The Last Soldier

On the tiny (209 sq. mi.) Pacific island of Guam, two fishermen last week pounced on a ragged, furtive little man whom they had spotted tending a fish trap in the Talofofo River, and turned him over to the police for questioning. To his incredulous interrogators, the man announced that he was Shoichi Yokoi, 56, a sergeant in the 38th Infantry Regiment of the old Japanese Imperial Army. He had been hiding out in the jungles of Guam since U.S. forces recaptured the island during a month-long siege in the summer of 1944. From a leaflet that he found one day, Yokoi had known for 20 years that the war was over. But he had refused to surrender, he said, because "we Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive."

Despite his incredible ordeal, Yokoi proved to be in remarkably good health. While resting in a Guam hospital, he told reporters about his experience as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. "At first," he said, "there were ten of us, lying low and dodging the enemy." One by one, the others died or gave themselves up, and for the past eight years Yokoi had to fend for himself. He kept time by marking a "calendar" tree at each full moon. Food in the jungle was plentiful, and he survived on a diet of mangoes, nuts, crabs, prawns, snails, rats, eels, pigeons and wild hog. A tailor before he was drafted in 1941, Yokoi had kept a pair of scissors, with which he trimmed his hair and cut cloth that he made from tree-bark fibers for clothes. His home was a subterranean cave in the jungle with a floor of soft leaves, and lit by a coconut-oil lamp that he had made.

Yokoi was quite bewildered by his sudden return to civilization. He knew vaguely what jets were--"those strange planes whose wings are all swept back"--but he had not known that the emperor whom he had served so faithfully was now a mere mortal instead of a god. One of Yokoi's first questions to reporters was on a political matter: "Tell me one thing quick: Is Roosevelt dead?" The ex-sergeant burst into tears when told that his mother had died.

Yokoi became an instant hero in Japan, and he will be given a triumphal welcome this week in Tokyo, and later in his hometown of Nagoya, where there is a tombstone bearing his name in a graveyard. The Japanese government offered Yokoi a $320 cash token of sympathy--his accrued back pay amounts to only about $129--and chartered a jet to fly him home. Thousands of Japanese citizens have come forward with gifts, ranging from job proposals to electric blankets and a lifetime pass to a hotel's bath. All in all, Yokoi may find modern life as much of an ordeal as existence in the jungle. "It's all like a dream, and I'm afraid of waking up from it," he said. "Once back home, I want to climb a tall mountain and meditate there alone for a long, long time."

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