Something from my travels

Shanghai (2024): Scooters in Shanghai electrified at a frightening pace in my five-year absence.

Lost in the Jungle

Hiroo Onoda joined Imperial at age twenty and made lieutenant within two years. He was a sharp kid – sharp enough that his superiors sent him to an island in the Philippines with strict orders. Stand your ground. Terrorise your enemies. Never surrender.

It was 1944, in the early forays of what would become the Cold War, and Onoda took those orders seriously.

The war ended only a year later, in August 1945, but there was no one to tell Onoda – he was still deep in the jungle. He and a small troop of soldiers had stayed hidden – living off whatever they could scavenge and conducting raids on local farms.

When, one day, they stumbled upon air-dropped leaflets announcing Japan’s surrender, they assumed it was American propaganda. An obvious trick to get them to reveal their positions.

More leaflets came. Then search parties. Then, in the 1950s, they brought Onoda’s family members to call out to him through megaphones. His brother’s voice echoed through the jungle.

Onoda’s first thought was that the Americans must have captured him.

Over the years, his small troop thinned. One soldier surrendered in 1950. Another was shot by local police in 1954. His last companion died in 1972, leaving Onoda completely alone.

He kept fighting.

He burned crops. He shot at farmers who came too close. He lived off jungle vegetation and whatever supplies he could steal during night raids. Search parties continued looking for him throughout the 1960s and early 70s. They left newspapers showing Japan’s post-war recovery. Photographs of modern Tokyo. Messages from family and former commanding officers.

All of it, Onoda decided, was sophisticated American psychological warfare. The newspapers were forgeries. The photographs were Hollywood productions. The voices of his family members were recordings or actors.

In 1974, a Japanese explorer named Norio Suzuki went looking for Onoda as a personal adventure. He found him. They talked for days. Onoda explained that he would only surrender if his commanding officer personally relieved him of duty.

Suzuki returned to Japan and tracked down Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who had been Onoda’s commander three decades earlier. Taniguchi flew to the Philippines and, in March 1974, formally ordered Lieutenant Onoda to lay down his arms.

On the day Onoda surrendered he was fifty-two years old. The war had ended twenty-nine years earlier.

Even then, he later admitted, he wasn’t entirely convinced the war was truly over. But his commanding officer had given him an order.

Think about what this means.

Twenty-nine years living in a jungle, starving, fighting an enemy that no longer existed, defending an island that had stopped being strategically relevant before he’d even arrived. All because admitting the war had ended would mean admitting his entire adult life had been based on a premise that no longer existed.

The war had become Onoda’s identity.

Your Faith and Your Soul

When your sense of self becomes inseparable from your belief system, any evidence that you might be on the wrong path becomes an existential threat.

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger studied a doomsday cult that predicted the world would end on a specific date.

When that date passed and nothing happened, most members refused to update their beliefs. They couldn’t abandon this idea they had cherished. So they let their beliefs reframe what they were seeing:

It wasn’t that their faith had been wrong, they proclaimed. In fact, their faith had saved the world. The world hadn’t ended because of the depth of their fervour.

This reframing renewed their commitment. The psychological cost of admitting error was too high. The months of preparation, the damaged relationships, the jobs some had quit – if they were wrong, it would all have been for nothing.

Onoda faced an even steeper cost. His first year in the jungle after the war ended might have been excusable as a mistake. By year ten, admitting error meant admitting a decade of pointless suffering. By year twenty-nine, the psychological weight of being wrong had become unbearable.

So didn’t admit He refused to believe his lying eyes. His brother’s voice became enemy deception. Newspapers showing Japan’s recovery became sophisticated forgeries. Every piece of evidence got filtered through the framework that the war must still be ongoing, because the alternative was unthinkable.

Onoda wasn’t stupid. He survived alone through intelligence, discipline, and resourcefulness. But intelligence doesn’t. If anything, it makes you better at constructing elaborate justifications for why contradicting evidence must be false.

I’ve been in that position myself with failing businesses I refused to let go of. You might have been there too, staying failing, because leaving would mean the previous five were wasted. You may double down on a losing investment because selling makes the loss concrete. You might defend a political position more aggressively when shown contradicting evidence simply because your identity has become wrapped up in being the kind of person who holds that view.

Sunk costs compound. The longer you’ve believed something, the harder it becomes to question it.

After surrendering, Onoda struggled to adjust to modern Japan. The country bore little resemblance to the one he’d left. He’d been fighting for an empire that no longer existed. He eventually moved to Brazil and started a cattle ranch, perhaps finding it easier to build a new life somewhere that didn’t constantly remind him of everything he’d lost.

Your beliefs can keep you lost in the jungle for decades if you’re not willing to question them. A metaphorical wilderness where you keep reframing evidence to fit conclusions you reached years ago under different circumstances with different information.

Books worth reading

Olga Tokarczuk — Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

An eccentric adventure in a remote Polish village.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Read

Chigozie Obioma — The Fishermen

Four brothers in Nigeria unravel after a madman’s prophecy. Highly recommend.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Read

Tom Wainwright — Narconomics

This book explores what happens when drug cartels start acting more like Harvard MBAs.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Impulsively Bought