This week’s Global Museum highlights a story about a new museum that has opened in Nagoya, Japan in memory of Shoichi Yokoi, a former soldier in the Japanese army who returned to Japan in 1972 having spent over 26 years in the jungles of Guam without realising World War II had ended.
The story, originally released by Japan Economic Newswire quotes Shoichi Yokoi’s widow said that the museum was opened in memory of her husband, then sargeant of the Imperial Japanese Navy, at the couple’s former house.
I want many people to realize the preciousness of peace
Sadly the story does not elaborate further about the sargeant’s life on Guam or why he should have returned, ‘ashamed to come home’ alive more than 31 years after he left Japan on a naval transport ship.
What I find interesting about this story isn’t so much that Shoichi Yokoi might not have realised that World War II had formally ended more than a quarter century before he left Guam, but that he created a life for himself there, solitary or otherwise. How did that change his view of the world and of his own sense of self and how in 1972 did he find out that WWII was over? This story on the ‘last Japanese WWII straggler on Guam‘ which describes more detail about his extraordinary survival in an underground cave, making clothing from the fibres of wild hibiscus for example. In 1972, Shoichi was reputed to have said,
‘We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive.’
‘The only thing that gave me the strength and will to survive was my faith in myself and that as a soldier of Japan, it was not a disgrace to continue on living’ he reflected later in 1986.
It is difficult to know what such a story can teach us except perhaps demonstrating the human capacity for survival and determination to live when all else that busies our minds and bodies is lost.
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