The Bucket List

In 1974, after nearly twenty-nine years of conducting a solo guerrilla war in the Philippine jungle, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was finally brought home. Governments had tried to reach him. The Philippine military had tried. Search parties left newspapers, magazines, photographs of his family. Onoda read a 1959 newspaper, found the world it described too strange to be real, and concluded it was enemy propaganda.

A twenty-four-year-old college dropout found him in four days.

Norio Suzuki was a Japanese adventurer who had told friends he was traveling the world in search of three things: Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the abominable snowman — in that order. He wandered onto Lubang Island in February 1974 and simply located the man that entire nations had failed to reach. Onoda later described the encounter with a kind of bewildered tenderness: "This hippie boy, Suzuki, came to the island to listen to the feelings of a Japanese soldier."

Suzuki brought back photographs. The Japanese government tracked down Onoda's former commanding officer — who had spent the postwar decades as a bookseller — and flew him to the jungle to formally rescind his thirty-year-old orders. Onoda surrendered his rifle, five hundred rounds of ammunition, and a dagger his mother had given him in 1944. He had carried it for 10,416 days and never used it.

As for Suzuki, he found his panda. He then went looking for the yeti.

One does wish he had stopped at two.

He died in a Himalayan avalanche in 1986. He was thirty-seven.