Ninja (34 page)

As leaflet followed leaflet, each was interpreted as a fake. Here was a picture of Onoda-san's family. But why the presence of a nonfamily member? Why the honorific
san
, if the picture was intended for him alone? And here was Kozuka's family
in front of a new house.
“How do they expect me to believe this?” he scoffed, unaware of the Allied bombing raids and the shattered cities. And the leaflets were on poor-quality paper; which meant they were being mass produced; which meant they were being dropped all over the Philippines; which meant there must be hundreds if not thousands of guerrillas out there; that explained the honorific
san
, quite suitable if the picture was being seen by nonfamily men; all of which meant the war was still on. And the nonfamily person in the family picture? Obviously a warning not to take any of the leaflets seriously.

“With both sides sending all sorts of messages like this,” said Onoda to Kozuka, “the Japanese counter-attack must be coming soon.”

In the absence of what they considered hard information, anything and everything fed their fantasy that the Japanese were fighting back, regaining what had been lost. Bombs that were dropped in target areas by the Philippine Air Force must have been to stop Japanese guerrilla units from landing. A loudspeaker announcement claimed to be from the former chief of staff of the naval air force. A
naval
man coming to look for
army
men? Transparently ridiculous! Believing that a landing was imminent on Lubang's south coast, the two determined to keep it safe by scaring away locals. All attempts at contact, of which there were many, were simply seen as enemy agents blocking them from contacting other Japanese agents. Each time they heard a loudspeaker, they moved away.

The fact was that after fifteen years the two of them were so fixed in their ideas that they were unable to understand anything that did not fit in with them. It's a common human condition, the idée fixe. Once programmed into the mind, it acts as a lens that either distorts all that passes through it to fit the image or else rejects what cannot be made to fit. Such obsessions have had horribly real consequences. Witness the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages, which caused the burning of hundreds of innocent women. Self-delusion is a staple of comedy and drama in theater, film, and fiction. Malvolio is made to believe that Olivia loves him, cross-gartering and all, and is judged mad as a result; Jed Parry in Ian McEwan's novel
Enduring Love
interprets every rejection by Joe, the object of his obsession, as a come-on. So it was with Onoda. “If there was anything that did not fit, we interpreted it to mean whatever we wanted it to mean.”

In 1959, reality almost broke through. A loudspeaker called: “This is your brother Toshio. Kozuka's brother Fukuji has come with me. This is our last day here. Please come out where we can see you.” At first Onoda thought it was a recording. He crept closer, and was amazed to see what really seemed to be his brother. Yes, “he was built like my brother, and his voice was identical.”

Then he had second thoughts. “That's really something. They've found a prisoner who looks at a distance like my brother, and he's learned to imitate my brother's voice perfectly.”

The man began to sing a student song that both of them knew from school, which almost had Onoda convinced but then went off key. Onoda laughed. The impersonator couldn't keep it up. He had given himself away. Onoda and Kozuka remained hidden, watched as the search party sadly left, then slipped back into the jungle. (Soon after this, in December 1959, Onoda was officially declared dead, along with Kozuka. They had supposedly been killed five years before in a clash with Philippine troops.)

The search party left behind a stack of newspapers and magazines, with countless articles about life in postwar Japan. Fakes! When Onoda left Japan, the war had been going badly, but the nation had sworn to fight to the last man, woman, and child. “One hundred million souls dying for honor” had been the phrase on everyone's lips. If Japan had lost the war, there wouldn't be any life! Everyone would be dead! If they weren't, Japan could not have lost the war. Indeed, it seemed to be winning, since it was obviously prosperous. Naturally, fourteen years after the end of the war, there was no mention of the flattened cities, the atomic bomb, the surrender, the occupation, the reconstruction—all the developments that might have allowed a truer interpretation of the articles.

Slowly, a new and utterly false picture of the modern world formed in their minds. Sure, Japan was now democratic. But it must still have an empire—its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere—because there were good relations with former enemies. If China was communist, it must be under Japanese auspices. That was how the Americans and English had been driven from China. Presumably the Dutch had been driven from Java and Sumatra. Perhaps Siberia was also in the empire. No doubt the war was still being fought in the outer fringes, for after all, Onoda had been taught that it might take one hundred years of war to build the empire.

One article was a particular challenge. It was about him and the school: “Secret Mission on Lubang: What Did the Nakano School Order Lt. Onoda to Do?” Reviewing the history of the school, it said no one was quite sure who had issued his orders. Like a theologian wrestling to reconcile scripture with some alleged piece of evidence, Onoda took a while to see that this, too, was fake. Of
course
the school knew who had issued his orders. It was all there in the records. This was merely a way for his bosses to send him a message: Hang on, Onoda! We haven't forgotten you.

Hanging on demanded ever higher degrees of ingenuity. The solutions they found to the problems of survival would make a fine field guide to self-sufficiency. They learned to deal with rats, swarms of bees, ants of many species (including five that stung like bees), centipedes with poisonous bites, and scorpions. They became superb ecologists, working out how to catch rats and snare jungle fowl. They discovered how best to deal with the steamy, one-hundred-degree heat of May, the July rains, when it poured so hard you couldn't see ten meters, the second rainy season in September, the balmy days of October to December, the relative coolness of January and February (though the temperature could still go up to eighty-five degrees F). A major concern was where to spend the rainy season, during which they couldn't move around. With their tents long gone, they built anew each year. The spot, with a suitable tree to act as an anchor for the hut, had to be on sloping ground for good drainage, safe from intrusion, on the eastern side of the mountains for coolness, not too near a village to avoid their fire being spotted, but near banana fields and coconut groves, all of which had to be planned without knowing exactly when the rains would come. There weren't many such places, and once identified they used the same ones every three or four years. At the first downpour, they would strip the tree of branches, use one for a ridge pole, bind the others to it with vines, and make a roof of palm leaves. Flat rocks made a stove. At the end of the rainy season, they tore the hut down, scattered the site with mud and branches, and again began a nomadic life, sleeping in the open fully dressed. “During the whole thirty years, I never once took off my trousers at night.” If it rained, they got wet.

Their clothes rotted and split. They needed a needle to patch them. Onoda made one by sharpening a piece of wire, using a hemp-like plant for thread. Occasionally, they requisitioned American goods—canteens, tents, shoes, blankets—from stores made by the islanders. They made sandals from old inner tubes or sneaker soles. They camouflaged themselves by using fishing line to sew twigs and leaves to their jackets. They ate bananas, ripe if possible, but often bitter green ones, skin and all, sliced and boiled in coconut milk with dried meat to take away the bitterness.

Three cows a year kept them in meat, supplemented by a water buffalo or horse now and then. Onoda gives a lesson in how to kill and prepare a cow. It takes about an hour for two men. Start just before dark when the villagers have gone home. Shoot the cow from no more than seventy meters to fell it, using only one shot, preferably in the rain to muffle the sound. Finish off the fallen cow by smashing its head with a stone and/or stabbing it in the heart with a bayonet. It is lying on its side. Cut off the two upper legs, slice it down the middle of the belly, strip back the skin, turn it over, and repeat. Remove the heart, liver, sweetbreads, and other innards, and put them in a sack. After the butchery, with the meat on your back, haul the carcass away as far as possible in darkness and hide it to prevent the villagers putting two and two together. Fresh meat lasted a few days, boiled meat for ten, dried meat—smoked over an open fire—for four months.

Salt they either gathered from brine on the shore or from the islanders' salt pans. There was never a shortage of water, though they feared contamination from cattle and always boiled it. Rice was kept clear of ants in bags placed in five-gallon cans. Coconuts provided copra, milk (for soup), and fibers that made reasonable toothbrushes. At every campsite they dug a toilet pit, leaving the soil available to fill it in when they left. They used palm leaves for toilet paper. Every day, they examined their shit and urine, modifying diet and activity if anything looked wrong. It worked well. Onoda developed a fever twice in thirty years; Kozuka impaled his heel on thorns twice, causing his leg to swell. Otherwise, no health problems.

Through all this, they remained soldiers, looking after their weapons, hoarding their ammunition, keeping it dry in ammunition pouches made of rubber sneakers. Onoda had several hundred rounds of machine-gun ammunition, which he modified to fire as single shots from his rifle. He carried sixty cartridges with him, just in case of trouble, but used them only infrequently, to scare off locals or shoot cows. Faulty and rusty cartridges were opened to release the gunpowder, which was used as tinder, ignited by focusing sunlight through a stolen lens. Spare ammunition was squirreled away in holes stopped with rocks.

Life improved over time. Their expertise grew, and they learned how to “requisition”—that is, steal—from locals with impunity. Besides, the islanders were increasingly well off, so Onoda's life improved with theirs. “Life in the jungle was never easy, but so far as food, clothing and utensils were concerned, it was easier in the later years than in the first five or ten.”

Long-term survival is not all about technique. Underlying the technical skills is emotional and psychological health, as I learned when involved in several media projects on the subject of survival—a TV series and three radio series. There has been a good deal of research into post-traumatic stress disorder, focusing mainly on the malign effects of life-threatening events. I was interested in the opposite: why some seem to come through such events better than others, without ill effects. The plain fact is that some people are better survivors than others, both during and after the event. Naturally, academic research has focused on those who suffer. Those who don't have been less studied. But my interviews suggested to me some guidelines:

•  
Have a long-term aim,
an agenda that makes you look beyond your own immediate concerns. This may be no more than a determination to return to a wife, or friends, or beloved children. It may be a whole philosophy or belief system. In German concentration camps, for example, two groups tended to survive slightly better than others: Seventh-day Adventists and Communists. They did so because their experience reinforced their worldviews. Seventh-day Adventists were certain the Last Days were at hand and that they would be chosen for salvation. Communists, taught that capitalism would collapse, saw around them proof that Marx's prediction was coming true. In brief, these two groups saw themselves as part of a great historical process. The truth or falsity of the belief is not important, because that can only be established in different circumstances. In the extreme and usually brief conditions of an extermination or labor camp, a belief system may help. In Onoda's case, it certainly did. His suffering was for a purpose. He knew why he had to survive.

•  
Be wary of faith.
Belief is not always a prop. Those with a naïve faith that God is on their side and will be on hand to help are, on the whole, disappointed. In the concentration camps, God was notably absent, and many simply despaired. Despair can do strange things to minds. Take one of my interviewees, Bob Tininenko. He and his brother-in-law were sailing south from Seattle in a catamaran when a storm overturned them. The two were trapped in the hull. Improvising hammocks swinging just above the surface, Bob set about the task of survival by rationing the remaining stores. But the brother-in-law was a fundamentalist Christian who believed not only that God would save them but that any attempt to save themselves would be to preempt God's intervention. In order to allow God to act in his own time, he actually threw away some of the rations—an extreme example of faith undermining survival (he died; Bob survived). Onoda was not encumbered by a faith in a personal, interventionist god. He knew that no one was going to help him but himself.

•  
Accept the possibility of your own death.
This removes a crucial threat—panic, which is one of the prime causes of death in the early days of catastrophe. There is a paradox here: To say to yourself “I accept that I may die tomorrow” frees you to add a corollary—“but not today, not yet, not here.” That in turn opens the possibility of survival for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a life. Accept death, find life—that was what Onoda did.

•  
Be familiar with your environment.
Two of my interviewees come to mind.
¹
The first was a young German woman, Juliane Köpcke, who was on a plane flying from Lima to Pucallpa on the upper Amazon basin when a lightning storm broke the plane apart, killing ninety-two passengers, including her mother, all except Juliane herself. Still strapped in her seat, she fell several thousand meters, hit the forest canopy, and woke up, on the jungle floor, with a few bruises and a cracked collarbone. She then walked for some ten days through the jungle, until she came across people. Her big advantage was that she was on home territory. Her parents were zoologists, and she knew what she could eat (in fact, nothing but some cake she retrieved from the crash) and what to avoid, and also knew that following a stream downriver would not only give her fresh water but also lead her to civilization. When I met her, she was back in the same area, researching bats.