentiality – as we see Onoda, both burdened and bound by his sense of duty, permanently rooted to his island hideout; and Suzuki, entirely free and carefree in his idle wanderings about the globe, going in search of “a wild panda, Onoda-san, and the Yeti, in that order.” The life that was and the life that could have been, but for different times and different circumstances.

The film has been lauded, winning the Prix Louis-Delluc and was nominated at the 11^th Magritte Awards. It has been praised as a captivating ‘existentialist action movie’, but it has also been criticised as ‘an absurdist slow burn’ at almost three hours running time. A very superficial review in The Observer characterised it as a Boy’s Own adventure yarn, much like J.M. Barrie’s lost boys, with Onoda as the young boy who grows old whilst remaining “hopelessly lost in the woods, playing his forlorn game of soldiers after everyone else has gone to bed.” It’s a nice conceit, and makes for a catchy last sentence to a short and pithy review, but the reality which this film is clearly setting out to portray is a lot darker than this; a closer parallel might be a grown-up version William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Certainly, when viewed as a biopic, rather than historically inspired fiction, it is a reasonably faithful rendition. Much of the cinematography mirrors well-known images from the actual lives of the characters involved – the photo of Onoda as a young recruit in his cap and smart uniform is echoed in the shot of him standing on the boat looking towards Lubang when he first arrives on the island. Suzuki’s blue jeans and shirt, as well as the way he holds Onoda’s rifle and comments on how heavy it is when he takes the selfie photo which he uses to persuade Major Taniguchi to come out of retirement and order Onoda to lay down his arms and surrender mirrors the real-life photo Suzuki took to prove he’d met Onoda. And lastly, the view of a lithesome Onoda, wearing his patched-up army uniform while walking towards the helicopter, watched by the islanders whom he has terrorised for nearly three full decades, faithfully echoes the TV news footage of the actual event – it is all there.

Original photo of Suzuki Norio with Onoda Hirō

Actual photo of Onoda surrendering in 1974 (Guardian)

A scene from the movie, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Bathysphere)

But therein lies the ambiguity which such a movie cannot fully resolve, although it goes some way towards showing it – which is the direct impact Onoda’s actions had on the lives of those around him. In his delusion that he must continue the fight against ordinary civilians. People simply trying to live their lives in what should have been peacetime. The film does show the moral conflict within the characters, wondering who shot first in the confrontations they have, shooting into the air in order to scare people away rather than expressly shooting at them – but, in reality, it is thought that Onoda and his band needlessly killed up to thirty individuals in those three decades post-1945. The death of a lone woman whom they accidentally encounter is presumably meant to stand collectively for all of those innocent victims. And yet, when Onoda did eventually surrender, he was praised for his military discipline – the fact he’d kept his rifle in pristine working order across all those years. He was even pardoned by the then Philippine President, Ferdinand Marcos, to whom he symbolically handed over his sword in a televised ceremony of surrender. Back home again in Japan, after all those years of undoubted hardship, Onoda was hailed as a hero – again for the virtues he seemed to embody of selflessness, discipline, self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. But some also saw him as a victim. Brainwashed by a militaristic regime, given an inhuman and inhumane mission to fight a total war without surrender, without the right to die, at such personal cost and self-sacrifice – robbed of any chance of a normal life. On the other hand, some less charitable souls condemned him as a not very intelligent intelligence officer for scrupulously following his orders to the letter for so many decades after it had become patently obvious that the war was long since over. A personally protracted thirty-year war fought perhaps as an expression of bitter pride?

 

The film shows us scenes wherein Onoda and Kozuka doubt a Japanese repatriation party, which includes Onoda’s brother and father, hailing them in the jungle after one of their party decides to abandon them and surrender on his own. How the two of them conjure up a fanciful explanation of the ‘subterfuge’ they perceive in reading modern newspapers, imagining the fanciful ‘truths’ of an on-going war in which the new Japanese ‘Self-Defense Force’ has allied with Mao’s Communist China in order to continue the fight against the Americans, but wondering whose side is the Philippines is now on? 

Naturally, it is the film’s premise – as with all movies – for us as the viewer to sympathise and even empathise with its central character. And in this respect the film certainly succeeds. By the end of the movie, we see Onoda as a kind of living, walking ghost-figure, a man who has merged with the jungle, haunted by the memories of his dead comrades, the ghosts of his past, visiting and laying flowers upon the graves of those he has known and served alongside because ultimately this is all he has left of the truth by which he has chosen (and/or been ordered) to live by. There is a strange sense of nobility in the silence he maintains when confronted by Suzuki on their first meeting, and even moreso when he finally stands in front of Major Taniguchi, who reads out to him the official surrender order issued in September 1945, telling him to stand down in March 1974. His silence is the most eloquent expression of the contradictions which confound his sense of confusion. Like all absurdities it is both uncanny (rather than outright funny) and deeply tragic. It suggests a man emerging from an oddly baffled sense of pessimism, his new situation slowly reorienting him. It is a profoundly Conradian psychological dilemma. The film ends with a strangely tantalising and yet unresolved sense of pathos – what was it all for in the end?

 

The nobility Onoda found in his role as the leader of a small band of men may have redeemed the self-perceived inadequacies which originally got him into this pickle – but it perhaps only belies the bigger paradox, that in seeking to do the right thing he has ended up accomplishing its opposite – wasting not just his own life, but also the lives of those who remained with him, and of those whom they encountered and killed. When watching the film’s long closing shot of Onoda’s face as he looks out of the helicopter lifting him out of Lubang, mirroring the way he looked to the island on his arrival, one can’t help wondering what he might be feeling and thinking deep inside as he listens to the unending metronomic rattle of the helicopter’s rotor blades passing overhead. It seems as though the clock which stopped long ago in 1945 has finally begun ticking for him once again. But this is an unanswerable question. Only Onoda can really know what it felt like, the rest of us can only speculate.

  

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

MIA –Second World War Japanese ‘Hold Outs’

 Guam – Jungle Trekking

All images from Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Bathysphere), original photo of Suzuki and Onoda presumed to be in the public domain.

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Postscript: – It seems there's something in the zeitgeist at the moment prompting reflections upon the life of Onoda Hirō. In June this year, an English translation (by Michael Hofmann) of a novel, The Twilight World (Penguin / Random House, 2022), by the filmmaker, Werner Herzog, is due to be published. This should make for an interesting read. Herzog, whose own work very much bridges the psychological space between Joseph Conrad and J.G. Ballard, is fascinated by themes of the quixotic and the dystopian. As Herzog himself has said: “I am fascinated by the idea that our civilisation is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness” (Scottish Review of Books, 13 May 2011). Herzog first met and got to know Onoda Hirō in 1997 when visiting Japan, so – although still a fictional representation of a reality, presumably much like Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle – this novel may well present some further enlightened and informed existential insights into this fascinating subject of a man removed from time, stuck in confrontation with himself and the world as he sees and experiences it, at the edge of that thin layer which separates external reality from the internal abyss, lodged deep within the human psyche.