Japanese Holdout - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• One episode of the American TV comedy Ensign O'Toole titled "Operation Holdout" shown on October 28, 1962, the crew finds four stranded soldiers on an isolated island, two American and two Japanese, who think World War II is still underway.
• One episode of the American TV comedy Gilligan's Island revolves around a Japanese sailor and his mini-sub; the Skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) remarks how every few years, a Japanese is found who does not know the war is over.
• A 1965 episode of the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea entitled "And Five of Us are Left..." involves a group of Americans and one Japanese who have been trapped in an undersea cave for twenty-five years. The Japanese refuses to believe the war is over, and hampers rescue efforts.
• The 1965 film None But the Brave with Frank Sinatra, Clint Walker, Tatsuya Mihashi, Takeshi Katô, Homare Suguro. On a remote Pacific island, a plane carrying U.S. Marines crash-lands, setting up a tense stand-off with the overlooked Japanese contingent already there.
• One episode of the American TV comedy Northern Exposure features a Japanese businessman who pretends to be a holdout until his business textbooks are discovered.
• An episode of The Six Million Dollar Man finds Col. Steve Austin being held prisoner by a Japanese holdout. Steve uses his Polaroid camera to take an instant photo of his captor, in an attempt to prove to him how far the world has moved on, and notes the Made in Japan label on the device.
• The second episode of 1979 TV series Salvage 1, Shangri-la Lil, centers on the accidental discovery (and reintegration) of a Japanese holdout.
• The 1980 film The Last Flight of Noah's Ark featured two elderly Japanese soldiers who have lived on an uncharted island for 35 years.
• The 1981 film A Friend Is a Treasure, starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, features a Japanese soldier who maintains an entire base to protect a treasure.
• The album Nude (1981) by the British rock band Camel reworked the story, with a twist–after returning to 'civilisation', the soldier was so appalled by what society had become that he later disappeared, presumed headed back to the peace and serenity of his island.
• The film American Ninja (1985) featured John Fujioka, a Japanese holdout and ninja master, who finds and trains Michael Dudikoff to be an American ninja in the Philippines.
• The film Savage Beach (1989) featured a Japanese holdout who resided on a remote island which was used to stash gold bars from the Philippines.
• The action thriller Shima (2007) explores the psychological trauma faced by an officer of the Imperial Army. The film is loosely based on the life on Lieutenant Hiroo Onada and other soldiers involved in Japanese holdouts.
• The fictional Asian island nation of Panau in the video game Just Cause 2 includes an island occupied by Japanese holdouts. These men, several of them centenarians by the time of the game, had been building a superweapon for the Imperial Japanese Army, a giant tower which emits an electromagnetic pulse, disabling any approaching aircraft and disrupting radio communications. Thus, they never got the news that the war was over.
• The novel The Seventh Carrier, written by Peter Albano in 1983, describes a situation where a fictitious Yamato class battleship-turned aircraft carrier named Yonaga and its crew were trapped in a secret base in Siberia's Chukchi Peninsula just before Operation Z was to be launched in 1941. Trapped there until 1983, the remaining crew escaped with their ship and launched an attack on the forty-second anniversary of their comrades' attack, causing considerable damage even with antiquated aircraft and bombs against then-modern attack helicopters and jet fighters.
• The children's novel Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo is set in the 1990s and centres on the friendship between a Japanese straggler and a lost British boy.
• The 1984 song "I Was A Kamikaze Pilot", by Australian rock band Hoodoo Gurus, has been interpreted as describing a holdout.