Do you know someone who, for reasons that are difficult to explain, holds firmly to a particular view or opinion despite mounting evidence that it no longer adequately reflects reality?
Perhaps you have sometimes wondered how such a thing is possible. I have asked myself the same question in relation to my own life.
Before looking more closely at my own situation, let us examine the case of Japanese World War II soldier Hiroo Onoda, which may help us understand a persistent human tendency: the refusal, sometimes for years, to let contrary evidence reshape our prevailing view of reality.
Onoda was not a typical Japanese soldier. Before being sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944, he trained as an intelligence officer at an elite military school specializing in guerrilla warfare and counterintelligence.
His orders were to destroy the airfield and pier there and harass the enemy. His commanding officer told him never to surrender and not to commit suicide, even if it meant being captured by the enemy. He was promised that, whatever happened, the Japanese military would one day return to retrieve him.
Onoda carried these orders and promises with him long after World War II ended.
He first heard news about Japan’s defeat and the end of the war a few months after the formal signing of Japan’s surrender.
A campaign of dropping leaflets throughout the island had started, declaring the news of Japan’s defeat and surrender, but when Onoda and the other men with him examined them, they concluded that they were fake, enemy propaganda.
Over the next twenty-nine years, each time more convincing evidence was presented that the war was over and he could safely come out of hiding, he continued to disbelieve it, finding new ways to dismiss it.
In Onoda’s imagined world, the newspapers dropped on the island showing daily life in Japan did not convince him that the war was over. Instead, they confirmed that the war was still going on.
If Japan had really lost the war, he reasoned, there should not have been any life in Japan. Everybody should have been dead, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death and never surrender to America.
Onoda believed that his country, and by extension himself, had been assigned the task of creating what was, at the time, referred to as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Japan’s wartime vision of a Japan-led Asian bloc presented as liberation from Western colonialism.
Only after his former commanding officer came to the island in March 1974 and declared that the war was over and Japan had lost, could Onoda allow the evidence before him for years to penetrate his imagination and overturn his deeply held convictions.
At the end of his memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, Onoda describes the scene of his departure from Lubang by helicopter the day after his surrender. In a moment of reflection as he looked down at the island where he had spent the last thirty years of his life, he wondered, “Why had I fought here for thirty years? Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?”
Earlier in the memoir, he seems to hint at possible inner turmoil when he recalls looking out of his hotel window after returning to Tokyo:
“When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.”
Because the memoir ends with his 1974 return to Tokyo from Lubang, we cannot know for sure what internal changes he experienced after his surrender.
We do know that he eventually moved to Brazil, where he worked on a cattle ranch. Then, in 1984, at the age of sixty-two, he returned to Japan to work with young people through the Onoda Nature School.
He may have gradually constructed a new world of meaning and orientation, or he may have carried his old orientation forward into new circumstances without fully letting go of the old.
His memoir suggests that factual recognition and inner transformation are not the same thing. One can be brought face to face with reality and still have to reckon with the slower, more uncertain work of becoming someone who can actually live in relation to it.
In my case, what I had taken for granted as reality was, in fact, a reality of my own making. Through imagination, story, narrative, and truth claims, I constructed a world that felt solid, necessary, and true. I lived and moved confidently within that framework for decades.
When that world began to break apart, when the leaflets started falling and contradicting my carefully constructed world of beliefs and attitudes, I initially denied the conflicting evidence.
The first leaflet contained rumors that a highly respected leader in the organization had been drinking and using drugs. This was inconceivable to me. So, I denied the possibility.
I had been living for so long in this imaginative world that nothing from the outside could make its way in. As far as I was concerned, this was an unsubstantiated rumor meant to besmirch the reputation of a righteous man. It later turned out to be true.
The second leaflet announced that the wife of a popular and respected man in our faith community, whom I personally knew, one day, up and took her kids, and left her husband for good, never to return.
I would have readily dismissed this evidence as well, seeing it as another attempt to sully the reputation of a morally upright man, if not for the fact that I happened to be around on the day she left, at the time not knowing she and her kids were never coming back.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, cracking open the door a bit for me to take a closer look.
My denial of factual evidence up to then stemmed from the belief that I had been called by a transcendent God to carry out a special task through a specific organization sanctioned by God for that purpose.
This vision was shaped by an aspiration to help build a world of unity and cooperation among all nations and peoples, without physical violence.
How could these kinds of problems and behavior be a part of my imagined world? I asked myself.
As mounting evidence continued to contradict the story I had been telling myself for decades, I slowly confronted the frightening possibility that I would have to transform the way I saw myself and the world around me.
The implications of this realization felt like the floor I had been walking on suddenly giving way beneath me. It was as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of my chest, a hole so wide and deep, it took all my strength to get out of bed every morning and face the world.
And yet the way forward was not simply to adopt a better interpretation or quickly exchange one story for another.
The deeper task was to move through the discomfort of that collapse and let it affect the very center from which I understood myself.
That meant not only revising what I believed, but changing my relation to belief itself. It meant learning to live with less certainty, less defense, and less need to force reality into forms that could protect me from pain.
In that sense, the transformation was not primarily intellectual, though thought was part of it. It was existential. It involved a gradual reorientation toward myself, toward others, and toward the larger world I inhabit.
What changed was not only the content of my view, but the way I stood in relation to truth, vulnerability, and reality itself.
And perhaps that is the hardest kind of change: not replacing one framework with another, but the slow becoming of a person able to live without needing every question answered.
Lovely article. 🙏