It happened 70 years ago this week, 16 May 1955.
Official caption, “Japanese Army Pfc. Kaichiro Eguchi is pictured in Canlubang Army Headquarters (in Calamba, Laguna), after his long overdue surrender to a U.S. Army detachment in the Philippines. He came out of a jungle hideout nine years after the end of the war. He wore a suit he had woven from hemp, coconut shell, and other materials, and carried a still usable Japanese army rifle.”
The good private would not be the last of the holdouts (zanryū nipponhei).
Seaman Noboru Kinoshita captured (and promptly self-terminated) the following November in Luzon.
Four Japanese airmen surrendered to the Dutch on Hollandia in late 1955.
Nine soldiers threw in the towel on Morotai and another four on Mindoro in 1956.
Pvt. Bunzō Minagawa and Sgt. Masashi Itō walked out of the bush in Guam in 1960.
Sgt. Shoichi Yokoi also gave up in Guam in 1972.
PFC Kinshichi Kozuka was killed in a shootout with Filipino police in 1972.
LT Hiroo Onoda surrendered in Lubang in March 1974.
Pvt. Teruo Nakamura— the last confirmed holdout– turned himself in to an Indonesian Air Force patrol on Morotai just before Christmas 1974, 29 years after WWII ended.
Of course, sightings and unconfirmed reports endured from Kolombangara to Luzon as late as 2005, making unreconstructed Japanese soldiers something of the cryptids of the Southwestern Pacific jungle for a half-century.