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Monday, November 24, 2008

HOM: Guam

Guam was pretty, white beaches and green mountains. When we sailed into port, there was a nuclear sub tied up at a pier. Their five missile hatches were open, and had one letter painted on the inside of each.
A L O H A
The message seemed apt. Once we were in port & tied up in Apra Harbor on the Orote Naval Base, some of us took a taxi to "Downtown Agana". There wasn't much there in those days. Guam did have a surplus of carry-overs from WWII. One of them was named Shoichi Yokoi, who was captured two years after I left. Shōichi Yokoi, (March 31, 1915–September 22, 1997) was a Japanese soldier and, later, celebrity. Born in Saori, Aichi Prefecture, he was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941 and sent to Guam shortly thereafter. As American forces reconquered the island in the 1944 Battle of Guam, Yokoi went into hiding. Yokoi hunted primarily at night and used much of the native plants to form clothes, bedding, and storage implements, which he carefully hid in his cave. Yokoi feared harsh reprisals if he fell into the hands of the residents of Guam, due to the cruel treatment that the occupational Japanese Army had meted out during the occupation of Guam. For twenty-eight years, he hid in an underground jungle cave, fearing to come out of hiding even after finding leaflets declaring that World War II had ended. This has therefore made him the third-to-last Japanese soldier to surrender after the war, before Hiroo Onoda and Teruo Nakamura. Yokoi, who had been a tailor's apprentice before being drafted in 1941, made clothing from the fibers of wild hibiscus plants and survived on a diet of coconuts, breadfruit, papayas, snails, eels and rats. "We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive," Yokoi said in 1972. "The only thing that gave me the strength and will to survive was my faith in myself and that as a soldier of Japan, it was not a disgrace to continue on living," Yokoi said in 1986. No one in the history of humanity, except stragglers later discovered in Philippines, has equaled his record. Few have struggled with loneliness, fear, and self for as long as twenty-eight years. On the evening of January 24, 1972, Yokoi was discovered in the jungle. He was found by Jesus Duenas and Manuel DeGracia, two local men who were checking their shrimp traps along a small river on Talofofo. They had initially assumed that Yokoi was a villager from Talofofo, but managed to surprise and subdue him, carrying him out of the jungle with minor bruising. "It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive," he said upon his return to Japan, carrying his rusted rifle at his side. The remark would later become a popular saying in Japanese. He would eventually receive the equivalent of $300 in back pay, along with a small pension. TBC (Me) (Home)

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