I recently read Werner Herzog's The Twilight World, the real life tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier in WWII who was still fighting the war decades later in 1974. I reviewed it on Goodreads, which you can read here. Sometimes I feel like I'm having a conversation with the universe, and the one regarding Herzog's book was not over. Because I turned on Hardcore History for my commute the next day, and it was an episode called Supernova in the East Part 1. And as soon as Dan Carlin started describing a WWII soldier, I knew long before he said the person's name that it would be Hiroo Onoda.
And it was. In the review I make note of the attempts to reach Onoda to tell him the war was over, and he refused to believe it because orders are orders. I compared it to Maga now clinging to their concept of "fake news" rather than facing an unpleasant truth, a way to turn a blind eye to something that cannot possibly be accepted in that person's worldview. It puzzled me, and I felt a little disappointed, after reading about Onoda all these years, to see that this was the real reason why he kept fighting. I felt like the real Onoda, rather than the romantic character in my head, had let me down.
The universe reached out to let me know that no, I'm actually culturally insensitive. It gave me a lot to think about as Carlin describes the world in which Onoda grew up, quoting from Onoda's own memoir (which I need to find for myself, by the way). When he'd gone off to war, his mother had given him a dagger and told him to use it to kill himself if he should be captured. Carlin wondered about the other powers in that war. How many of their mothers would tell something like that to their sons? Just Japan's? Onoda himself talks about how, in the Japan he left when he went to that island, surrender would have been unthinkable. Every man, woman and child would fight to the very end, with bamboo sticks if necessary. The only conceivable way he would think that Japan surrendered was IF EVERYONE THERE WAS DEAD.
Holy fucking shit. No wonder he chose to keep fighting. The only alternative was that the world he'd known and loved had been wiped from the face of the earth forever.
I mentioned in my review how much the world had changed in the time Onoda fought on that island. Atom bombs and moonwalks. Could you imagine being the one to tell him about all of that? But Carlin goes further. He uses American vets as an example here. They came home from the war and watched how their world changed slowly but surely until it had become what they would think of as a perversion of everything they'd known their world to be, and that's why they reacted so poorly with the counter-cultural movement at the time. They were trying to maintain a world that no longer existed. But they got to witness the eventual . . . what they would consider a decline.
Onoda didn't witness that. When Suzuki brought him out of the jungle, he stepped out of one world--EVEN IF IT DIDN'T EXIST!!!!--and walked into a completely alien, brand new one.
And that got me to thinking. (Uh-oh, I hear you say.) The world I was born into, the one I think about often and fantasize about sometimes, that world? Is gone. Like you never step twice into the same river. That kind of gone. I ask myself, what would I do to save that world? What would I do to maintain it? What would I do to bring it back? Would I move goddam mountains to make that happen?
Probably. If I thought I had the ability, I'd probably do anything.
Which brings me back to Maga. Maybe I understand them a little more now. Obviously fuck their worldview, but now I finally understand why they're so determined to ruin the world for everyone else. If I were in their shoes, I might not do any differently.
But I do not now and never have coveted those shoes, because I understand the thing that they don't, that Carlin also points out. That world that we think about? The vanquished world? It never existed. That world can only be seen through the prism of memory, and how reliable is memory? Especially since YOU are your only reference point for that memory? Not very. Have you ever found a picture of a place you think about often? Something from your childhood? Some of the details are right, but a lot of them are wrong. That's because you (and I) have been building these memories up. It starts as: was it this way? And then it becomes: it was probably this way. And then it simply is: it was this way. It happens so fast we don't often notice it. But this world is more fancy than fact.
Nostalgia for an age that never existed.
