No Surrender (26 page)

At any rate, this is what I wanted to think. I resolved once again that if I encountered the enemy, I would shoot to kill. If I did this, the islanders would be frightened and stay out of my territory. That in itself would make life easier.

But I never really carried out this plan, because I was interrupted by a new search party, which arrived only three days after Kozuka's death.

“Onoda-san, wherever you are, come out! We guarantee your safety.”

So came the pleas from the search party's loudspeakers, over and over again. It kept coming closer, and I became convinced that I had to dodge the searchers somehow. I moved eastward across the Vigo River, but to judge from the movements of the helicopter, the search was being centered on the mountains between Tilik and the radar base, in which case I would not be able to escape unless I went to the area between Agcawayan and Looc.

The islanders had finished harvesting their dry-field rice and were beginning to harvest the rice in the wet paddies. Crawling along the barriers between the paddies, I managed to gather enough unhulled rice to last for a time, taking only a little from each sheaf so as to avoid discovery. Then I started toward the east, planning to make the trip in easy stages, stopping for four or five days at a time. The more I thought about this, however, the more I became convinced that I would have trouble eluding the search party's dragnet. Eventually I decided on a more aggressive line of action.

On the evening of November 19, just a month after Kozuka was killed, I walked out into the open on the automobile road at Ambulong, directly below the radar base. Presently I met an islander going home from work. I uttered a threatening noise and pointed my rifle at him. Thunderstruck, the man fled, but he kept looking back at me and waving his arms as though he were pleading for mercy. This in itself was unusual, because when the islanders saw me, they always fled without looking back. I decided that the man must have been told to make sure it was me he had seen.

That suited me all right. I chased him, still training my rifle
on him. Again he looked back only to find that I had gained on him and was still prepared to shoot. He ran on for a while at full speed and then darted into one of the residences attached to the radar base.

I figured that when the man informed the search party he had seen me, they would come in large numbers to the road, and I would sneak off in the mountains toward Looc.

Just as I planned it, in about twenty minutes the search party showed up. Over their loudspeaker they said, “We had a report that you had shown up here, and we think you are somewhere where you can hear this speaker. . . . Onoda-san, if you don't believe we are Japanese, load up your infantry rifle before you come out.”

I had to laugh. Load up my rifle indeed! The rifle that had been kept loaded for nearly thirty years. I was here, all right, and I could hear their loudspeaker. But I was not about to fall for something like that!

I crossed a branch of the Vigo River and made off in the direction of Looc. Then, from somewhere around Kumano Point, there came a woman's voice. I could not make out exactly what it was saying, but I caught the words, “Hiroo, you gave me two, didn't you?”

I recognized the voice as belonging to my older sister Chie, and I thought she must be talking about a pair of pearls that I had given her as a wedding present. While I was wondering about this, a man's voice came from another direction: “. . . a warrior, fight like a warrior! Soldier, fight like a soldier!”

It was my brother Tadao's voice, and I had heard these words at the Kurume Officers' Training School. So Tadao had come all the way from Brazil!

Still, that did not surprise me very much. I had learned from a leaflet that he had moved to Brazil. I remembered looking at a picture of him and his children in the leaflet and thinking that it was like him to go somewhere like that. I had always
rather expected him to go to New Guinea or some other new country and get into development work. Brazil fitted in.

“It was good of him to travel such a long distance for my sake,” I thought. “I think I'll just sit here and listen to him for a while.”

I sat down where I was and tried to hear what he was saying. Because of the terrain and the wind. I could not make out everything the loudspeaker said, but I caught enough to know that Tadao was talking with his customary eloquence. He had once won the All-Japan Middle School Debating Contest, and he seemed to be making good use of his experience in that field.

I decided to postpone going to Looc and stay a while longer on the east slope overlooking the Vigo River. I had plenty of food, and there now seemed to be no great hurry to go to Looc. I might as well stay here and observe the search party a little longer.

At the time of the 1959 search party, I thought someone had been imitating my brother Toshio's voice, but this time the voices, both Chie's and Tadao's, were definitely theirs. This seemed to mean that the new search party had actually come from Japan and not from the American intelligence corps. I wanted to make sure of this point.

One evening about two weeks later, on the forty-fifth day after Kozuka's death, I went over to the place where he had been shot, with the intention of saying a prayer to comfort his spirit. Presumably the search party had wearied of looking here. Their activities in the area had all but ceased; I could hear no pleas from the loudspeaker.

As I came out of the bushes and approached the small hill from the rear, I found a book with the rising sun on the cover. On the flyleaf, in my brother's hand, there was a message saying,
“You probably have things to say to me before we talk together. Tear out the flyleaf and write them down on it. If you leave it here, I'll receive it.”

The writing was without doubt Tadao's, and I was now completely convinced that he was on Lubang.

Here, near Kozuka's grave, I was afraid that there might be enemy guards around. I kept hearing a noise that I was not accustomed to. Releasing the safety lock on my rifle, I walked cautiously on, my pack still on my back.

Last year, walking along a road that the islanders had built to make it easier to transport their rice, I had sung to myself a song about wartime comrades:

My friend lies under a stone in the field,

Lightened by the soft rays of the evening sun. . . .

After making sure no one was around, I looked up and in the darkness made out a Japanese flag flapping in the breeze. This was the odd noise I had heard. I sighed with relief.

As I drew near the
doha
tree, I saw that a large tombstone had been erected at the spot where Kozuka had fallen. Peering so closely that my face almost touched the stone, I made out large engraved characters saying: “Death Place of Army Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka.” Before the tombstone someone had placed a wreath of flowers and some incense. I knew from the way the marker had been set up that it had been placed there by Japanese.

I clasped my hands in prayer as I silently spoke to Kozuka: “I made things difficult for you, didn't I? You must have suffered a lot. I'm sorry I had fights and arguments with you. Go back to Japan ahead of me, and don't worry about me. I will avenge your death whatever happens. Being alone has not made me weak. Be at peace.”

In my ears rang his last words, “It's no use!” I was all tight in the chest.

The moon came up, and in its pale light I could make out the outlines of Ambil Island in the distance. As I came back from the hill, I thought again of the song about comrades:

Faithful to the Five Teachings,

Lying a corpse on the battlefield.

From old the warrior's conviction:

Though not one single hair remains,

No one can regret dying for honor.

I sang under the moonlight until my mind was at rest again. As I sang, I thought repeatedly of the pledge I had made before Kozuka's tombstone.

To avoid danger, I decided again that I must leave the vicinity of Kozuka's grave as soon as possible. I fixed on Agcawayan plain as my destination.

Next day around noon, I reached the plain and saw a Japanese flag flying in the middle of it. Apparently this was the search party's current headquarters.

I decided that on the following morning I would leave my hiding place before eating and go up in the valley for fresh water, taking a look around as I did so. In the course of carrying out this operation, I found a large number of discarded dry-cell batteries, as well as books, newspapers and leaflets. I picked these up and started back for my hideout but discovered to my surprise that I could not find it. There were a lot of little ridges around there; they all looked pretty much alike. I began to worry. I had my gun with me, but I had left behind all my spare ammunition. If it was found, the enemy would know where I was.

I do not remember ever being so frantic. It took me until the next day at noon to locate the hiding place. Sweating as much from anxiety as from heat, I must have searched every hill in the area except the right one, and at times I was no more than fifty yards away from it.

This would not have happened if Kozuka had been around. If there had been two of us, one of us would have stayed in the hiding place and would have seen the other searching for it.

The newspapers devoted a lot of space to Kozuka's death, and I went over all the articles very thoroughly. They said, among other things, that I myself seemed to have received a leg injury in the skirmish. That was untrue, and there were a number of other discrepancies in the stories.

What struck me as most peculiar was that none of the newspapers said a single word about Kozuka's “thousand-stitch waistband,” which he had worn every day during his years on Lubang. A “thousand-stitch waistband” was a piece of cotton cloth in which each of a departing soldier's family and friends sewed one stitch, often attaching a coin or writing a short inscription. Many Japanese soldiers wore bands like this around their waists for good luck, and Kozuka was never without his. The newspapers not only failed to mention the waistband, but made the mistake of reporting that Kozuka had had a five-sen piece and a ten-sen piece
in his pocket
, when in fact they had been attached to the waistband. It looked to me as though the error must have been made on purpose. In any event, I came to the conclusion that these newspapers, like the others, had been doctored.

Kozuka's waistband had been a length of pink cloth on which there was a picture of a tiger. The coins, which his family had given him as good-luck pieces, were sewn on with red thread. Kozuka once told me, “I had to leave suddenly, and I had to use this cheap store-bought cloth. There wasn't time to make a proper ‘thousand-stitch waistband.' It's terrible material. I'm surprised it is still holding together. There ought to be a law against merchants selling this flimsy pink rayon to soldiers going to the front.”

Every year near the end of the rainy season, we repaired our clothes, and I remembered that this year I had seen Kozuka make a strong black waistband and wrap the pink one in it.

Why the newspapers would suppress the information about the waistband was a mystery to me. After pondering over this for some time, I arrived at a tentative conclusion.

Unlike the search party of 1959, the new expedition was actually sent by the Japanese goverment. The search, however, was only a pretext, the real purpose being to send a team of Japanese reconnaissance experts to conduct a detailed survey of Lubang. According to the news on the radio, Japan had become a large economic power, and it might well be that one aim of the search party was to spread a lot of money around Lubang and win the islanders over to the Japanese side. The appeals to me to come out, then, were intended to throw American intelligence off the track. Under cover of the ostensible search for me, Japanese agents would photograph every strategic point on the island and prepare detailed reports on the terrain and conditions among the people.