Eighty years ago, Japanese submariner Kazuo Sakamaki was taken prisoner by the U.S.—and erased from his own country’s history
Japanese submarine HA-19 on an Oahu beach after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
PHOTO: U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVESBy Takuma Melber Dec. 4, 2021 12:01 am
Until the end of World War II, Japan celebrated its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, as a glorious victory. But the patriotic legend also created a victim: Kazuo Sakamaki, a lieutenant in the Japanese Navy who was taken captive during the attack, becoming Japan’s first prisoner of war in the conflict.
During their military training, Japanese recruits were taught that for imperial soldiers only victory mattered; there must be no retreat. Individuality and personal sentiments were to be subordinated to the group. “Whatever happens to me—if I go, it will be in the service of my country. Words cannot express how grateful I am for the privilege of fighting for peace and justice,” the 22-year-old Sakamaki wrote in a letter to his parents, expecting them to read it after his death. The submariners left behind hair and fingernail cuttings for their relatives to bury in the event that they died.
Weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakamaki had been put in command of HA-19, a Kō-Hyōteki-class midget submarine—a speedy ship barely 2 meters wide, with room for just two crewmen. It carried two torpedoes, but if they had no other option the submariners were instructed to crash directly into the target, sacrificing their own lives in the process—underwater kamikazes. The submariners left behind not only letters to their families but also hair and fingernail cuttings so that their relatives would have something of their bodies to bury in the event that they died.
The Japanese plan called for five of the submarines to be unloaded from their tenders about 12 miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor, then conceal themselves in the bay and attack American battleships following the first air raid. On Dec. 5, 1941, the squadron entered American waters as planned and was able to tune in American jazz on the radio. Inside submarine tender I-24, the last religious rites were performed to ritually cleanse body and soul.
Kazuo Sakamaki as a young officer in the Japanese Navy.
When he boarded HA-19, Sakamaki wrote in a memoir after the war, he discovered to his horror that the gyrocompass, the most important navigation instrument in his midget submarine, was defective. As a result, the sub was soon 90 degrees off course, moving in a circle away from Pearl Harbor instead of heading toward the entrance. It quickly became impossible to maneuver and ran aground on a coral reef.When the bombing of Pearl Harbor began on the morning of Dec. 7, the destroyer U.S.S. Helm managed to escape the inferno and sailed at full speed to safety on the open sea. At 8:17 a.m., the Helm reported spotting a stranded Japanese submarine and opened fire. HA-19 was shaken and Sakamaki lost consciousness for a moment, but when he came to he saw that the shots had missed their target and freed the submarine. His steersman, Kiyoshi Inagaki, had the presence of mind to immediately put the engines in reverse and steer back into the water at full speed.
The sub’s battery had been damaged and was giving off toxic fumes, and the two-man crew began to feel lightheaded from lack of oxygen. Sakamaki ordered his steersman to attempt evasive action and head for the island of Lanai, one of the eight main Hawaiian islands, to rendezvous with the submarine tender. HA-19 managed to get away from the Helm, but it drifted for hours in the water, badly damaged and incapable of maneuvering with two dazed seamen on board.
Sakamaki and Inagaki activated the self-destruct mechanism and left the vessel, attempting with their last strength to reach land. They realized on the way that they had not heard an explosion and that the self-destruct mechanism had not worked. Sakamaki wanted to turn back, he recalled, but then he saw a huge wave carry off his crewmate Inagaki, and he himself was swept exhausted onto the beach, where he lost consciousness.
On the morning of Dec. 8, while wounded American servicemen were being treated and the dead buried, 21-year-old corporal David Akui, a Japanese-American born on Hawaii, was patrolling with Lieutenant Paul Plybon on Oahu’s Waimanalo Beach southeast of Kaneohe Naval Air Station, which had been heavily bombed the day before. They discovered an unconscious man lying on the beach: Kazuo Sakamaki, who became the U.S.’s first Japanese prisoner of war. His crewmate Inagaki was found dead.
As Sakamaki learned when he was interrogated, all of his other comrades in the midget submarines had also died. None of the Kō-Hyōteki submarines returned from Pearl Harbor. Sakamaki asked to join them in an honorable death by being executed or allowed to take his own life. But the request was denied, and he remained in captivity until the end of the war.
Japanese propaganda tried to brand him, at least by implication, as a kind of outlaw. Sakamaki’s comrades, described as “nine fallen soldiers, distinguished by their incomparable uprightness and loyalty” and celebrated as “war gods,” were the subject of books, paintings and songs. In April 1942, they were given a state funeral in the presence of Prime Minister Tōjō, and they are still venerated today in ultranationalist circles.
Meanwhile, Sakamaki’s face was missing from all pictures, his name wasn’t mentioned and his whereabouts were left unspoken. In the U.S., the captured HA-19 was exhibited for the rest of the war to promote the sale of war bonds. It toured the country decorated with red, white and blue ribbons and the inscription “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Instead of damaging the U.S. Pacific Fleet, it thus helped to finance the American war against Japan.
When Sakamaki was released at the end of the war and returned to Japan, he published a book about his experiences in American captivity. He went on to work for decades for Toyota and was manager of the company’s subsidiary in Brazil, but to the end of his life he was stigmatized in Japan as the “first prisoner of war.” When he died in 1999 at the age of 81, his family requested that the news not be made public.
