Japanese diplomats waited for a third day on Sunday to confirm reports that there were two elderly men in the southern Philippines left over from the World War II, but suspicion was rising that the whole thing may be a hoax or trap set by kidnappers.
An official from Tokyo’s health ministry is due to join four staff from its embassy on Sunday, to meet with a Mindanao-based Japanese trader to discuss arrangements to get the two elderly men out from the mountains where they have reputedly been hiding for 60 years.
“We will continue to wait for confirmation,” Shuhei Ogawa, the Japanese embassy spokesman told Reuters. “We will continue to arrange an appointment with the two men. There is no deadline. It’s important to get a confirmation.”
But skepticism began to grow three days after the stragglers’ story broke in Japan’s media, because there had been no credible proof the two elderly men exist.
Media named the pair as Yoshio Yamakawa, 87, from the western city of Osaka, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85, and said they could be the first cases in 30 years of wartime stragglers being found.
The last known Japanese straggler from the war was found in 1975 in Indonesia.
'Bait' for kidnappers?
Philippine police officials also doubted the reported presence of war-time stragglers in mountains near the port city of General Santos, known as the country’s tuna capital.
“All the information about these stragglers is hearsay,” said Robert Kunisala, head of the regional police’s intelligence office.
“We would like to caution everybody this might be a big scam. There are kidnap gangs operating near the mountains and the stragglers’ story could be the bait," he said.
He said the police has briefed embassy officials on the security and personal safety situation outside the city, especially near the mountains, a stronghold of communist and Muslim rebels and kidnap gangs.
On Saturday, Japanese embassy officials posted a note outside the hotel where they are staying warning reporters not to leave the city and investigate on their own near the mountains.
Suspicious signs
A horde of foreign journalists, mostly from Japan, has descended on the south, but some are now starting to doubt the story after the Japanese embassy contact — a trader who only gave his name as Asano — began asking money in exchange for information.
A member of a Japanese television network said Asano even offered to sell video of the two stragglers. Some Japanese reporters told Reuters that Asano was also asking money to cover his expenses in locating the stragglers.
Another Japanese reporter said Asano told them he had paid $50,000 to the people holding the stragglers, whom he described as guerrillas.
The amount was about five times the original price after the stragglers’ story was flashed on local newspapers and national television stations in the Philippines.
“I am convinced the story was a hoax,” said Pedro Juachon, a retired air force general, who led a team of Philippine soldiers in tracking down Hiroo Onoda, the last known Japanese straggler from the war in the Philippines, in 1974.
A former Japanese army intelligence officer, Onoda was found living in the jungle on the Philippine island of Lubang. He was unaware of Japan’s defeat in 1945.
The Philippines, invaded by Japan in 1941, was the scene of heavy fighting at the end of the war as Japanese soldiers fiercely loyal to the emperor fought U.S. troops across the sprawling country, which has thousands of remote islands.
Japanese media played the story of the possible former soldiers prominently at home, showing footage of Japanese troops during the war but not touching on a brutal occupation that is believed to have left as many as one million Filipinos dead.
