Nakamura Teruo

Nakamura Teruo ( Japanese 中 村 輝 夫 ; * October 8, 1919 in Taiwan ; † June 15, 1979 ibid) was a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army who stayed in Indonesia as a holdout after the war and only surrendered in 1974 .

His name in his native language was Attun Palalin ; the national Chinese press called him Lee Guang-Hui ( 李 光輝 ), a name whose Chinese pronunciation he learned only after his return in 1975.

military service

Nakamura was a native , probably an Amis or Puyuma , from the Japanese-occupied Taiwan , who was forcibly recruited into a Taiwanese unit of the Imperial Japanese Army in November 1943. He was stationed on the Indonesian island of Morotai until the island was captured by the Allies in September 1944 . Nakamura was pronounced dead in March 1945.

After the island was captured, Nakamura lived in seclusion with other Japanese soldiers who had remained on Morotai until the 1950s, with phases of retreating into the jungle for longer periods of time. In 1956 he separated from the rest of the Japanese soldiers and built a small camp consisting of a hut and a 20 x 30 m fenced field. When asked why he broke up with his comrades on his return, he said that some had tried to kill him, but this was said by three other comrades from the group who had been discovered in the 1950s was disputed.

discovery

Nakamura's hut was found by accident by an Indonesian pilot in mid-1974. In November 1974 the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta requested the support of the Indonesian government for a search operation carried out by the Indonesian Air Force , which led to its discovery by Indonesian soldiers on December 18, 1974. A four-man search party from the Indonesian army waved the Japanese military flag and sang the Japanese national anthem , whereupon a gaunt, naked and utterly distraught Nakamura stepped in front of his hut and surrendered without resistance. He was flown to Jakarta and taken to a hospital, where, given the circumstances, he was certified to be in excellent health. He became known to the Japanese public on December 27, 1974. Nakamura refused to fly to Japan and returned to Taiwan, where he died of lung cancer on June 15, 1979 .

Perception in Japan

Nakamura's perception in the Japanese public and the circumstances of his repatriation differed considerably from those of other late Japanese returnees such as Onoda Hirō , who had been discovered a few months earlier. One reason was the question of his nationality, which held some prominence among the Japanese public in the 1970s. Nakamura was legally stateless and, because of his place of birth, was also not a Japanese citizen; the Japanese embassy in Jakarta offered him Japanese citizenship, which he refused. At the time of his arrest, Nakamura spoke neither Japanese nor Chinese ; it was even questioned whether he could speak at all after being in isolation for over 20 years. In addition, Onoda had been an officer , while Nakamura, as a forcibly recruited common soldier from a Japanese colony, was less suited to serving the Japanese military's ideas of honor and unconditional perseverance, but more likely to have sparked discussions about Japan's role as a colonial power. Another difficult point was the question of the payment of his outstanding pay. Since Nakamura was not entitled to an officer's pension, in 1974 he only received the pay of a common soldier from 1945 to 1953 in accordance with the salary regulations adjusted in 1953, which, plus a repatriation bonus, amounted to only 68,000 yen (then 227.59 US dollars). This sparked public outrage at the Japanese government, which hastened to pay him additional compensation of several million yen, which led to a public discussion about the unequal treatment of Taiwanese and Japanese former soldiers on the one hand and late returnees repatriated in the 1950s and 1970s on the other.

See also

• Onoda Hirō and Yokoi Shōichi , other Japanese soldiers who were only discovered decades after the end of the war.

literature

• Beatrice Trefalt: Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975. Routledge, London 2003, ISBN 0-415-31218-3 , pp. 160ff. (Chapter partly online )

Web links

• The Last Last Soldier? (Article of January 13, 1975 in TIME on its discovery)
• Timeline on the Japanese Holdouts Registry

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Nakamura is the family name, Teruo the first name.