On March 9, 1974, the world was shocked to see a Japanese soldier emerge from the jungle on the Philippine island of Lubang, almost thirty years after the Pacific War ended. The popular media narrative was that intelligence officer Lt. Onoda Hiroo didn’t know that Japan had surrendered and that nobody knew he was there. The truth is much more complicated than that and has a lot to teach us about the lengths to which we go to modify reality to conform to our beliefs.
As one historian wryly puts it, Onoda and two comrades (who were killed in shootouts with locals in 1954 and 1972) survived by shooting local people and stealing their food. After each sighting, the Japanese government sent search parties—including the soldiers’ family members—to the island, dropping newspapers from aircraft and announcing on loudspeakers that the war was over.
But, as Onoda wrote in his memoir, they “had developed so many fixed ideas that we were unable to understand anything that did not conform with them.” They crafted bizarre, convoluted alternative explanations for a truth they could not bear.
Sound familiar? It should. An absurdly large number of Americans are now wandering in the jungle of their own fantasies, literally shooting and terrorizing the locals, because they can’t handle the truth.
Onoda later expressed resentment toward the emperor for making him a “slave.” I hope it doesn’t take thirty years for thirty percent of our fellow Americans to recognize their own mental slavery.
I’m Taylor Atkins and that’s my perspective.
