On January 24, 1972, two local fishermen in Guam, Jesus Mantanona Duenas and Manuel Tolentino De Gracia, were inspecting shrimp traps along the Talofofo River when they noticed unusual movement on a nearby hillside.
Moments later, a frail, undernourished man emerged from the tall grass and lunged toward one of their rifles. After a brief struggle, the fishermen managed to restrain him and tied his hands.
They took the stranger to Duenas’ house, where he revealed an extraordinary story: he was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in the Imperial Japanese Army who had survived in the jungle since World War II ended.
For nearly 28 years, he had lived in isolation, convinced that the war was not truly over, reports Tokyo Weekender.
Throughout those decades, Yokoi held onto the belief that his fellow soldiers would eventually return for him.
Even when he was finally discovered, at the age of 57, he remained certain that his life was under threat. “He really panicked,” recalls his nephew, Omi Hatashin.
After decades without contact with other people, the sudden appearance of the fishermen terrified Yokoi. Acting on instinct, he attempted to seize one of their weapons. However, years of malnutrition had left him too weak to overpower them.
“He feared they would take him as a prisoner of war – that would have been the greatest shame for a Japanese soldier and for his family back home,” Hatashin explains.
As the fishermen escorted him through the dense jungle grass, Yokoi begged them to end his life immediately rather than let him be captured.
Drawing on Yokoi’s own memoirs published in Japanese two years after he was found and the accounts of the men who encountered him, Hatashin spent years reconstructing his uncle’s life in hiding. The result was his book,
Private Yokoi’s War and Life on Guam, 1944–1972, which was released in English in 2009.
“I am very proud of him. He was a shy and quiet person, but with a great presence,” Hatashin says, reports BBC. Yokoi’s years in concealment began in July 1944, when US forces invaded Guam during their Pacific campaign against Japan.
Intense fighting followed, and after Japanese command structures collapsed, scattered soldiers like Yokoi were left on their own.
“From the outset they took enormous care not to be detected, erasing their footprints as they moved through the undergrowth,” Hatashin said.
In the initial period, the remaining Japanese troops once numbering in the dozens survived by hunting and slaughtering local cattle.
Over time, however, fear of detection by US patrols and later by island residents forced them deeper into the jungle.
Their diet became increasingly desperate. They survived on creatures such as poisonous toads, rats, and river eels. Yokoi crafted eel traps from wild reeds and eventually built an underground shelter reinforced with sturdy bamboo.
“He was an extremely resourceful man,” Hatashin notes. Staying occupied was essential to Yokoi’s survival, helping him avoid dwelling on his isolation or the family he had left behind, his nephew adds.
Yokoi’s memoirs reveal a man determined not to abandon hope, even during the final eight years when he lived entirely alone after his last two companions were swept away by floods in 1964.
Thinking of his elderly mother in Japan, he once wrote: “It was pointless to cause my heart pain by dwelling on such things.”
Recounting a moment of severe illness in the jungle, he wrote: “No! I cannot die here. I cannot expose my corpse to the enemy. I must go back to my hole to die. I have so far managed to survive but all is coming to nothing now.”
Just two weeks after being found, Yokoi was flown back to Japan, where he was greeted as a national symbol of endurance. Media attention quickly surrounded him, he appeared on television and radio and was frequently invited to speak at schools and universities.
Hatashin, who was six years old when Yokoi married his aunt, says his uncle struggled to adapt to post-war Japanese society.
He was critical of the country’s rapid economic transformation and once remarked upon seeing a new 10,000-yen note that the money had become “valueless”.
As he aged, Yokoi grew increasingly reflective and attached to the past. Before his death in 1997, he returned to Guam several times with his wife.
Today, some of the tools he relied on during his years in hiding, including his eel traps are displayed in a small museum on the island, preserving the memory of one of the longest and most remarkable wartime survivals.
