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#5 Platform: No Surrender
Sep. 18th, 2012 06:19 pm(Programming note: So I fell behind pretty significantly on these reviews again, and I'm going to try to catch up at a rate of 1 a day once more, along with some other actual life related posts. I'll feel better when I'm on this more, I think. It's useful. But I'm going to bounce around a bit in the chronology of the reviews, depending on what I feel like writing up. So here's where we're starting today.)
There's a lot to be said for perseverence, but it can go too far sometimes.
Book #40: No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
Author: Hiroo Onoda
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount library
Wars are big places, full of people and moving parts, where it's easy for things to fall through the cracks. But when they do, it's not a trivial matter; that little crack can end up being big enough to actually hold the content of someone's life. I think when I was growing up, I heard stories of the Japanese soldiers who didn't know World War II had ended until decades after. A whole life spent in not just a futile cause, but a cause that was already lost years ago. A very interesting concept, if a tragic one.
No Surrender is the biography of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer with spy training who ended up getting posted to the Philippine island of Lubang towards the end of the year in 1944, where the tide of the war had already turned. We do get some description of what his upbringing was like (mostly about some time spent working in China and dealing with his army brother), what training was like towards the end of the war for Japanese offices (much reduced in length, with everyone cramming in as much hectically as possible), and the state of the Japanese war effort when he arrived on Lubang (pretty damn bad, and people were rather ready to give up). But the meat of the story is about the years between his arrival in December 1944, and when he finally was relieved of duty in March 1974.
So this is essentially a survivalist tale of the small band of people Onoda lived with, down to two for a couple of decades, through his last months spent alone. Onoda gives good details about what life on the island was like for them, moving from place to place, storing ammunition away, finding food by taking it from the trees at different points and stealing rice where they could, the maps they had in their minds, the difficulties of maintaining their clothes. And how they still tried to carry out their mission, tracking the people and troop movements for when the Japanese made their counter-attack. They also carried out little operations that would harass the villagers on the island.
To me, beyond the survivalist stuff, the most interesting parts of the story were how Onoda and Kozuka, his last remaining companion for the last couple of decades, came up with ways to distrust the updates they were given trying to get them to surrender. And there were many - newspapers left for them, leaflets dropped, pictures and letters from home placed in the forest where they were likely to find them. But they built up their own whole narrative of how the world had come to function, Japan's new allies and how they'd been holding out, finding a place for their mission and their life until then, even if it meant distrusting pictures from home because someone had been referred to by a different nickname, or because a neighbor was in the picture. There was delusion here, but to the fervent end of keeping their belief alive, that they hadn't wasted their time.
It's really quite an interesting story, and Onoda writes it clearly; the translation carries this pretty smoothly, as well, with a clear voice, simply presented. Onoda wonders at the end what all the time he spent there was for, if the cause had already been lost, and you certainly wouldn't want to trade places with him. It's not too bad to wonder what it'd have been to be there, though, and the book's not too heavy to find out.
Next up: Uh... well, we'll see what I feel like reviewing tomorrow, I suppose?
There's a lot to be said for perseverence, but it can go too far sometimes.
Book #40: No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
Author: Hiroo Onoda
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount library
Wars are big places, full of people and moving parts, where it's easy for things to fall through the cracks. But when they do, it's not a trivial matter; that little crack can end up being big enough to actually hold the content of someone's life. I think when I was growing up, I heard stories of the Japanese soldiers who didn't know World War II had ended until decades after. A whole life spent in not just a futile cause, but a cause that was already lost years ago. A very interesting concept, if a tragic one.
No Surrender is the biography of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer with spy training who ended up getting posted to the Philippine island of Lubang towards the end of the year in 1944, where the tide of the war had already turned. We do get some description of what his upbringing was like (mostly about some time spent working in China and dealing with his army brother), what training was like towards the end of the war for Japanese offices (much reduced in length, with everyone cramming in as much hectically as possible), and the state of the Japanese war effort when he arrived on Lubang (pretty damn bad, and people were rather ready to give up). But the meat of the story is about the years between his arrival in December 1944, and when he finally was relieved of duty in March 1974.
So this is essentially a survivalist tale of the small band of people Onoda lived with, down to two for a couple of decades, through his last months spent alone. Onoda gives good details about what life on the island was like for them, moving from place to place, storing ammunition away, finding food by taking it from the trees at different points and stealing rice where they could, the maps they had in their minds, the difficulties of maintaining their clothes. And how they still tried to carry out their mission, tracking the people and troop movements for when the Japanese made their counter-attack. They also carried out little operations that would harass the villagers on the island.
To me, beyond the survivalist stuff, the most interesting parts of the story were how Onoda and Kozuka, his last remaining companion for the last couple of decades, came up with ways to distrust the updates they were given trying to get them to surrender. And there were many - newspapers left for them, leaflets dropped, pictures and letters from home placed in the forest where they were likely to find them. But they built up their own whole narrative of how the world had come to function, Japan's new allies and how they'd been holding out, finding a place for their mission and their life until then, even if it meant distrusting pictures from home because someone had been referred to by a different nickname, or because a neighbor was in the picture. There was delusion here, but to the fervent end of keeping their belief alive, that they hadn't wasted their time.
It's really quite an interesting story, and Onoda writes it clearly; the translation carries this pretty smoothly, as well, with a clear voice, simply presented. Onoda wonders at the end what all the time he spent there was for, if the cause had already been lost, and you certainly wouldn't want to trade places with him. It's not too bad to wonder what it'd have been to be there, though, and the book's not too heavy to find out.
Next up: Uh... well, we'll see what I feel like reviewing tomorrow, I suppose?
