The garden declared: "these ministers and senior command issued a command, has no qualifications for command to us. Figure: the major period of the garden. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images. Japanese military personnel who learned of the surrender had to first overcome the shock of defeat. Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese Officer Who Refused to Surrender Decades After WWII’s End. Private Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-born soldier (Amis: Attun Palalin), was discovered by the Indonesian Air Force on Morotai, and surrendered to a search patrol on December 18, 1974. But despite being left alone, Onoda refused to surrender and went on to evade dozens of Philippine army and police patrols. A Japanese soldier who hunkered down in the jungles of the Philippines for nearly three decades, refusing to believe that World War II had ended, has died in … Some members of the Japanese military, for a variety of reasons, refused to turn in their arms and surrender, and instead hightailed it to jungle and mountain hideouts. Former Japanese Imperial Army intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda salutes after his surrender on March 9, 1974. One such IJA member was Yuichi Akatsu, who spent a few years terrorizing Filipinos on Lubang with the aforementioned Onoda. Japan is the kingdom of God, the emperor of Japan is not the sort of person who will never surrender!" World War II officially ended in 1945 when Japan’s representatives signed their country’s articles of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor, but the fighting did not end that day. Operation Downfall was to take place in two parts. 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