Teruo Nakamura


Teruo Nakamura was a Taiwanese soldier from the Imperial Japanese Army who fought for Japan in World War II and did not surrender until 1974. He was the last known Japanese holdout to surrender after the end of hostilities in 1945.

Military service

Nakamura was an Amis aborigine. Born on 8 October 1919, he was enlisted 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. Nakamura was declared dead on 13 November 1945 by the Imperial Japanese army.
After the capture of the island, it appears that Nakamura lived with other stragglers on the island until well into the 1950s, while 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 fenced field.

Discovery

Nakamura's hut was accidentally discovered by a pilot in mid-1974. In November 1974, the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta requested the assistance of the Indonesian government in organizing a search mission, which was conducted by the Indonesian Air Force on Morotai and led to his arrest by Indonesian soldiers on 18 December 1974. He was flown to Jakarta and hospitalised there. News of his discovery reached Japan on 27 December 1974. Nakamura decided to be repatriated straight to Taiwan, bypassing Japan, and died there of lung cancer five years later on 15 June 1979. Upon his return, he was referred to by the Taiwanese press as Lee Kuang-hui, a name he learned of only after his repatriation. The Taiwanese Kuomintang government initially did not receive him well because it considered him a Japanese loyalist.
The Japanese public's perceptions of Nakamura and his repatriation at the time differed considerably from those of earlier holdouts, such as Hirō Onoda, who had been discovered only a few months earlier and was both an officer and ethnically Japanese. As a private in a colonial unit, Nakamura was not entitled to a pension after a 1953 change in the law on pensions, and thus received only the minimal sum of ¥68,000. This caused a considerable outcry in the press, motivating the Taiwanese government and the public to donate a total of ¥4,250,000 to Nakamura.