Recently there have been reports of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers left over from World War II being found in the mountains of the Phillipines. Check out Oranckay’s blog for more details on this. However, Yahoo News is reporting that the reports may not be accurate:

The astonishing claim that World War II holdouts may still be alive has attracted huge interest in Japan, where veterans are marking the 60th anniversary of the war’s end. But the Japanese government urged caution, saying the report came from somebody who had not seen the men himself. Efforts to contact the pair also were complicated by the fact that the area in which they supposedly were found is notorious for ransom kidnappings and attacks by Muslim separatists, who have waged war for three decades. Communist rebels also are active there.

Tokyo first learned of the former soldiers in January, from a Japanese trader on Mindanao who has been trying since Friday to arrange a meeting so officials could try to confirm the men’s’ identities, Japanese Embassy spokesman Shuhei Ogawa said. But Ogawa stressed that the trader had not seen the men and was relying on a Filipino contact, who himself got word of the mystery soldiers from yet another Filipino. “You should know this type of information comes in all the time,” he said. “We really have no idea if these two people exist.”

I have my doubts about this story because of the way the rumor of these two guys spread without anyone even have actually seeing them. Why would these guys come out of hiding now? Doesn’t make much sense but I guess we will see how this plays out.

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