Hiroo Onoda: Get Over It

Mrs. Haversham, of Great Expectations is the example of the woman who cannot move beyond disappointment about whom most American school children learn. But there are other, mostly fictional, examples of people, mostly women, who cling to a vow or a hope beyond reason. Joan Baez's first album had a haunting song about a woman who waited 16 years for her lover to return, but when he did, it turned out he had forsaken her while she had waited. Madam Butterfly waited for her naval officer. 
In most cases, we suspect the personwho clings to a promise or a vow beyond reasonable expectation, who clings when the steadfastness seems self sacrificial, has something wrong with her, or with him. 
In this world, the individual who cleaves tight to a proposition despite sea changes in the world around him (or her), is a rarity.
In a sense, the idea of marriage is based on this fidelity to a vow, til death do us part, even after it is apparent clinging to the vow, has been "for worse."
If we have come to suspect psychopathology in some forms of fidelity then we have to come to doubt the proposition that any form of fidelity to a promise made early in life may be a form of neurosis: but that would include the marriage vows.

So, when Hiroo Onoda died, his story still fascinated across time and across cultures.
Onoda was the Japanese lieutenant who remained in the jungles of the Phillipines for 29  years after the end of World War II, claiming he did not believe the war was over and he was remaining faithful to his orders not to surrender until and unless his commanding officer specifically returned to order him to stop fighting.

When you think about it, you know he must have known, or strongly suspected.  the war had ended--when no more soldiers appeared to fight him, when no more ships bombarded his island, when the only people left to fight were villagers and policemen. 
You know he could have slipped into a village and ascertained there really was no more war going on. He must have known the fighting had stopped.

But he continued the fight, knowing hostilities had stopped and he was the only one who still fought on.

Jesse James and  other bands of Confederate soldiers continued to act as marauders after the American Civil War, but the local population came to think of them as simple criminals.  Citizens sent police, not the Army after these die hards. 

When Onoda finally emerged from the jungle and his former commander arrived to deliver the order to cease and desist, he was returned to Japan, to a Tokyo which had glass skyscrapers and he was greeted as a hero. Here was a man who had not embraced the culture of avarice, creature comforts and money, a man who had lived in the jungle, in discomfort, because of fidelity to a sense of honor.

It must be telling, however, that he lasted only a year in the Japan he found on his return, then moved to Brazil and married a Japanese woman there, returning to Japan 10 years later to open a survivalist school, and the story became one which sounds like a man finally cashing in. 

It all reminds Mad Dog of the Japanese student who  studied in the stacks of his college library. He would arrive as soon as the library opened in the morning and stay until it closed at night, coming and going only for classes and meals. Mad Dog knew the Japanese student did this, because Mad Dog was doing the same thing. 
But what Mad Dog did not at first appreciate was that the Japanese student was doing this in a tacit competition. 
 Mad Dog caught this student looking in Mad Dog's direction, as 10 PM approached, often enough that he began to suspect.  One Saturday night, at 9:30,  Mad Dog gathered his books up, put on his coat, took the stairwell down one flight of stairs. The library closed at 10 PM on Saturday. Mad Dog never left before 10 PM, but just to test his own hypothesis, that night Mad Dog cleared out his stuff from his study carrel 30 minutes early. He waited in the stairwell for 10 minutes and returned to his carrel, looked down the row of carrels to the carrel occupied by the Japanese student, and saw the student had cleared out.

In retrospect, Mad Dog realized his own devotion to study and isolation was more than a test of will; it occurred against a background of no other really tempting options, and in a state of neurosis.

And Mad Dog wonders whether or not most or all fidelity is like that. As Oscar Wilde said:   "I can resist anything but temptation."

We project a set of heroic features on a man and his story, but, in the end, extreme behavior often looks more like simply eccentricity, sometimes simple social inadequacy dressed up as strength of will. 

And if that applies to the man who chooses to remain in the jungle, does it apply less to the woman who stays loyal to a husband who has moved on psychologically, or to a marriage which has become little more than a habit?

When young soldiers pledge themselves to each other, when they fight for survival together,  that loyalty is functional, self preserving. But they do not expect to carry sacrifice forward for thirty years. They anticipate a battle "for the duration," but the duration is expected to be relatively brief.

But what do we do with people who remain loyal to one idea for an unreasonably long time? And what do we say about institutions which depend on this sort of vow taking?

Obadiah Youngblood,  "Feeder Canal"