In Signs of Life, Werner Herzog's 1968 directorial debut, three German soldiers are dispatched to a serene corner of the Reich to guard a repository of ammunition in a crumbling 14th-century fortress. On the Greek island of Kos, they find peace in a world and war and fall into varying states of listlessness while next to nothing happens around them. Instead of killing the enemy they kill time. Eventually, one of the trio, named Stroszek, snaps. After a quixotic rampage against a field of windmills, he hears that his time on the island might be coming to an end. In a fit of madness, Stroszek seizes control of the fortress, where he takes potshots at the Greek islanders and his fellow German castaways in a one-man siege.
While the then 25-year-old Herzog was shooting Sighs of Life on an out-of-the-way island, halfway around the world, Hiroo Onoda was still shooting at Pilipino islanders on another as part of his 30-year struggle as a Japanese holdout. While serving as a foot soldier in China, Onoda had been selected for special intelligence and guerrilla training, where he was immersed in the techniques of "secret warfare". Unlike his fellow troops, Onoda was forbidden from taking his own life and was trusted to supply the enemy with false information upon capture. When he arrived on the 48-square mile island of Lubang in December 1944, he had two jobs, to destroy a pier and an airfield in order to hamper American forces when they took control from the retreating imperial army. He failed to accomplish either. In the days that followed, those who could retreat did so, while those who could not, chose suicide. But Onoda was on a secret mission and, unlike most Japanese fighters during the Second World War, had been explicitly ordered to stay alive and hold the island. "You will be like a ghost", his commanding officer told him, "elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy… It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we'll come back for you." When the allies arrived on Lubang, Onoda recruited three of his fellow fighters and together they sunk into the jungle, where they would fight on for the next three decades.
Herzog's new novel, The Twilight World, is a romantic retelling of Onoda's bizarre adventure. Shortly after Japan's surrender, leaflets fall on Lubang, informing the holdouts that it was safe to surrender, but Onoda spots clumsy errors in the translations. Fake news. The enemy, he tells his three subordinates, is trying to trick them. Nothing and nobody can be trusted. From then on, the holdouts survive on a diet of bananas, coconuts and water buffalo. They change their camp as often as they can to avoid detection, fires are only lit in dense mist and when it rains, they walk backwards along the jungle paths to leave misleading footprints in the mud. From here on in, the jungle engulfs the prose like wisteria.
As the years pass, Onoda's comrades fall away. In 1949, Private Yuichi Akatsu deserts and lives alone in the jungle for six months until he surrenders. Five years later, Corporal Shōichi Shimada is killed in a shootout with a search party who were sent to help. And in 1972, after over a quarter of a century of insurgency, Private Kinshichi Kozuka is shot and killed by local police. Onoda is alone, the lethal living embodiment of a lost world, trapped in an event "extorted from eternity".
The Twilight World is a minimalist novella. The soldiers are presented as good-natured, unfortunate and largely passive in the face of the jungle and the hostility of the Filipinos. Herzog's Onoda is a time capsule carrying the religious and ideological devotion of the 1930s and 40s into the post-war world, but he is little more than that. Throughout the text, we learn little of his early life in Japan or his emigration to occupied Wuhan as a civilian. Nor do we follow him home after his war is over. Instead, he fights and survives, occasionally noticing bombers on their way to ignite the battlefields of Korea and later, of Vietnam, and wondering how the war is going or, when Japanese newspapers are left out for him to read, if the whole conflict only exists in his imagination. But it is Herzog's imagination that obscures the lost soul of a more complicated human experience on Lubang and beyond.
Thankfully, Onoda was not a typical Japanese soldier. If he had been, Japan and a myriad of Pacific islands would have suffered from decades of needless violence after 1945. Herzog's Onoda is solemn and stoic. But to understand the full extent of his fanaticism, it helps to read his autobiography, published shortly after his re-emergence in 1974. In No Surrender: My Thirty Year War, Onoda paints himself as an elite fighter with elite knowledge, not just of guerrilla tactics but of the dynamics of the entire conflict. He even claims to have known that the Americans were working on nuclear weapons prior to his deployment in 1944. At the beginning of his mission, Onoda has little regard for his fellow Japanese fighters, "a bunch of idiots". But once he finds himself in command of three subordinates surrounded by enemies, his only power over them is the fiction of an ongoing war. Throughout their time on Lubang, the stragglers were repeatedly informed that the war had ended. From 1959 onwards, stacks of Japanese newspapers, local and national, were left for them to find. They covered preparation for the 1960 Toyko Olympics, the construction of a high-speed bullet train and multiple articles about the soldiers themselves, including interviews with friends and family. Onoda called them "poison candy" and persuaded his one surviving comrade, Kozuka, that the Americans had edited the papers to carefully insert news that might lure them out of the forest. In late 1965, Ondoa and Kozuka stole a radio and listened to news about the war in Vietnam from the NHK in Tokyo and the BBC World Service in London. This time the crafty Americans had recorded real Japanese broadcasts and spliced them with propaganda aimed at Japanese soldiers holding out on every island in the Pacific. "The Americans are really good at this, aren't they?", remarked a bewildered Kozuka. Once Onoda had invested himself in the long war, there could be no turning back. It was only after Kozuka’s death, when there was nobody left to say 'I told you so', that Onoda felt like he could come out of hiding.
The rest of the Onoda family are seemly as lost to Herzog as they were to Hiroo. This does a disservice to the reader. In 1958 a loudspeaker could be heard from one of the island's peaks. "Hiroo, come out. This is your brother Toshio." Onoda crept towards the voice until he saw a man with a build and a voice identical to that of his brother, whom he hadn't seen for 14 years. "Now that's really something", Onoda thought to himself, "they've found a Nisei (a term used to describe second-generation Japanese immigrants) or a prisoner who looks, at a distance like my brother, and he's learned to imitate my brother's voice perfectly." In one last attempt to coax his brother out, Toshio started singing a song from the playground of they Tokyo school they had both attended, but his voice fell away and Onoda convinced himself that the impersonator had reached his limit. When the pair were reunited a decade and a half later, Toshio explained that as he was singing the song, he remembered that he had to fly back to Japan the next day. It was his last day on Lubang and his last chance to find Onoda before he left. He choked up and burst into tears. "So you did hear me after all." Stories like this, many of which can only be read in No Surrender, make Herzog's tightly framed novella feel like a lost opportunity.
War crimes are another problem for Herzog to swerve. About 30 to 50 people are thought to have been killed by the four Japanese soldiers who fought on Lubang after the war, many of them farmers and fishermen. Onoda later claimed that the local police blamed him for every unsolved crime on the island. Perhaps they did. But in a BBC documentary broadcast in 2001, an elderly farmer remembered one of Onoda's victims, "the body was found in one place, and the head in another… two other people who were with water buffalo in the hills were shot dead as they ran for their lives". Onoda, the farmer recalled, was "the cause of our misery". Once again, this isn't the silhouette of the soldier we find in The Twilight World. When Kozuka wants to steal a tin of sugar from a village in November 1945, Herzog's Onoda rebukes him because "they were soldiers, not thieves". The real Onoda was more hawkish in No Surrender when he tried to justify his raids on civilians, who he sometimes kidnapped and interrogated at gunpoint: "it is normal in guerrilla warfare to try to acquire guns, ammunition, food, clothing and other supplies from the enemy. Since the islanders were aiding the enemy taskforces that came to look for us we considered them enemies too." Herzog and Onoda both seem to have regarded the islanders as little more than nameless collateral damage. Ikeda Shin, Onoda's ghost-writer, would eventually publish his own book about the holdouts, Fantasy Island. He didn't think his subject was brave or heroic and wanted to repent for his contribution to the militaristic mythology that had led to millions of death and countless war crimes in the name of the Emperor. And yet, a moralising account of Onoda's extraordinary life would be just as limited as Herzog's reiteration of the popular legend. What's lost, in both cases, is the experience of sharing an island with four men fighting the last world war. How did it feel to be haunted by the remnants of the Japanese army? What was it like to look out at tree-covered mountains and know they were inhabited by armed insurgents fighting an imaginative world war alongside Hitler and Mussolini while their old enemies sat on sofas thousands of miles away listening to Elton John and watching the second series of M*A*S*H? By the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the people of Lubang had been trapped in an eerie microcosm of 1945 for 24 years.
“Most details are factually correct, some are not,” reads Herzog’s disclaimer, “what was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.” And an essence of the subject is there. The stoic and unflinching Onoda of The Twilight World, who missed his family and who looked up at that moon to ponder the oncology of war and the passing of time, was very real. But so was the rest of him, not least the perpetual paranoia that discarded all the evidence running contrary to the crusade or the fanatical obstinance that squandered the lives of three obedient soldiers and dozens of civilians. If there’s a tragedy to Onda’s cultural legacy, it’s that none of these realities needed to be mutually exclusive.