You don’t have to be a history professor to know there are events that occur in life that define history. Everyone remembers 9/11, D-Day, what transpired during the American Revolution, the Civil War, and especially Pearl Harbor, a “day which will live in infamy.” But I bet you don’t know and have never heard of Mitsuo Fuchida, so let me tell you about him.
Commander Mitsuo Fuchida of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service is perhaps best known for leading the first wave of bomber and fighter planes during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. At 7:40 a.m. on December 7, 1941, he sent up the green flare from his plane signaling the order to attack; and he later ordered his radio operator to send the message “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” informing the Japanese that they had achieved complete surprise. The attack on the Hawaiian US Navy base resulted in 2,403 American and 64 Japanese deaths. The following day the United States officially declared war on Japan and entered World War II.
Fuchida served Japan throughout the war. He once again escaped possible death when an emergency appendectomy left him on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Akagi instead of flying a plane when the United States attacked during the Battle of Midway.
Later, having broken both ankles when thrown by an explosion, he became a staff officer with Vice Adm. Kakuji Kakuta. Ordered to Tokyo just before Kakuta failed to stop the American liberation of Guam, he would otherwise have participated with Kakuta in suicide by seppuku. “Again the sword of death had missed me only by inches,” he told reporter Hal Drake in 1971.
One of his tasks was to inspect the city of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped—again he was the only one of his party not to die, this time from radiation poisoning. (He would have by original orders been in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded on August 6, but was abruptly sent to Yamato instead on August 5 for an intelligence briefing.) After returning to his family and their chicken farm, he later recalled, “Life had no taste or meaning. … I had missed death so many times and for what? What did it all mean?”
After the end of the war, a number of Japanese military personnel were put on trial for war crimes relating to their treatment of prisoners of war. Fuchida, called on to testify, felt the trials were a sham. He had harbored resentment of the United States for decades due to its restrictions on Asian immigration, and he believed the Americans had treated Japanese POWs just as badly. He sought out recently released POWs to gather evidence. It was then he met his former flight engineer Kazuo Kanegasaki, presumed to have died at the Battle of Midway, who had instead been taken prisoner.
Rather than telling a story of abuse and torture by Americans, the man told him of a young American woman, Peggy Covell, who treated him and his fellow prisoners with great kindness even though Japanese soldiers had killed her missionary parents in the Philippines. Fuchida was astounded. The code of the warrior not only permitted revenge, it demanded it; but this woman declined revenge and offered compassion to Japanese prisoners.
This sparked Fuchida’s interest in Christianity. He soon encountered the testimony of Jacob DeShazer, an American POW who shared his story of finding God in a Japanese camp in I Was a Prisoner of Japan. In September 1949, Fuchida became a Christian. “Looking back,” he said later, “I can see now that the Lord had laid his hand upon me so that I might serve him.”
Fuchida established the Captain Fuchida Evangelical Association and began to travel full time sharing a presentation of his conversion story. In his autobiography, From Pearl Harbor to Calvary (1959), he wrote, “I remember the thrill that was mine when, in one of my first [evangelistic] meetings, I led my first soul to Christ in America. And he was one of my own countrymen.” In 1952 he toured with the Worldwide Christian Missionary Army of Sky Pilots.
It may seem quite impossible that the officer who led the strike on Pearl Harbor eventually devoted himself to religion. Fuchida, deeply affected by the devastation he had orchestrated and the broader consequences of the conflict, converted to Christianity and dedicated his remaining years to sharing its message.
Fuchida followed a similar path and read the Bible out of curiosity. He officially converted to Christianity in September 1949. After that, he was extremely dedicated to religion and started traveling the world as an Evangelist. He was even invited to the United States to share his story, a nerve-wracking request to make of the man who commanded the enemy aerial fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Fuchida said he was only ever welcomed warmly, telling everyone he met, “I would give anything to retract my actions at Pearl Harbor, but that is impossible. Instead, I will work at striking the death-blow to the giant called hatred which infests human hearts.”
Aside from establishing the Captain Fuchida Evangelistic Association, Fuchida recounted his own story in numerous books. Yet, as much as he told his story, Fuchida also received significant backlash for its accuracy. Fuchida never appeared to address these critiques. Instead, he spent his life recounting his experiences during the war and how they led him to find Christianity. He died in Japan on May 30, 1976 from diabetes.
I am sharing this story for the upcoming Easter week to emphasize how stories change and as a result how they can impact each and every one of us. Two thousand years ago, Jesus made a triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and within that week he was arrested, tried and crucified. But that wasn’t the end of the story … He arose and lives within us if we ask Him to.
Matthew 28: 5-7: “The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
Tagged: kindness and compassion, missionaries, prison ministry, world war II
