Rip Van Yokoi

Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer puzzled him, too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time, and of matters which he could not understand.

In those words, published in 1819, Washington Irving described the state of his fictional hero Rip Van Winkle when Rip woke from a sleep of 20 years. Irving's words apply equally well today to a real-life Rip Van Winkle: Shoichi Yokoi, the Japanese army corporal who fled into the jungles of Guam when U.S. troops retook the island in 1944, and hid out for 28 years even though he read of the war's end in leaflets dropped by U.S. planes. Last week, seven months after he was discovered by fishermen and returned to Japan (TIME, Feb. 7), Yokoi, now 57, admitted to TIME Correspondent S. Chang that he was "baffled" and "confused." "Practically everything I encounter is tough to accept," he said. "I am having trouble preparing my mind to cope with all these changes that have happened in my country."

Yokoi is distressed by contemporary values. He cannot accept the humanizing of Hirohito. "Perhaps the Emperor has ceased to be a living god to other people, but to me he remains a sacred personage." Yokoi is also shocked by the disrespect of children for their elders: "In the good old Japan, koko [being filial] was everything in life for youngsters. Now they seem to make it a profession to defy the authority of parents; they talk of nothing but freedom and demokurasu [democracy]. Before the war, our society was far more close-knit and warmhearted. Today only one thing makes itself felt--egotism. These youngsters amount to a bunch of spoiled brats. Physically, because they eat so well, they are big. Mentally, they are so soft that I think what they need is a stretch in the barracks; I would call for the restoration of the old conscription system."

Youth is not the only group that Yokoi finds dismally altered. Women, he rages, have become "monsters." Virtue has "all but gone from them," and so has gentleness--"they screech like apes." In Tokyo, right after his return from Guam, he saw a woman who proved typical of many Japanese females. "She was in what is known as a mini. Her hair was dyed red, her fingernails were painted, and her eyes were so shadowed in purple that she looked like a ghost. She was everything I didn't dream about in the jungle." What he did dream of was the kind of girl he knew before he was shipped off to war: "Then, women were everything that made life blissful for men--virtuous, obedient to commands from menfolk, lovely to look at, gentle and retiring."

Another one of the changes that depresses Yokoi is kogai (environmental disruption). It came about, he believes, because the nation "has become hideously rich." While he is glad to see the end of "the old kind of poverty," he exclaims: "What a price to pay! The glories of nature that I used to know have all disappeared. Instead, up in the sky we have this thing called smog. On earth, cars are killing people even faster than war. The jungle of Guam may be the most reposeful place there is."

On a more practical level, Yokoi is confused by the decline in the value of the yen; his previous monthly army pay, 20 yen, is one two-thousandth of the pay for the same rank today. "Before the war," he laments, "I could have a perfectly satisfying evening out on a mere 10-yen note. Now you might spend 10,000 yen and the geisha will still say no." Yokoi is increasingly concerned about how he will earn those yen. "If I turn tailor again, as I was before the war, I would only go broke; I would be disqualified from the very first step, bargaining the price of a suit length."

Meanwhile, Yokoi is at loose ends. He gets up at 4 a.m., as he did in the jungle, takes walks, and spends hours weeding the yard in front of the house he shares with his brother-in-law. (Never married, he has no other close relative.) With part of the $80,000 he has received from the government and from well-wishers, he has bought land and plans to build a house. He hopes to write his memoirs of the Battle of Guam and visit the families of his dead comrades-in-arms. "Then I might be able to settle down and think seriously about what to do with the rest of my life."

His prospects for happiness do not seem bright. He dreams of an impossible Japan, "halfway between then and now, a combination of prewar Japan without its militarism and postwar Japan without its kogai." In a westernized Japan, he is unlikely to find the kind of wife he is seeking. Though he returned to Japan a hero, other glamorous figures (the Olympic gymnasts, among others) have since dethroned him. Worst of all, his neighbors have begun to cool toward him. Explains one friend: "Quite a few people have been wondering aloud why he didn't commit hara-kiri like a good soldier when Guam fell." Besides, "people are disgusted because he looks down on them disdainfully and seems convinced that nobody else suffered during the war."

Paradoxically, the disdain that is now alienating Yokoi from his countrymen helped keep him alive and sane during his long ordeal in the jungle; both he and Psychiatrist Haruo Kawai, who has examined him since his return, agree on that. In his youth, Yokoi was apparently made to feel inferior. Out of iji (spite), he decided to prove himself superior to everyone else in at least one thing: the capacity to suffer. "I had an extra-tough childhood," Yokoi explains. "So many people were harsh, cruel or downright brutal to me. By sticking to the jungle, I actually sought to vent my spite on all these people by remote control; I had to become somebody who could look down on these fellows to even the old score. And I think I have."

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