In January 1972, Vicente Diaz was on his way to baseball practice on the Pacific island of Guam when a classmate stopped him to ask if he’d heard the news: Local hunters had discovered a Japanese soldier hiding in the jungle. The soldier, whose name was Shoichi Yokoi, believed that World War II continued to rage, 27 years after its end.

This discovery stoked a deep fear in the teenager. “Stories of the war were certainly passed down to us, and they were enough to give me nightmares,” says Diaz, who is now a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. “I still have them.”

For 32 months, the Japanese maintained a brutal occupation of Guam in