Emelio Viaña went out to farm sweet potatoes with his two sons, Protacio and Diony, both in their early teens, at their farm near Yapusan on the western side of Lubang Island in the Philippines. It was March 8, 1961—the day before his 53rd birthday. After a morning of hard work, Emelio sat down for a lunch break and was drinking a cup of coffee. Gunshots rang out. The first bullet shattered Emelio’s upper thigh. Another shot struck his young son Diony in the leg. The two boys frantically dragged their father into the shelter of nearby aroma bushes—the large hard thorns were piercing and painful, but their terror was worse.
Bleeding heavily, Emelio couldn’t move. His sons barely managed to drag him away as fast as they could to their small boat and row him to a small fishing port at Tubahin. Still in mortal fear of being shot at as they paddled away, they watched helplessly as their father bled to death in front of their eyes. By the time they reached safety it was too late. Emelio was gone. Amid all the horror there was one sight that Protacio would never forget. While hiding in the thorny bushes he had seen his father’s murderer stalking them. It was a Japanese soldier.
The murder of Emelio Viaña was one in a series of killings that plagued Lubang Island for decades from the end of World War II until the 1970s. All the victims were islanders going about their daily lives who were targeted and assaulted at moments when they were isolated and vulnerable. Their grieving family members have never forgotten them, and their deaths tore wounds in their close-knit community which are still unhealed.
Yet these victims have been forgotten in the world’s collective memory. By contrast, the man responsible for these grisly crimes—which he would later refer to euphemistically as “guerrilla warfare”—became something of a celebrity. His name was Hiroo Onoda.
Onoda shocked the world when, 29 years after World War II ended, he materialized from the wilderness of Lubang Island in 1974 still dressed in his Imperial Japanese Army uniform and formally surrendered. He claimed not to have known that the war had ended—a claim he reinforced with his 1974 autobiography, , in which he also claimed to have been conducting a so-called “guerrilla war” on Lubang Island without admitting to the details of what that meant. Returning to Japan as a hero, he died in 2014 and has passed into legend, frequently cast into the role of a “lone samurai” type of, and a fictionalized 2022 novel about him penned by eminent German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Onoda fascinates people.
