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.

~ * ~

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.

The World Rent Asunder

'War of the Worlds - Men Hunting' by Robert Czarny, 2006.

London: 3 March 2022 – In January this year I read H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) for the first time. It is one of those ubiquitous books which everyone knows, but which lots of people have never actually read. This was something which struck me when the recent BBC TV dramatization was aired a year or two ago. It faithfully set the story of the novel in its own time and its original place, unlike the most recent Hollywood adaptation, starring Tom Cruise in 2005, which transposes the action to modern day America. Or the earlier classic Hollywood version of 1953, starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, which also changed the three-legged Martian machines into boomerang-shaped flying saucers with cobra-headed heat ray guns. While watching the BBC version, I commented to my mother that I’d never read the original novel, but that I thought I really should someday, because the idea that H.G. Wells could have dreamt up such a fantastical fictional premise of aliens with advanced technology invading the Earth during the late nineteenth-century’s ‘Age of Steam’ seemed so far removed from our present-day conceptions of sci-fi. Noting this absent-minded musing of mine, my mother bought the book and happily surprised me with it as a gift for my birthday a couple of months later. But sadly, when I finally read Wells’ novel at the start of this year, I had no idea how tragically apt a moment it would end up being; to read such a book when the world was unwittingly drifting closer towards the edge of a moment of unthinkable change – a change wrought by the potential prospect of a third world war – when, at the end of the following month, Russia invaded the Ukraine.

 

As a kid growing up during the 1980s, as for many people of my age, my main point of reference for Wells’ War of the Worlds was Jeff Wayne’s musical version (1978), which we used to listen to as a family in the car. I’ve always remembered the sinister moment narrated by Richard Burton when the Martian cylinder begins to unscrew. For some reason this moment really captured my imagination. Like many kids, I was obsessed with the idea of extra-terrestrials and alien invasions. A fascination first fed by the films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982), as well as old television series, such as The Invaders (1967-1968) and more recent ones (at that time), such as V (1984-1985). Later on, of course, there was The X-Files (1993-2002). I always knew there was an element of Cold War paranoia hidden beneath the surface of such films, especially old ones such as the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or Invaders from Mars (1953). The common menace behind all of these films and TV shows was the unknown; that creeping insidious fear which permeated the Cold War – not knowing what the other side was up to, not knowing what they might be planning, but knowing that they had the means to destroy everyone and everything should they choose to do so. That threat of nuclear Armageddon with just the press of a button. It was something which anyone alive in those decades post-World War 2 up until the end of the twentieth century, when the Cold War finally seemed to come to a (largely) peaceful close in the period between 1989-1991 with the collapse of the USSR.

 

H.G. Wells (National Portrait Gallery)

For H.G. Wells the menace which inspired him with such dreadful visions of the future was something different, but something which nonetheless was at the very root of what the Cold War later became. For Wells, his fear was the dehumanising mechanisation of death. In certain ways, his novel foreshadowed the horrors unleashed on the grim battlefields of the First World War, which took place only a couple of decades after the publication of War of the Worlds in 1898. The incomprehensible truth of mankind’s inhumanity towards itself is envisaged as manifested in the form of a callously methodical and unsympathetic alien invader. And, in unleashing such a cold-blooded enemy upon the unsuspecting Earth, Wells’ very matter-of-factly - if somewhat macabrely - describes our familiar world being rent asunder, the everyday world torn to shreds by enormous three-legged alien machines stalking the land from sleepy Surrey into the bustling metropolis of London, which is reduced to ashes via war and anarchy as the systems and institutions of society crumble and collapse under the relentless onslaught of total war. In this very specific way, Wells clearly foresaw the modern ‘Blitzkrieg’ of the Second World War as much as he foresaw the senseless carnage of the battlefields being gassed during the First World War. Watching the senselessness of the current Russian military advance on multiple fronts into a peaceful Ukraine, the present war seems just as inexplicable as it is horrifying.

 

When I read War of the Worlds at the start of this year, I’d been surprised to see my hometown in northwest London given two mentions in the course of the novel. The majority of the action in the story takes place in Surrey, moving onto southwest and then central London, with an interlude in which we follow the course of the narrator’s brother, who eventually escapes England as a desperate refugee onboard a paddle steamer which manages to cross the English Channel to the Continent, despite being pursued by the Martian machines which are bravely opposed in a suicidal last stand made by a Royal Navy dreadnought. The macabre appeal of this truly remarkable novel is to picture the vivid descriptions of our sane and orderly world uprooted and utterly smashed by uncontrollable and unopposable forces. But as the events of the Second World War in particular should have taught us, such a flight of the imagination is not so fanciful. Those events are still within living memory for my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. It was the defining global event of their lifetimes, as was also the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. I’d always thought my generation’s defining moment was that hopeful and optimistic era which witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, but since then we’ve had the shocking event of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the USA, as well as the wars, insurgencies and subsequent terrorist attacks which have followed in their wake; then the current Corona virus pandemic, along with the increasingly worsening effects of global climate change as a backdrop to all of this, in just these first few decades of the 21^st century. And now we have the megalomaniacal madness made manifest of Vladimir Putin, an unopposed autocrat ordering his troops to invade a neighbouring sovereign state, all the while with his finger held poised over the nuclear button, as he has duly warned us.

 

Given such a clear and unequivocal threat, if we believe and sufficiently fear Putin’s resolve, our sense of existential dread certainly feels more acute now than it has at any point during the last 40 years. It is akin to that deeply sinister moment of hearing the cylinder slowly starting to unscrew itself in War of the Worlds. During my childhood my family always knew that in the event of a nuclear war we’d almost certainly be instantly vaporised because we lived only a matter of a few miles away from the NATO command centre at Northwood. There were undoubtedly a couple of nuclear warheads sitting in Soviet missile silos with our names written on them. In the more recent post-Cold War era, I’ve often wondered what has happened to those missiles. We understood that the nuclear deterrent had been downgraded on both of the formerly opposing sides of the Iron Curtain, but I’ve long been fascinated by the subsequent rise of the enigma that is Vladimir Putin. Over the last twenty or so years, reading articles speculating upon the psychological implications of his having been a KGB officer stationed in East Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how he and his comrades had repeatedly called Moscow for instructions when the protestors were hammering at the doors of the Soviet headquarters where he was rapidly shredding documents, but the line was dead. The only reply they received was silence. And not so very long thereafter the USSR itself was no longer a voice on the global stage. All that was left was the seemingly insubstantial ghost of a once great power. Only a year or two ago I marvelled as I read an article about the Soviet military base at Vogelsang, close to Berlin, which is now a ruin sought out by psycho-geographers and urbexers, but which was still manned and operational when I first visited Berlin in February 1993 on my second visit to the former GDR. Empty swimming pools, broken windows, trees growing through crumbling concrete, and paint peeling from sun-bleached Soviet Realist statues and murals. Looking at the accompanying photos of the base in its current derelict state it looked to me like something from a different era altogether, not like something which had been fully functioning in my own lifetime.

 

I’m currently living close to Westminster Abbey. Many years ago, a friend of mine who worked in the House of Commons told me that one of the reasons why the Jubilee Line extension on the London Underground system was so delayed in opening was because the construction workers had not correctly anticipated just how long it would take to punch holes through the former nuclear bunker which had been built beside the Houses of Parliament during the height of the Cold War. If you go into Westminster Tube Station and ride the escalators down to the Jubilee Line platforms, you can indeed still see the remnants of what looks like a much older concrete structure behind the newer beams and pillars of the station complex, so there may well be some truth to that conjecture. Hence, if Putin does press the button, Westminster Tube Station might not be too bad a place to hurry to during such an eventuality. If he does though, I think, remembering the sobering effect of watching Raymond Brigg’s cartoon of When the Wind Blows (1986), I’d rather disappear in the white heat of the blinding flash than survive in such a blisteringly bleak world thereafter. Scientists say the nuclear weapons which are extant nowadays are so far in advance of the power of any which have previously been used in anger at either Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the nuclear tests of the 1950s, that we probably wouldn’t stand a chance if these weapons were put into action. There are no preparations we could possibly make for such an eventuality, and so – much like in the 1980s – we can only ‘keep calm and carry on’, as the British like to say.

 

'War of the Worlds - Thunder Child' by Robert Czarny, 2005.

What is more staggering perhaps, is to realise how the world seems to have sleepwalked into this current situation. Some say the West has handled Putin all wrong from the start. Rebuffing his friendly overtures towards the European Union and to NATO, determined to treat Russia as a second-rate world power, was arrogance and folly. Essentially NATO’s advance to the East (contrary to promises apparently made to Putin), as Vladimir Pozner suggests, has enacted a Cuban missile crisis in reverse. While others insist that there is no such thing as an “ex-KGB officer.” Putin was never a man to be trusted. In essence, he has simply been a ticking time bomb who has now reached the end of a very long-smouldering fuse. Time’s up. Whichever way you choose to look at it, this may well have been the inevitable outcome of either point of view. I recall a BBC TV interview with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 2019 (I think). In which he was asked if he thought the world was a safer place since the end of the Cold War, and he replied ‘far from it’ – he thought the world ‘infinitely more dangerous now’ because those same weapons still existed, yet they were now more powerful, and they were also considerably more vulnerable than they’d ever been compared to those former times. Anything could very easily happen these days, he said. He was perhaps referring to global threats from terrorism arising from people with deluded ideological agendas, but he was (perhaps understandably) non-committal on pertinent questions concerning Russia’s current leadership when asked in such a context.

 

By Morten Morland (The Sunday Times)

Gorbachev was right, though. Of late the world has seemingly been increasingly poised, only a knife edge away from the utterly irrational impinging upon the everyday, as the events of 9/11 clearly taught us – anything really can happen. So many strange and previously unthinkable things have occurred in our recent times – think of the storming of the US Capitol only a year or so ago. Anarchy lies just the other side of this thin curtain called reality which we draw around ourselves and our societies. Only a week ago the people of Ukraine were living their lives like the rest of us – going to work, going to school, walking the dog, riding trains, commuting to work, going shopping, driving cars, listening to music, watching TV, eating dinner, doing all the normal things people and families do in a sane and stable world, but now they have been utterly uprooted. The elderly and those with young children fleeing from harm’s way are now refugees, while those who have stayed or are returning to fight and resist the invader are all in mortal danger. It seems so utterly unimaginable.

 

Simple misinformation, as well as active disinformation, threaten our understanding of what is going on and could so easily help to spin things out of control due to the current credulous nature of unfiltered news and opinion, much like Orson Welles’ infamously all-too-realistic radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. We’ve no idea of what Vladimir Putin is capable of doing. We watch dumbfounded, in fear and aghast at the devastation he has unleashed upon the poor people of Ukraine. Ordinary people, like those the world over, whose lives were much the same as yours and mine only a week ago. We watch in horror. We watch feeling powerless. We witness the inhumanity. And I can’t help reflecting how those fictional three-legged machines with their heat rays stalking the Surrey countryside, burning up the streets and villages for no sensible reason no longer seem quite so alien or extraordinary now. It could so easily be anyone of us, any of our own hometowns. We’ve long watched passively as this sort of thing has happened in other places both near and far, and those who have tried to protest or warn of this kind of thing have simply been ignored by those who have the real power to do something meaningful and just about it – but somehow this time it is different. This time it could very well be a moment of epochal change, as if we’ve not already had enough of those arising in this increasingly deracinated and deeply tarnished new century.

 

Something is deeply wrong with the way our world operates. In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds it was the smallest and seemingly the most inconsequential of organisms which eventually managed to overthrow the madness of the inhuman aggression which confronted the world, perhaps now it will be the right thoughts and right actions of all of us, no matter how small or individual we are, which can only be magnified if we band together and oppose the tyrannies of those who would have us living unquestioningly and according to their terms only, using our fears as the source of their strength and personal profits. Now is the wake-up call, telling us it is high time for us to shake off our apathy and our atomisation. Vaclav Havel called this social philosophy ‘Living in Truth.’ It’s worked in the past and it can work again if we stand strong, work together and will it to do so. We only have one world, and we clearly need greater and more inclusive unity in order to make it a better place. Whatever the outcome of this unpardonable act of aggression against Ukraine eventually is, it seems clear that our world will need to change not just accordingly, but hopefully radically, and radically for the better, in the wake of this present emergency. But that will depend on all of us doing what is right, and by all of us no longer allowing those who do wrong by others to get away with it.

Slava Ukraini! 

'Peace' by Waldemar Walczak

NB - At the time of posting (2022): I've not been able to find out who the artist is who created the two illustrations used above (of the three-legged Martian machines attacking London and being faced down by the 'Thunder Child') - I sourced them from GoodReads, but if anyone knows please let me know and I'll credit them properly. UPDATE (2024): I've now found out that the artist is Robert Czarny (c.2005-2006).