Teruo Nakamura
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| Teruo Nakamura | |
|---|---|
| 1919 - 1979 | |
| Place of birth |  Taiwan |
| Place of death |  Taiwan |
| Allegiance | Empire of Japan |
| Service/branch |  Imperial Japanese Army |
| Years of service | 1943 - 1974 |
| Rank | Private |
| Unit | 4th Takasago Volunteer Unit 高砂義勇隊 |
| Battles/wars | Battle of Morotai |
Private Teruo Nakamura (Japanese 中村輝夫 Nakamura Teruo) was a Taiwan-born soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army who fought for Japan in World War II and did not surrender until 1974.
His name in his native language appears to have been Attun Palalin. The Taiwanese press referred to him as Lee Guang-Hui 李光輝, a name of which he learned only after his repatriation in 1975.
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[edit] Military Service
Nakamura was an aborigine, probably Amis, from Japanese-occupied Taiwan. Born in 1919, he was conscripted into a Takasago Volunteer Unit of the Imperial Japanese army in November 1943. He was stationed on Morotai Island in Indonesia shortly before the island was overrun by the Allies in September 1944 in the Battle of Morotai. He was declared dead in March 1945.
After the capture of the island, it appears that Nakamura lived with other stragglers on the island until well into the 1950s, however going off for extended periods of time on his own. In 1956, he apparently decided to relinquish his allegiance with the other remaining holdouts on the island and set off to construct a small camp of his own, consisting of a small hut in a 20-by-30 meter fenced field. When asked for the reason why he left the others, Nakamura claimed that other holdouts had tried to kill him, however this claim was denied by three other stragglers from his group who had been discovered in the 1950s.
[edit] Discovery
Nakamura's hut was discovered accidentally by a pilot in mid-1974. In November 1974, the Japanese Embassy to Indonesia in Jakarta requested the assistance of the Indonesian government in organising a search mission, which was conducted by the Indonesian Air Force on Morotai and led to his arrest by Indonesian soldiers on December 18, 1974. He was flown to Jakarta and hospitalized there. News of his discovery reached Japan on December 27, 1974. Nakamura decided to be repatriated straight to Taiwan, bypassing Japan, and died there of lung cancer five years later in 1979.
Nakamura's repatriation and his perception in the Japanese public at the time differed considerably from that of earlier holdouts, such as Hiroo Onoda who had been discovered only a few months earlier. One reason for this was the question of his nationality. Born on Taiwan, Nakamura was ethnically Amis and legally stateless; questions of nationality were of considerable importance in the Japanese public at the time, and while the Japanese embassy in Jakarta offered to repatriate him, there were also diplomatic questions over how to treat him in case he wanted to go back to Taiwan. At the time of his capture, he spoke neither Japanese nor Chinese (in fact it was doubted whether he could speak at all after twenty years of solitude). Secondly, while Onoda had been an officer, Nakamura's rank as a conscripted private from a Japanese colony did not incite the public imagination and was likely to raise questions about the role of Japanese colonialism during the war instead. Another sensitive issue was the question of back pay of his soldier's pension. As a conscripted private, Nakamura was not entitled to pensions after a 1953 change in the law on pensions, and thus received only a minimal sum of ¥68,000 ($227.59 at the time). This raised a considerable outcry in the press, motivating the government to donate a larger sum similar to what had been given to Onoda, which in turn generated questions by earlier Taiwanese holdouts and led to considerable public discussion of the differences in treatment of Japanese and Taiwanese holdouts by the government.
[edit] See also
[edit] Selected bibliography
- Trefalt, Beatrice, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 160ff. (chapter partially online)
[edit] External links
- "The Last Last Soldier?" (TIME magazine article of January 13, 1975, on his discovery)
- Timeline at the Japanese Holdouts Registry at wanpela.com
- Blog article with a photo of Nakamura (on the right)
