something must be hiro onoda The interest of a German writer (and director) like Werner Herzog and a French director like him Arthur Harari. Last year, the first published novel ‘Twilight of the world’, dedicated to it Japanese soldier who spent thirty years on the Philippine island He is convinced that World War II is not over and there is still a chance to win it. The novel was published in Spanish by Blackie Books. Harari’s movie ‘Onoda, 10,000 nights in the woods’premiered on Friday. The book and the movie share many things, the choice of what they tell is different.
The ‘Fitzcarraldo’ director’s admiration for Onoda goes back even further. In his novel, he describes how he made a mistake by refusing the invitation of the Japanese emperor while in Tokyo to direct the production of an opera in 1997. In return, He said he wanted to meet Onoda very much. And so it happened. Twenty years later, at a meeting at the Cannes festival, Herzog met Harari, and perhaps it was then that they exchanged ideas about such a fascinating character.
a mythological character
Onoda could have been the hero of a Herzog movie. This As mythological as Lope de Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde or Dieter Dengler, A German soldier fighting US forces and captured in Vietnam, to which Herzog dedicates a documentary and fiction starring Christian Bale. Like them, his vital experience, life in the jungle, at the end of the world. The director chose to make him the hero of a fictional document, which is set up like the pages of a very selective newspaper. He did something similar in the movie Harari.
But what makes it so special that Hiro Onoda has created so many literary and cinematographic passions? As described in the movie, the young soldier was inside. a dead end on a personal level When he was recruited by General Yoshimi Taniguchi for a strategic mission essential to success in the Pacific campaign. He was then 22 years old.
an impossible task
Born in 1922, Onoda became an intelligence officer and was in charge of a secret war devised by his superior. for him It was moved to the Philippine island of Lubang in December 1944. He remained there until mid-1974.. His task was to organize a guerrilla war. However, from the very beginning, the soldiers under his responsibility faced the opposite opinion. Nobody believed in this mission. Two months later, on February 23, 1945, the Americans captured the island. On September 2 of that year, Japan signed an unconditional surrender.
Onoda was losing his men; they fell victim to starvation, disease, desertion, or attacks by Filipino guerrillas and fishermen. However he still believed that the war was not over – or convinced himself that it should be –. Harari shows him in a few scenes where he listens to the radio news thanks to a small transistor found in a village. in the room believed what he heard was part of a US disinformation strategy and, according to Herzog, China began to think that Siberia, Laos, and India had formed an alliance on a new axis to fight the allies. Nor did he take into account the leaflets thrown on the island, announcing the end of the war.
delivery
Things started to change when the Japanese student entered the scene. Norio Suzuki. He reached Lubang, set up camp, set up the speakers, and played a tape recording of Onoda’s favorite song. She came down from the mountains and spoke to him. Finally, Suzuki convinced him. in the room He surrendered only when ordered by his superior, Taniguchi.who later retired from the army and worked as a bookseller. In the middle of the forest, in front of Taniguchi, Onoda surrendered his uniform, sword and weapons. Onoda was born on March 11, 1974, 28 and a half years after Japan’s surrender. He presented his sword to Ferdinand Marcos, president of the Philippines, with a ceremony..
Onoda lived until 2014, while Suzuki died very young in 1986. On his return to Japan, Onoda took up politics and published his memoirs. Finally, He went to Brazil and devoted himself to raising cattle. He returned to Japan in the mid-1980s, though he was not the last Japanese soldier of the war. Teruo Nakamura was arrested on the Indonesian island of Morotai in December 1974, but confined himself to a hut and stopped fighting in the mid-1950s.