Yokoi Found Hiding in Guam: 28 Years After WWII Ended

Two hunters on Guam stumbled upon a gaunt, wild-eyed man living in a jungle cave, surviving on frogs, rats, snails, and river shrimp. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army had been hiding in the jungle for 28 years, unaware that World War II had ended in 1945. His discovery on January 24, 1972, made global headlines and confronted Japan with an uncomfortable relic of its imperial past. Yokoi had been stationed on Guam when U.S. forces invaded the island in July 1944. As organized Japanese resistance collapsed, he and several comrades fled into the dense interior jungle. Over the years, his companions either surrendered or died. By the early 1960s, Yokoi was completely alone. He fashioned clothing from tree bark and woven hibiscus fibers, built an underground shelter with remarkable ingenuity, and crafted tools from salvaged metal. He knew the war was probably over—he had found leaflets—but shame and fear of disgrace prevented him from surrendering. When the two Guamanian hunters, Jesus Duenas and Manuel De Gracia, encountered him checking shrimp traps along a river, Yokoi attacked them before being subdued. He was 56 years old, severely malnourished, and had not spoken to another human being in over eight years. Upon his return to Japan, he famously said, "It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive." The phrase became one of the most quoted statements in postwar Japanese culture. Yokoi returned to a Japan utterly transformed from the militaristic empire he had served. The pastoral country of his memory was now an economic superpower with bullet trains and color television. He became a celebrity, married, and wrote a bestselling memoir. His story was not unique: several other Japanese holdouts were discovered in the 1970s, including Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda in the Philippines in 1974. Yokoi''s survival testified to the extraordinary endurance of the individual soldier, but also to the destructive power of a military culture that made surrender a fate worse than decades of isolation.