Teruo Nakamura was the last known Japanese wartime holdout to surrender, doing so on Morotai in 1974.
Nakamura was an ethnically Taiwanese Indigenous soldier who served in the Imperial Japanese Army’s Takasago Volunteer Unit. He remained on Morotai, an island in present-day Indonesia, after Japan’s 1945 surrender. His hut was discovered by a pilot in mid-1974, and Indonesian soldiers arrested him on 18 December 1974.
Nakamura’s case is often confused with Hiroo Onoda, who surrendered earlier in 1974 on Lubang Island in the Philippines after his former commanding officer ordered him to do so. Shōichi Yokoi was also found earlier, on Guam in 1972.
Nakamura had been born in Japanese Taiwan and was given the Japanese name Teruo Nakamura. After his repatriation, he returned to Taiwan and died of lung cancer in 1979. His surrender shows that the end of Japan’s organized war in 1945 did not immediately end every isolated soldier’s resistance.