Twenty-five years ago, while in Tokyo directing an opera, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog turned down the offer of a private audience with the emperor of Japan. “It was a faux pas, so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up,” Herzog writes in the preface to his first novel, The Twilight World. Nonetheless, his hosts wondered whether he might like to meet some other Japanese celebrity. Without hesitation, he asked to visit Hiroo Onoda.
Even if you don't recognize the name, there's a good chance that you are familiar with Onoda as a legend, a symbol—what we might nowadays call a meme. A lieutenant in the Imperial Army during World War II, stationed on the Philippine island of Lubang, he kept fighting long after the Allied victory, until he was finally relieved of his duties in 1974. Onoda wasn't the only Japanese soldier to wage a lonely, endless war. Shoichi Yokoi was captured in Guam in 1972 and, like Onoda, struggled to make peace with the radically altered reality of postwar Japan.
Beyond their home country, these men have come to serve as illustrations in an informal dictionary of received ideas, accompanying the entries for fanatical loyalty, fighting the last war, and general cluelessness. The guy who stays in the field long after the war is over is, to modern eyes, a comical, cautionary figure, an avatar of patriotism carried to ridiculous extremes. We rarely pause to look for motives other than blind obedience, or to imagine what those years of phantom combat in the wilderness must have felt like.
Denne historien er fra June 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra June 2022-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
