Word: yokoi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi surrendered in the jungles of Guam in 1972, all Japan was excited by the emergence of "the last soldier" of World War II. Yokoi immediately became a national hero. When the second "last soldier" of World War II, Lieut. Hiroo Onoda, was found in the Philippines last March, Tokyo sent a chartered jet to bring him home. When a third last soldier was captured on the remote Indonesian island of Morotai last month, the Japanese began to show a little embarrassment. How many more aging sons of Nippon can still be fighting for the Emperor...
...Imperial Army Lieut. Hiroo Onoda, 52, Japan's last-known World War II straggler, who had finally been persuaded to surrender on the remote Philippine island of Lubang. For many Japanese, Onoda's ordeal seemed to strike a more responsive emotional chord than that of Sgt. Shoichi Yokoi, another wartime Rip van Winkle, who returned from his hideout on Guam two years ago (TIME, Feb. 7, 1972). Yokoi had remained in hiding because he was afraid, and did not know that the war was over...
World War II ended for Shoichi Yokoi, 57, only last year when the former Japanese imperial army corporal was found hiding out in the jungles of Guam. Now a prosperous tailor in Nagoya, Yokoi brought his new bride Mihoko, 45, back to the island for their honeymoon. Visiting his cave hideout, a favorite spot with tourists these days, Yokoi asked: "How could I have wasted all those years in this dirty hole?" Trapped in the jungle for a couple of steamy hours because of helicopter trouble, Yokoi muttered that he simply "hated the looks of the jungle" and couldn...
...Shoichi Yokoi, 57, the Japanese Imperial Army corporal who only last January emerged from his World War II hiding place in the jungle of Guam, found the contemporary world rather unsettling. Modern women, particularly, struck him as "monsters" who "screech like apes." Now, apparently, he has found an old-fashioned girl to marry: Mihoko Hatashin, 44, a war widow. Said Mihoko: "We can now communicate with each other by eyes, though we don't talk to each other much." The couple's expected honeymoon site: Guam...
Paradoxically, the disdain that is now alienating Yokoi from his countrymen helped keep him alive and sane during his long ordeal in the jungle; both he and Psychiatrist Haruo Kawai, who has examined him since his return, agree on that. In his youth, Yokoi was apparently made to feel inferior. Out of iji (spite), he decided to prove himself superior to everyone else in at least one thing: the capacity to suffer. "I had an extra-tough childhood," Yokoi explains. "So many people were harsh, cruel or downright brutal to me. By sticking to the jungle, I actually sought...