Sixteen years after the U. S. military took Guam from Japan, two villagers on the island’s east side went out one Saturday morning in May 1960 to hunt coconut crabs. Vicente Manibusan and Clemente Santos of Talopa saw a man in short trousers and a shirt walking through the trees in the Tolcha area.
They initially mistook him for a straggler from the war, circled to higher ground, and then heard what sounded like coconuts hitting the ground. They found the man about 40 feet up in a breadfruit tree. Manibusan shouted a word up at him that the Navy’s base newspaper later explained meant “friend” in Japanese. The man dropped to the ground and ran.
The two villagers chased him for about a quarter of a mile, caught him, and after a short struggle held him down. He was Bunzo Minagawa, a private first class of the Imperial Army, and he had been hiding in the jungle of Guam since the summer of 1944. Two days later, another soldier, Sergeant Masashi Ito, walked out of the brush on his own. The island had lived under Japanese occupation from December 1941 until the summer of 1944, and the Navy’s command newspaper on Guam, Crossroads, recorded what happened to these two men almost hour by hour on May 27.
The first question was whether Minagawa was alone. Speaking through an interpreter at a press conference that first afternoon, after a hospital doctor’s examination, he said he had been alone for 16 years. That claim did not last the weekend. When Navy investigators questioned him, he told them about a companion.
On Monday, Minagawa went up in a helicopter with a search party and guided it to their camp in the Yona jungle. The helicopter set down about 100 yards away, and Minagawa called out to his companion in the undergrowth. After a short wait, a search party member saw a man come out of the brush waving a small, light-colored piece of cloth. It was Ito, listed as 40 years old, and he was taken to the naval hospital where doctors listed his condition as satisfactory.
The entire manhunt involved one helicopter and one man calling into the trees. On the Saturday, before any of that, Manibusan and Santos had walked their prisoner out to Route 4 and tried to flag down a ride. The first two drivers who stopped drove off when they heard the two men had a Japanese straggler with them. A third driver agreed to go to the nearest telephone and call the Guam police.
A fourth car carried the three of them to the police substation at Yona. A local historian working from the Guam Daily News of that week adds that a blow from the butt of Manibusan’s rifle had helped end the struggle, and that an interpreter named Jesus Sama was sent for. Several hundred people gathered outside the station once the news got around. A physician from Guam Memorial Hospital examined Minagawa and found him in fair condition.
That afternoon, territorial and federal officials held a press conference. They announced that no charges had been lodged against him and that he would be turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The territory handled an enemy soldier 16 years late with the paperwork it had, the kind meant for a foreigner found inside its borders without papers. Then he went to the naval hospital to rest for about four days.
The search party marked the camp on a map. It sat about 200 yards south of the Cross Island Highway and about 100 yards from an unfinished building that had been put up roughly 10 years earlier to house Marines. Two soldiers of the Imperial Army had been living within a short walk of a highway. The paper ran photographs of what came out of that camp.
There were files and knives, buckets, and clothing the two men had made themselves. There were sandals made from old tires and wire. A flashlight lens had been their way of starting fires for 16 years. There was a rubber inner tube they had rigged to trap rain, clamped shut at one end, with a piece of downspout fitted into the top and a hole plugged with a small stick of wood.
When the plug came out, a little stream of water spurted from the hole, and the caption called it a fountain for drinking. The paper listed Ito as a member of Unit 8, 63rd Battalion, and gave his hometown as Toboku Kofu City in Yamanashi. The typo almost certainly meant Kofu, where Ito had joined his regiment. Told backwards from the day they were found, the years behind those two men run like this.
In 1957, a woman reported seeing a scrawny, long-haired figure near the Windward Hills golf course. That same year, according to Ito’s own account, Chamorro islanders shot him, taking a bullet in the back, and he survived. About six years before the capture, a third soldier who had been living with them, Tetsuo Uno, died of sickness and hunger. The two men kept his bones so they could someday go home to Japan.
Ito wrote that in 1948, Chamorro islanders killed another of his early companions, and that over the years, islanders found their hiding places three different times. They also found American leaflets announcing that the war was over and did not trust them. At the far end of all of it is the summer of 1944. At his press conference, Minagawa said he had come to Guam in 1943 at age 22, landed at Sumae on the Oro Peninsula, and moved with his unit up to a place the Japanese called Kitamura, the northern village, and back.
When the American bombing of Sumae began, the troops scattered. He left eastward with five other soldiers. The group split up, and he said he stayed alone near the Fena reservoir for the next 16 years. That account sits badly with what came after it.
Minagawa told the press he had been alone the whole time, and within two days he was leading a helicopter to a camp he had shared with Ito. His home newspaper in Niigata, working from his service file, says he joined the 18th Infantry Regiment in 1944 and landed on Guam that June, not in 1943. Ito’s book says he started out in July 1944 with two comrades, and a historian writes of a third man, Unknown, who died in the camp. The published accounts never quite settle who was with whom and when.
How did two men stay hidden that long, a short walk from a highway on an island crowded with American bases? Ito’s memoir, published in English in 1967 as “The Emperor’s Last Soldiers,” gives the practical answer. They slept under lean-tos in the thickest parts of the jungle and moved their beds again and again. They warned each other with clicks of the tongue.
They made oversized sandals out of tires and scrap so their footprints would not look like a man’s. For fire, they scraped a steel cord along a log onto a pinch of gunpowder, and the flashlight lens did the same work with sunlight. They boiled seawater for salt, killed a wild pig or a cow when they could, and picked through the garbage dump of an American base. Minagawa gave the other half of the answer in 1960.
He said he never went near a farm or a village because he was afraid of being caught. His home newspaper puts it more bluntly, that he believed capture meant becoming a prisoner or being killed. Of everything that kept them hidden, fear did the most work. When capture finally came, it ended in a hospital bed.
An aircraft carried them home within a few weeks. Ito’s sister, Kimiko, interviewed decades later, remembered meeting him at Tachikawa Air Base outside Tokyo and being shocked at how thin he was. Their father had put up a memorial stone for his missing son in 1953. He died before the son came back.
In Niigata, the official notice of Minagawa’s death in action was dated September 30, 1944. When his sister Suru, his only living relative, heard he was alive, she reached him by telephone. A newsreel of the day caught her asking whether it was really him. The call, his home paper says, ended empty.
Both men went to Tokyo and found work as watchmen for the Toei film company, where, a Guam historian noted, their jungle habits made them very good at patrolling. Ito married in January 1961, and The New Yorker reported a daughter by the following year, although his hometown asked about it decades later remembers two children. In 1964, the two of them went back to Guam to help search for any soldiers still hiding. They spent a good deal of that visit with Manibusan and Santos, eating in restaurants and going to parties.
Minagawa told the men who had tackled him that he was grateful they had spotted him and brought him in. Eight years after that, in January 1972, two local men out on the river near Talopa caught Shoichi Yokoi, a soldier Minagawa had spent a short time with in the early years of the jungle. A photograph from later that year shows the three of them together, arms raised, shouting banzai at a news conference. The one line Time magazine picked out of Ito’s book in its 1967 review was his warning that the jungle will not so easily let go.
Masashi Ito died in January 2004 at age 82 of an aneurysm and was buried in Nishitokyo as he had asked. In 2016, the Pacific War Museum on Guam still had on display a photograph of Bunzo Minagawa sitting in his torn clothes after the Talopo men brought him in.