We aren’t sure what recent news announcement saddened us more: the arrest of Justin Beiber in Miami or the death of Japanese soldier Hiroo Onada at the age of 91.

For those of you few who don’t know, Onada was the last Japanese soldier to surrender and spent 29 years after the end of World War II in a jungle in the Philippines carrying out his orders to spy on US troops.

He refused to believe the war had ended and would not surrender, despite several instances of leaflets being dropped from planes over the jungle and trips by relatives of his to the jungle and their pleas over loudspeakers for him to come out.

It finally took the Japanese government tracking down and sending his former commanding officer to the jungle to order him to come out that Onada walked out of the jungle on March 11, 1974.

He was that determined to show that he was the perfect soldier, that he would only obey the chain of command, not listen to some farmer non-military person on an island Onada had been sent to do his sworn duty at.

Just for a second, try to look past the whole fact that he was a Japanese soldier trained and conditioned to hate and destroy Americans and everything we stand for. Take that off the table, and you can’t deny that he was, without a doubt, the poster child for spite.

This cat Hiroo is a hero in the spite movement, and ought to be remembered as such. He was trained to obey orders blindly and loyally, without question. He wasn’t about to be fooled by the enemy’s tricks or lured out from his post by the lies about the possibility the war had ended.

Les Stroud made an entire career of surviving in the jungle for a week or ten days at a time. Try 29 years, bro. Twenty-nine spiteful years.
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