Stuff You Should Know - What are Japanese stragglers?

Episode Date: August 11, 2009

During World War II, Japanese soldiers adopted a version of the samurai code of honor. Fiercely commited to this ideology, some continued to fight even after the war ended. Learn more about these "stragglers" in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Start your journey at toyota.com slash let's go places. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready for you. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Guess who's with me? That's right.

Chuckers, Cheek Bryant. I wonder how you would spell that out actually if I changed my name to that. I don't know. It would be a lot of G's and F's. Or you could just use punctuation marks like exclamation points in Yanomami. I wouldn't want to be confused with a comic strip curse word though, which is also random punctuations. Yes, it is.

Is it random though? Well, I don't know. I don't think each one signifies a letter, does it? I've driven myself mad trying to find a pattern. There's one in there somewhere. Right. Yeah. I'm like the guy from Pi.

Yeah. So Chuck, you know much about World War II? You know, Josh, I'm not the hugest history buff when it comes to the wars, but I know a little bit about the Great War, the big one. I think they're both called the Great Wars. Oh, really? No, I think the first war was called the Great War and the second one was the War to End All Wars.

Who knows? Let's leave it to the listeners to correct us. Oh boy. Chuck, did you know that during World War II, toward the end, although no one realized it was toward the end yet, everything was still hot and heavy, Japan's air force was actually starting to sag quite a bit, which if you have an air force and you're a nation, the last time you want your air fleet to start showing its age is in the middle of a major war.

And if you have an air force and you're not a nation, then that's pretty dang cool. It is pretty cool. You are a real threat. Yeah. And a rich, rich man. I would say. Or a woman. I mean, think about it.

Bill Gates could probably amass a private army. He probably has one. Probably. You're right, Josh. The deal was Japan's air force was old, really. Their fleet was old, not the pilots, but the planes themselves were old. Someone outdated. May have been old pilots, too.

And they couldn't keep up with the newer technology that America had to offer. No. So they came up with a very radical idea. Actually, more to the point, Vice Admiral Onishi Takajiro came up with an idea. I don't want to call it a good idea because it sent people to their deaths. It was a good idea, though. For them. Well, it worked, at least.

So what he decided to do was to take these aging planes and strap 550 pound bombs to them and then aim them right into aircraft carriers and destroyers and, you know, basically anything that you want to blow it up and use them as flying bombs. Yep. And then you talk these pilots into going down with their own plane. Right, that was the problem. They used pilots. Right.

It's called a kamikaze, which means divine wind. Yes. Let's say that together again. Divine wind. Nice. That's right, which is probably the coolest name for suicide I've heard of so far, except for harikere, which is gut cut in slang in Japanese. Is it really?

Yeah. Didn't know that. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, we have suicide bombers today, right, Chuck? Which I have to tell you, I can't wrap my mind around that. I've yet to encounter an ideology or dogma that I can point to and be like, yes, I would kill myself for that. Right.

Not even the Simpsons? No, not anymore. Maybe during season seven. Okay. Yeah, but that's a long time ago. Yeah. So we, but you can explain, and I've actually read a study before that kind of explains how suicide bombing works or why suicide bombers do what they do.

Right. It has nothing to do with religiousity. Oh, really? No. They, they did some, I can't remember who did this study, but they did a survey of people who, and they, they defined religiousness or adherence to the Muslim religion as how often you prayed every day, right on a daily basis, and they found that when you, when you factor that in, that being equal, the, the real thread that showed support for suicide

bombing or an aversion to suicide bombing was how often you attended mosque. Really? So it seems to be more of a social than a religious thing. Interesting. Suicide bombing, right? But still you can explain it by, it has that kind of structured framework of religion. Right. Right.

With the, with the kamikaze pilots, it had to do more with a perverted version of the code of honor, because this begs the question, how do you talk a man into getting into a plane and flying himself to his death? Well, I think the, you talk them into it by saying that your reward is, lies in the afterlife, in the case of religion, or in this case with, I guess, what your family name, the honor of your family name? Yeah. And what it was was a, there, there is an 18th century, um, code of the samurai called

Bushido. Yes. And what is that? Way of the warrior? Right. Okay. So you've got Bushido. Um, and it's this huge code of conduct that includes everything from, and it was created

in feudal Japan, and it creates, it involves everything from, there's like a tenant that you don't hire an incompetent person or put them in a position of power just because they've been loyal to you for X number of years, like, um, in this somewhere, right? This code of conduct is basically, it says that you, self-sacrifice is, is very important. Right. And honor comes from death. Sure. Humiliation comes from surrender.

Right? Yep. Disgrace. Uh, if you surrender, and that's where the, how did you pronounce it? I always said Harry Carey. Bushido. No. Harry Carey is gut cut.

No. Oh, Harikiri? Harikiri. Yeah. Uh, my girlfriends have Japanese, dude. It's like a walking, I have a walking crib sheet next to me. It's a similar concept in that, uh, death brings honor. Right.

But that's just part of it. Exactly. So there's, there's all this other, um, it's basically like how to live as a samurai, right? Uh-huh. Um, and the samurai were noble warriors. They were definitely, uh, in Japan, they're still revered and they have been for centuries. Right? Sure.

So when the Japanese government took this one facet of Bushido, that, you know, death, honor comes from death and humiliation comes from surrender, they took it and kind of pounded it into their military's head. Right. It was kind of a twisted form of it. Some would say, uh, some historians would call it an outright perversion of the Bushido. Right. Uh, but it worked and that's how they got Kamikaze pilots to have a real impact.

Uh, I think at their debut at the, um, the Gulf, the battle for the Gulf of Leyte, they took out, uh, the USS St. Low, um, with 144 men on board. And that was the first time, uh, by the time the battle of Okinawa came around, I think in 1944, um, 300 planes outfitted with 550 pound bombs were just coming out of the sky. And what do you do? Yeah. Because I mean, think about it, Chuck, you've told me this before, right? That if you are prepared to die, you are an indestructible enemy.

If you're prepared to give your own life, that's part of war is like you're hoping to make it out of the battle. Sure. If you don't assume you're going to make it out of the battle, you're the most dangerous person on the planet. Yep. And if you can line up, and I imagine once they started doing this and signing, uh, soldiers up pilots that became a lot easier to get the next guy in line because you certainly

didn't want to, uh, back down if you're, you know, copilot was all gung-ho. I'll bet with the first, the first round of pilots, uh, vice admiral Takajira was like, holy, they actually did it. You know? Yeah. He's like, it's going to be easy. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's line them up. So plus they tied it to the samurai and what is like cooler, probably more honorable to it, a World War II pilot in Japan than to be tied to the ancient Samurai. Sure. Yeah. It was like a resurgence of it. Absolutely. Plus also the samurai had hands down the coolest armor of any group of warriors in history.

Yeah. Even Tom Cruise looked cool as a samurai, which is really saying that says a whole lot. I'll five and a half feet of them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're being generous. Um, so this, the, the, uh, the perversion of Bushido was also extended to the rest of

the military too. Right. It wasn't just these kamikaze pilots, which is why, um, I think 5% of the Japanese military surrendered during World War II. Not much. 5%. Yeah. Um, in the Pacific, the Japanese, um, used to flood islands with tens of thousands of

soldiers. Yeah. I can't remember which island it was, but there was one. It may have been Saipan. It may have been Guam. I can't remember. Um, there were 20,000 Japanese soldiers on there and only 10% surrendered. Wow.

On that one battle. So the rest were mostly killed. Yeah. Like that's just how they fought. Well, that was the only thing you could do. Well, yeah, because I was going to surrender. You're forced to kill them. Right.

So one of these battles actually, um, you, you didn't have to get killed. You could also hide. Right. Right. And a lot of these islands, these islands became key toward the end of World War II because the United States figured, Hey, Midway and the Philippines and Guam would be great places to stage attacks on Japan. And Japan thought, Hey, these are great islands to stage attacks on us.

So they became kind of the focal point. Whoever owned these islands had great sway over the outcome of the war. Right. And it switched hands here or there. The Philippines, uh, were a really a key island in World War II in the Pacific theater, right? So the Japanese had it for a while and then the allies did their own flooding with Marines right who took the Philippines from the Japanese. And while the Japanese controlled the Philippines, they set up their own puppet regime.

Yeah. Not a kind regime. No, not toward the Filipinos. So the, uh, Filipinos had, um, they were kind of rubbing their hands in anticipation when the allies liberated the island because they started search parties and rooted out any, um, hiding Japanese soldiers and just butchered them. Sure. I think up to 80 a day for a while, right after the poisonous snakes.

Isn't that what they called them? Yeah. Yeah. That's what somebody was quoted as saying. Hey friends, whether you need it for work, school or a special project, it's important to have the right printer, right, Josh? That's right. And the Epson Eco Tank is a new type of printer that doesn't use cartridges.

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trip. Right. These islands were lousy with mountainous regions and jungles so some of these holdouts or stragglers as we call them could root down and kind of disappear. Yeah. A lot of them did. A lot of them did. And actually interestingly enough, a lot of these Japanese stragglers or holdouts kept

holding out or straggling depending on the verb you want to use after the war ended and refused to come down. Right? There's some really famous cases of Japanese holdouts. Yeah. There was one... Well, some are a little like more heartwarming than others. Definitely.

There was one man who apparently was charged with securing an island off the coast of eastern Russia. He said, defend this island. So he did so until 1958, long time after the war was over. And the nice end of history is that he settled in the Ukraine, he got used to things over there and started a new family and just kind of was like, all right, well, this is my life now. It's kind of nice over here.

This is your family. Not so much for his old family. Yeah. Did he have an old family? Probably. I don't know. Probably. Yeah.

Yeah. That is about as happy as the straggler stories go. From there, it goes into cannibalism. Cannibalism's one. There was one group. They were actually, I think some of them were civilians, but I think it was 20 men, something like that. 30.

30. So 29 men and a woman. We've talked about this off the air, about this woman and what it must have been like to be the only woman among 30. Her name was, her first name was Kazako. And apparently she used to decide that she liked one man as a boyfriend and then we get tired of him and liked another man and sure these people were living making milk out of or making a wine out of coconut milk, right?

They had their own clothes. They made, they found, I think a B29 Superfortress crashed nearby on this mountain that they were living on. So they pillaged it and used like the rifle springs as fish hooks and they were doing pretty good living like Swiss Family Robinson style, right? For like six years. Right. And the woman actually, when she transferred her affections, people would mysteriously vanish.

So apparently there was a lot of infighting, I think six or seven of the 11 deaths that were caused, that were attributed to the group itself were through violence. One guy turned up with 13 stab wounds and then at least four other guys who the woman had dated disappeared while fishing. Dated? Sure. That's what you call it when it's like, you know, love straggling style. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah. It's like a movie. Right. Well, they, they were finally convinced to come out in what, uh, 1951. Yeah. Which wasn't so bad, but there's, there is a whopper. There's another guy. Well, let's talk about, um, oh, what was his name?

Yokoi. Mm hmm. You want to talk about him? Yeah. But I think we should do this dramatically. Let's lead up. Pay it forward. Yeah.

All right. I think that's right. Yeah. Pay it forward. That's different. Let's wait for it. Pay it forward. Uh, Shoichi Yokoi, uh, he was, um, he was a soldier, a fellow holdout who has discovered

fishing on a riverbank in Guam wearing, uh, burlap pants and a tree bark shirt. Right. Clearly a survivor. Yeah. John Rambo, if you will. And no, he wasn't much of a Rambo. That's true. Wait for Rambo.

He's coming up. When, uh, when Yokoi, uh, got back, he basically, I don't know if he admitted it or what, but he, he said, I thought the war was still going on. And this is 1972. I don't think I even said that yet. Holy cow. This is 1972. I was one year old, you know, I was negative for crawling around Stone Mountain, Georgia.

And this guy was still holding out and he was found fishing and kind of said, uh, famously, I'm ashamed that I've returned alive when he finally came back. Right. He would have left, but he knew the war was over. I think that he, he said that he was forced to stay because of shame. He did not want to return as a, uh, surrender. Oh, you're right. And, and he was kind of met with national shame here.

Everybody's like, Hey, glad you made it, but you fell on a sword, it wouldn't be the worst thing. Exactly. Right. Um, in contrast to Yokoi was the baddest dude in world war two, probably. As a matter of fact, I invite our listeners to email us, anybody who can want any single individual who can top the man we're about to talk about as, as in badness. Okay.

I agree. And Josh will personally email you back and debate you on that choice. I don't know about that, but, um, this is the Rambo of Japan. Don't think about it. Chuck, there can't be too many people who, who exceed this guy. Now we're talking about Lieutenant, uh, Hiru Onoda, right? Bad dude. Right.

So if Yokoi was just kind of hanging out fishing and, and, uh, ashamed of himself, Onoda was doing the exact opposite. He was, um, staging raids on villages in the Philippines and murdering cows and, and, uh, stealing stuff out of freezers and shooting at villagers. Hold out. That's correct. Let's start at the beginning. How'd he get there?

He was on what island, Chuck? He was on the island of Lubang. I love it when you say that, Chuck. My pronunciation is stellar here. Uh, he was, uh, he was unaware actually that the war was over. He was a case that, that did not know. No. So they, he and I think four other guys end up on Lubang.

He was 23 at the time when they landed and Lubang is a Filipino island. Yes. It had, uh, an allied presence at the time. Um, but this was prior to the allies just flooding the, the Philippines with Marines and taking it from Japanese, right? Right. But I get the impression that Lubang was kind of, uh, no man's land because he and his four man crack commando teams were tasked with going and sabotaging everything they could

on Lubang. Right. And they did. They did. They blew stuff up. They, um, I think they, they did something to one of the ports and the peers and things like that. Um, and basically they're just saboteur commandos.

While they were there though, that allied invasion happened and these guys had to skedaddle and they did into the jungle and became gorillas. They did. They did not stop fighting. They did not fish along the river banks and get found by somebody who, anybody who wanted to talk to him. No, these guys continued carrying out the war. Yes.

All five of them until 1950, when, uh, one of them surrendered in 1950. Yeah. And then he turned around and said, he wrote a message that said, Hey guys, the, I've been treated very well. The war's actually over has been for six, five years. He texted them. Right. BTW wore over LOL, come home for sushi meal, LOL.

Exactly. I think is what the first message said. And they didn't buy it. No, they didn't. And then they blanketed the jungle, uh, with these messages, they make copies, dropped them from the planes and evidently they even played over loudspeakers into the jungle. Hey, wore over. Right.

Well, there was a contingent or contingent of, uh, Japanese diplomats that went and used loudspeakers to say, Hey dude, we're from Japan. Like we're, we're for real. War's over. The war is over for like six years. It's been over. Right. Now Lieutenant Ohnata, um, did not buy this.

He and his guys just didn't buy it. They figured it was Allied tricks trying to get them out. Yeah. You know, I can respect that. But it also shows that back in Japan, everybody was aware that this was going on and we banged. There was a Japanese, um, commando team that was still fighting World War II several years after it was over. Right.

And the Japanese loved this. Yeah. Right. And they're very reserved way. Well, sure. Um, and, uh, but one by one, these guys started to go down, right? Yeah. Two of them, uh, he became separated from the remaining two evidently and then both of

those, uh, holdouts were killed. So now he's by himself. Right. And he's still fighting this war. Still holding out. Like I said, when they wanted meat, they'd go and murder a cow and I guess field dress it and take the meat back into the jungle. Murder a cow.

Um, villagers were treated as spies and were shot at. Yeah. Um, they would get into firefights with the local Filipino police. Right. Um, and, uh, I bred, and this is not verified, but I read that they actually staged a raid on a local police station. This is back when there was more than just Lieutenant Onada, he raided a police station and got into a firefight to steal ammunition and guns.

Unreal. Okay. So time goes by. Flash through the sixties. Yeah. Of the sixties, dude, go through that and go midway into the seventies to 1974. So here we are as 1974. I'm three years old.

Was it full decade before Ghostbusters? Correct? Yeah. Unfortunately. Hey friends, whether you need it for work, school or a special project, it's important to have the right printer, right, Josh? That's right. And the Epson Eco Tank is a new type of printer that doesn't use cartridges.

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trip. And Anoda, excuse me, is still hunkered down and fighting. By himself. By himself when a Japanese student who has heard of this legend goes and seeks him out. Right. And a Japanese dropout apparently, Noriyo Suzuki, he was kind of a wandering drifter cool guy. Is it a dropout?

Yeah, he was. College dropout. Oh, what better person to go talk someone into quitting. Nice check. He leaves Japan and tells his friends he's going to look for Lieutenant Anoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman in that order. They're like, okay. All right, dude.

Leave your rent check. Yeah. So this guy was not leaving rent checks behind. He was the hippie rob of Japan. Exactly. So he goes to Lubang, the first thing he did was go to Lubang to look for Lieutenant Anoda, who by this time is 1974. Everyone in Japan is still aware that this guy's killing people left and right and he's

carrying on the war. He's in his fifties at this point. Yeah. He was 23 and 28 years later. Wow. Yeah. So he's still fighting and everyone's aware of it. And so I guess Suzuki's kind of like going to make a name for himself as being the one

who gets this guy to come out, and he actually meets Anoda in the jungle and they become friends. That is crazy. Yeah. This needs to be made into a film. I can't believe it hasn't already. Anoda even wrote a memoir. Really?

Yeah. It was a bestseller as far as I know. Memoirs of a geisha? That was different. Oh, okay. That was an entirely different story. All that samurai? Some resemblance.

No. No. That was different too. Foyled. And then she actually meets Anoda and they become friends, right? Yeah. And he kind of tells him, hey man, this is the war's been over for a long, long, long time.

You miss the sixties. You miss Woodstock. Disco is on the horizon. He's like, but Ghostbusters is coming. Ghostbusters is coming in a decade. And here's the problem. Here's the rub. And this is where the story starts to get sad.

You get the impression at this point that Lieutenant Anoda is aware that the war is probably over. But he says that he can't stop fighting until his commanding officer tells him to surrender. You couldn't write this stuff. He was originally given orders not to kill himself. He was under no circumstances allowed to take his own life. And he wasn't to stop until they came and got him. And so Suzuki was like, all right, let me see what I can do.

Goes back to Japan, finds this guy's former commanding officer who's now an aged, stooped over bookseller and selling little gremlins in a back alley. As part of the Marshall Plan, Japan didn't even have an army anymore. There's no standing army in Japan. They're not allowed to have one, right? But this nice bookseller decides to come along to Lubang. And Suzuki takes him to meet Onoda. And the guy officially orders Onoda to surrender, put down his arms.

And so after a second, apparently, it really sinks in. And Onoda is hit with the fact that he's just spent 29, more than half of his life, 29 years of his life fighting a war. Needlessly. Needlessly. And killing people needlessly. Killing 30 people and wounding 100 others. And God knows how many cows, right?

So he felt bad all of a sudden. Yeah, he felt like a fool. He felt bad. But he did come back as a national hero. And depending quite well what to do with them, because, again, they're trying to move past this. They stood and still stand accused of a lot of atrocities during World War II. And they've been trying to distance themselves ever since of their role in World War II.

Because they were definitely the losers. They had two atomic bombs dropped on them, which is arguably the worst thing any group of humans ever done to another group of humans. But at the same time, they lost and now they're hanging out with the victors. They want to be friends with everybody, so they're distancing themselves from that. And all of a sudden, bam, here comes this guy that exemplifies everything that the Japanese Imperial military was about during World War II. But they still treated him like a hero.

The guy, Andy, was pardoned by Ferdinand Marcos, husband of a Melda Marcos who famously had millions and trillions of shoes. You remember the Marcos' in the Philippines? The irony is rich in this one. Because Ohnata didn't have any shoes. But when he was found, he had his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and a couple hand grenades on him. Really?

Wow. That's a good thing to hang onto that stuff. Well, he needed the early 70s. Well, he needed the early 70s. Yeah. Of course, it was an old weaponry at that point. No, it was in pristine shapes, though. Oh, really?

Uh-huh. Oh, cool. A guy like that takes care of his gun, I can tell you. Yeah, you know what he said, sadly? Yeah. You close your article with his very poignant, I thought. Thanks, Chuck. When he was talking about his dead comrades who he lost years and years earlier, he said,

wouldn't it have been better if I had died with them? You can imagine. I know, man. That's kind of a waste of life. So people have heard stories of these holdouts and Japanese soldiers being found. I know supposedly they found some in the 80s and then the 90s a few years ago, but we haven't found that those were substantiated. Now, Chuck and I figured out a long time ago that if you are doing research and you find

a sensational story, and in it it says, but they're still trying to figure out whether or not it's for real, and then there's no follow-up whatsoever, then it was a hoax. Or it wasn't real. And also, Chuck, did you want to mention Japanese stragglers in pop culture? Yeah, I think we need to. We'd be remiss if we did not mention Gilligan's Island, which occurred to me while I was reading this article. It's like, wait a minute, man.

I remember Gilligan's Island episode with this. And sure enough, there was an episode called Sorry, So Sorry, My Island Now. Which is not the least bit racist. I sent you the clip. Also racist was in true Hollywood form. They hired an Italian man to play a Japanese soldier. Threw some thick glasses on him, told him to squint and talk funny. What do you think I don't know?

Exactly. And if you think we're being jerks ourselves, you should look it up on YouTube. That's actually a kind portrayal of what this guy said. His name was Vito Scotty, and he played on the same show a season later, played a Russian mad scientist. I remember that one too. That's Gilligan's Island, they weren't reaching too far. And the six million dollar man.

Steve Austin was held captive by a Japanese holdout in one episode of the six million dollar man. I mean, you got to think about it. When Onada came back to Japan, that was huge. It doesn't get bigger than that. That's like world news, big time, you know? Yeah, huge. Pretty cool.

So that's that, eh? Eh? Eh? So, yeah. Oh yeah, you can read this article, which is pretty much a rehash of what Chuck and I just said on HouseTheWorks.com. I did write it. And I like this one a lot.

It's a good one. Yeah. You should be proud of it. Yeah. That's in the handy search bar. What, just type Japanese holdouts or something like that? Sure. Yeah.

And since I just said handy search bar, that means Chuck, it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm going to just call this funny email from Natalie, who definitely does not want to kill her husband. That's what I'm going to call it. Oh, is this the pet on the back we didn't even know it? No. Oh. This is different.

Hello, Chuck and Josh, or Charles and Joshua, if we're going formal, we're not. I love your podcast. I've been a big fan for a while, and I have an idea for a show. Can someone truly be framed for murder? Interesting, don't you think? Josh? Huh. Interesting?

Yeah, well, yeah. Okay. We know that many have tried and failed, but there have been, has there ever been an attempt that was successful? I know if it was successful, we wouldn't really know. So that's my first thing that I was going to say right back, is we wouldn't know. Let me explain why I asked this before you think I'm trying to accomplish this and act. My husband, Paul, had two separate freak accidents within the last seven months.

The first one was when he was taking some items up to the attic, and the spring-loaded mechanism came loose and sprang up and hit him in the shoulder. Ow. He didn't hit him in the head, and he was just badly bruised. Yeah, it probably would have killed him if he'd hit him in the head. Perhaps. The second... If he'd aimed a little more closely.

Right. The second accident was when he dropped a floor tile on his head. Yes, a floor tile. He was cleaning his workshop garage and had put some floor tiles up on a shelf, then moved a ladder, and one of the tiles came right down on top of his noggin. While he was building the shelves, he had bruised his hands and cut his fingers, so it appeared that he had defensive ones. He said that he could totally set me up if he had another accident and came up dead because

all of the marks all over him, and all the shows that we have recorded in our Tivo, would indicate that I did it. I love all the crime shows, CSI, NCIS, Races Fox. CSI's Liars. They're all Liars. And that is from Natalie. And Natalie, one thing that I think you've missed in all this is typically when you frame someone for murder, you commit a murder, and you try and blame someone else.

You do not get murdered and set someone up to have police think that they killed you. Right. Well, maybe her husband hates her guts, you know, and is willing to die for that. Sure. Maybe he's a holdout. Maybe. Or a suicide bomber. So I think Natalie kind of was a little confused here.

When you frame someone for murder, it's typically not something you do for your own murder. Agreed, Chuck. I think it's a fine assessment. Sounds like your husband, Paul, is a bit of a klutz, and I don't think the cops would buy that story. Well, if you're looking for Chuck and I to serve as your alibi, just go ahead and send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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