Ninja (36 page)

Two weeks later he heard voices, and found a bag taped to a tree. It contained Suzuki's photos of him, a note saying he had come back as promised, and two orders, one from General Yamashita and a second saying that “instructions would be given to Lieutenant Onoda orally,” presumably by Taniguchi himself.

This was what he had been waiting for, direct, face-to-face, no-nonsense secret orders, for the only way to deliver secret orders was orally. He could hardly guess what he would be ordered to do—keep fighting on Lubang? Start a new operation somewhere else? The only certainty was that he had to get to the meeting point, the spot in the center of the island where he had met Suzuki two weeks earlier—Wakayama Point, on a river a good eight hours' walk across the mountains. It might be a trap, of course. But he had to take that risk.

In hindsight, it was no risk. Suzuki had returned to Japan and reported to the government, touching off what Terry calls “some of the most extravagant coverage ever provided by Japanese press and television.” They found Taniguchi and flew him to Lubang, with no fewer than one hundred Japanese news reporters. Taniguchi was there as Onoda approached Wakayama Point on the afternoon of March 9, 1974.

He hid in the bushes, intending to wait until the light was right: dark enough to be safe, light enough to recognize Taniguchi. There was no one about. He camouflaged himself with sticks and leaves, crossed the river, and climbed a small hill where he could oversee the meeting place. He saw a yellow tent but no sign of people. He approached warily to about a hundred meters and settled down to wait for sunset. Then, holding his rifle, he thrust out his chest and walked forward. Suzuki stood there, facing away, between the tent and a campfire. He turned and came forward, arms outstretched. “It's Onoda!” he shouted. “Major Taniguchi, it's Onoda!”

As Suzuki grasped Onoda's hand, a voice came from the tent. “Is it really you, Onoda? I'll be with you in a minute.” He was just changing his shirt. Yes, definitely Taniguchi's voice.

He emerged, fully dressed, wearing an army cap.

“Lieutenant Onoda, sir,” said Onoda smartly. “Reporting for orders.”

“Good for you!” said Taniguchi, patting Onoda on the shoulder. He gave Onoda a pack of cigarettes with the imperial crest on them, and then, as Onoda took a couple of paces back, said, “I shall read your orders.” These told Onoda that all combat activity had ceased, that the special squadron had no more military duties, and that all members, Onoda being one, should cease military activities and place themselves under the nearest superior officer.

For a few seconds, Onoda wondered if Taniguchi would follow up with his real orders.

Silence.

Onoda realized at last that this was it.

“We really lost the war! How could they have been so sloppy? Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. I felt like a fool for having been so tense and cautious on the way here. Worse than that, what had I been doing for all these years?”

The emotion subsided. He took off his pack, laid his rifle on top of it, and followed the major and Suzuki into the tent, where, through the night, he gave his report, often blinking back tears, with Suzuki, a little the worse for drink, snoring on his bed. With the coming of dawn, Taniguchi slept, but Onoda, on his first bed in thirty years, could not.

The next morning Suzuki's beacon fire summoned the rest of the party, a military escort and Onoda's oldest brother, Toshio. After a day retrieving weapons from the hills, there followed a meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos. In a very public ceremony, Onoda, performing his role of prisoner of war, formally surrendered his sword. But he was no ordinary prisoner. As a mark of respect and as a sign of reconciliation, Marcos handed the sword back.
²
“For a moment, something like the pride of a samurai swept over me.”

That was just the start of intense, almost hysterical press coverage. Why did he create such a stir? Nothing like this had attended the reappearance of Onoda's comrade-in-arms, Yamamoto, when he emerged from the Philippine jungle in 1956, nor the emergence of an NCO, Yokoi Shoichi, from Guam in 1972. Terry's theory is that Onoda was exactly what Japan needed as an antidote to defeat: a genuine, uncompromising war hero. Also, in Mercado's words, “his spare frame, intense gaze and goatee gave him the air of a samurai who has seemingly reached Japan in a time machine.” But there was a lot more to him than that. He was intelligent, articulate, strong-willed, and stoic.

He was also, incidentally, exactly the opposite of another type of uncompromising Japanese hero—the sort that takes on impossible odds and dies. Such a one was Saig
o
Takamori, “the last samurai,” who in 1877 led a pointless rebellion against the government of the Meiji Restoration and met an extremely sticky end, vastly outnumbered, wounded, unable to commit
seppuku
; he was beheaded, in true samurai fashion, by a close aide. But who, in a nation recovering from defeat, wants to identify with heroic failure? Onoda was an example of a man who had lived, not died, for his ideals.

Terry, a long-established and well-respected translator of Japanese, was skeptical of accepting Onoda as a hero, until, on TV, he saw Onoda arrive. “When I saw this small, dignified man emerge from the plane, bow, and then stand rigidly at attention for his ovation . . . I was hooked.” For the next two weeks, the press and TV were full of Onoda's doings—greeting his father, his mother, his friends, having a checkup, eating, traveling to his hometown. He received tens of thousands of letters of praise (though the foreign press looked askance at such adulation heaped on a man who had killed some thirty Filipinos and lived by theft). Naturally, publishers fell over one another hoping to win the rights to his story. He turned all of them down, choosing a publisher he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had read as a young man. Here was a man of inflexible will but also a certain gentleness and nostalgia for the old days. That, perhaps, is what drew him to the openhearted Suzuki, which in its turn opened the way to his return.

He also had a phenomenal memory. Within three months, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections, many of them amazingly detailed. He made sketches of his bases. Articles began to appear in serial form, and editors began work on book versions in both Japanese and English, with Terry as the translator and editor of the English edition.

Onoda was not happy with all the publicity, and the following year he decided to join his brother Tadao in Brazil, where he married a Japanese woman, Machie, joined a Japanese community, and started raising 250 head of cattle on a remote ranch on the borders of Bolivia and Paraguay. He was very good at it. In ten years he doubled the size of the ranch and had more than a thousand head of cattle. In 1980 he was shocked by an account of a Japanese teenager who had murdered his parents. Seeing this as a symbol of a decline in youthful standards, he moved back to Japan and set up a “nature school” at the foot of Mount Fuji to educate children in survival skills, living off the land.

In May 1996, Onoda returned to the Philippines on a trip proposed by the governor of Occidental Mindoro Province, Josephine Ramirez Sato, whose Japanese husband had been a member of one of the search parties hunting for Onoda. Onoda's purpose was to honor the memory of those who had died during his thirty years in the jungle. On Lubang, he laid flowers on the spot where Kozuka had been shot, which had been made into a peace monument in 1981, at the behest of the then Japanese prime minister, Fukuda Takeo, among others. Afterward, he gave the local mayor a check for ten thousand dollars to fund scholarships. There were courtesy calls on Governor Sato and the president, Fidel Ramos. Questioned by reporters and confronted by protesters demanding compensation for murder and theft, Onoda made his message clear. He had acted honorably, as a soldier, for his country. Compensation was for governments. All he could do was help reconciliation by showing goodwill.

The school and the visit seem to be Onoda's answer to his three questions: Why had he fought on Lubang for thirty years? Whom had he been fighting for? What was the cause?

He had fought to survive; he had survived to do what he could to reconcile old enemies and to bring the survival skills he had acquired to a new generation. Now Japan and the Philippines are close business partners. And, in twenty years, some twenty thousand children have passed through the school started by the man the children call “Uncle Jungle,” but whom others call the
real
last of the ninjas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With overall thanks to:

Noriko Ansell for her help and advice in Iga and K
o
ka, and her father, Katsuhisa Moriya; Antony Cummins, in particular for his help on the Iga Commune and for his translations (along with Yoshie Minami) of the ninja poems that begin each chapter; Tullio Lobetti, SOAS, Shugend
o
initiate; Dr. Gaynor Sekimori, SOAS, Shugend
o
expert.

In Iga:

Hiromitsu Kuroi, Iga-ryu Ninja Museum; Kazuya Kamaguchi, Akame (Forty-Eight Waterfalls); Momochi Mikio, owner of Momocho Sandayu's house, Iga Ueno; Morimoto Satoshi, Iga Ueno Tourist Office; Tomomori Kazuya, Kashihara Castle; Tsuki Katsuya, potter, Chigachi Castle; Ueda Masaru, restaurant owner, Akame (Forty-Eight Waterfalls).

In K
o
ka:

Hukui Minogu, K
o
ga ninja house; Koyama Haruhisa K
o
ga Ninjutsu Study Group; K
o
z
o
Yamada,
shugenja
and mountain walker; Sikimoto Jei-ichi, Shugend
o
priest; Somanosho, priest; Taki Sugao, K
o
ga Ninjutsu Study Group; Toshinobu Watanabe, K
o
ga Ninjutsu Study Group; Tsuji Kunio, hotel owner; Yoshihisa Yoshinori, K
o
ka Town Tourism.

My thanks as always to Felicity Bryan and her staff; Doug Young and Simon Thorogood at Transworld; and Mari Roberts for her excellent editing.

Picture Acknowledgments

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgments in any future edition. All images have been supplied courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are scores, perhaps hundreds, of books that focus on what are supposed to be the ninjas' martial arts, magical skills, and esoteric supremacy. There's a great deal of dross out there. The following are the books I found most useful.

Adolphson, Mikael.
The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers and Warriors in Premodern Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Allen, Louis. “The Nakano School.” In
Proceedings of the British Association for Japanese Studies
(edited by John Chapman and David Steeds). Vol. 10. Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1985.

Black, Jeremy.
The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen.
Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami.
Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 2000.

Cobb, Nora Okja. “Behind the Inscrutable Half-Shell: Images of Mutant Japanese and Ninja Turtles”,
MELUS
, vol. 16, no. 4.

Conlan, Thomas Donald.
State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Cummins, Antony, and Yoshie Minami.
The Book of the Ninja
[the
Bansensh
u
kai
]. London: Watkins, to be published 2013.

True Path of the Ninja: The Definitive Translation of the Shoninki.
Tokyo, Rutland, VT, and Singapore: Tuttle, 2011.

True Ninja Traditions: The Ninpiden and the Unknown Ninja Scroll.
Bloomington, IN: Wordclay, 2010.