Strange

There’s a bit of a commotion in the area around General Santos City.

An army of Japanese journalists have descended on the battle-scarred terrain in search of stragglers from another war, a war long buried in the fog of time. The Japanese invasion of the area was prompted by reports that two more unyielding infantrymen of the old Japanese Imperial Army were found.

The local police dismissed the reports as a hoax. The Japanese Embassy, without confirming nor denying the reported discovery, is frantically herding the journalists to keep them out of harm’s way.

Everybody knows GenSan is not the safest place in the country. Every sort of rebel and bandit seems to operate in the vicinity of this bustling city. The possibility of stray Japanese journalists being taken hostage is high.

Some bizarre incidents have already happened along the way. One Japanese journalists put his money in his shoulder bag and pushed the bag into the airport X-ray machine. He never saw his money again.

But the reported stragglers we might yet see.

They actually have names. Yoshio Yamakawa would now be 87. Tsuzuki Nakauchi would now be 83.

It is not clear how the stragglers have been identified. But if the story is true, this will be an epic.

The Japanese Imperial Army was trained in the mold of the classical Prussian precept: that every soldier should fear his superior more than he fears the enemy. Combine that with the traditional Japanese honor code for warriors: prefer to die than to surrender.

That combination has produced the many impressive stories we know of the Japanese Imperial Army: how, against vastly superior enemy forces, they fought to the last man; how soldiers separated from their units kept on fighting the war long after it ended.

In 1974, Philippine authorities recovered a straggler on Lubang island named Hiroo Onoda 29 years after the war ended.

Onoda kept his uniform, all stitched up and fraying at every fold. He kept his old rifle in working condition. He fought a game of hide-and-seek, a one-man guerrilla unit, now knowing that the war for which he was conscripted had long ended.

Returned to his own country, Onoda suffered from a culture shock. He opted to resettle in Brazil.

Before that, in 1972, Shoichi Yokoi was found on Guam. The last straggler from the grand old Japanese Imperial Army was found in Indonesia on 1975 – three decades after the war ended.

According to the mediator who is supposed to be negotiating the "surrender" of the two Japanese soldiers in the area around GenSan, the pair refused to yield for fear they would be punished by their superiors if they surfaced. Well, somebody should tell them their superiors are, in all likelihood, dead and the sheer test of endurance required to continue fighting a war that ended 60 years ago should be more of a punishment than any the Japanese Imperial Army could mete.

If this story is true, that pair would either be incredibly heroic or incredibly stupid.

Now, even as we contemplate the dimensions of this great human drama, reports are filtering out that rebels in the area have taken the pair hostage – ostensibly for ransom.

That, if it were true, is even more shocking.

Two doddering old men, fighting a war that ended 60 years ago, have managed to survive an area wracked by war and banditry, where an assortment of men under arms comb the forests and fight pitched battles over lost causes. Then, just as this drama is about to end, could it be that they have been taken hostage?

Let’s hope all this is a hoax.

That, at least, will save us the embarrassment of dealing with a hostage situation where the victims are stragglers who fought 60 years beyond their nation’s surrender. More than embarrassment, that will cause the world to spite us.

What a curious, humiliating story this will be: an epic saga of discipline and unyielding spirit ending in a cheap hostage crisis.

I really, truly hope this whole story is a hoax. A bad joke. A plain nightmare inflicted by pranksters.

Then we can just say that small army of several hundred Japanese journalists who descended upon GenSan are suckers for an improbable tale – the tale of two octogenarians fighting a guerrilla war in the bush, immune to the other hostilities in progress where they operate. How could they have bought into a story like this one?

I really, truly hope this is how this story ends.

There are limits to gallantry, even for the best of soldiers. The most compelling of those limits is age. Two octogenarians could not possibly be nimbly dodging all the assorted armed forces crisscrossing an area where they presumed to be fighting a war long done.

There are legends everywhere of old soldiers refusing to die, refusing to give up the fight. In the GenSan area, where some of the old soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army have chosen to settle in the land they once tried to take by force of arms, there are many incredible stories. Among these stories are those of stragglers roaming the jungle, keeping away from the warmth of communities, enduring unnecessary punishment.

Let’s hope the story of this octogenarian duo is just that: legend. Perhaps some stragglers did manage to elude us for years after the war.

But that war is just too long gone to continue yielding heroes to this day. Too long gone to allow even the most fanatical stragglers to endure so much and yet live so long.