An afternoon with Saburo Sakai

HOME > JAPAN > SABURO SAKAI II

Also on this website: a review of Samurai! by Saburo Sakai, Fred Saito, and Martin Caidin and the story of Sakai's scarf

An afternoon with Saburo Sakai (part 2)

By Scott Hards

continued from part 1

On just missing Lyndon Johnson

One day I jumped two B-26s and shot one down. I got a few shots off at the other before I lost it in a cloud bank. After the war, I learned from U.S. records of the incident that the plane that got away had been carrying Lyndon Johnson! Can you imagine how I might have changed history if I'd hit the other plane first instead? A lot of Americans who know that story have come up to me and said "Saburo, why didn't you shoot the other plane down first? Then we could have stayed out of the Vietnam War!"

On the IJN leadership

Promotions in the Navy were based on what school you graduated from and who you knew, it had nothing to do with merit. Some guy could smash up 20 planes trying to learn how to fly, and then not shoot down a damn thing and he'd be promoted faster than me or any other successful pilot simply because he came from the right school. Those were the kinds of idiots we had leading us. How were we supposed to win the war with leadership like that? Take that idiot [Minoru] Genda. He could barely fly, but he jumped up and down about the Shiden-kai ["George"], so everybody else pretended to like it, too. That plane was a piece of crap, put together by a third-rate firm [Kawanishi].

On the atomic bomb

Once, I was on a discussion panel with [Enola Gay pilot] Col. Paul Tibbets in the U.S. and somebody asked me what I thought about the A-bomb. I said "If Japan had had the bomb, and they told me to fly the plane that carried it and bomb San Francisco or something, I would have done it gladly. That's a soldier's job. To follow orders and fight for his country." I think Tibbets was a great hero for the U.S. To fly out there with just two B-29s and no fighter escort, that takes a lot of guts. At the time, nobody knew about the A-bomb; there was no international treaty against its use, like there was for chemical weapons. The U.S. even dropped leaflets warning people in Hiroshima that a new weapon was going to be used. That's just war.

On the Rape of Nanjing

There's no question that Japanese soldiers probably killed a few thousand people there, but stories of 100,000 to 300,000 dead are complete fiction, made up by the Chinese for propaganda purposes. And most of the "civilians" that got killed were probably Chinese soldiers masquerading as non-combatants by not wearing their uniforms. That IS against international law. Why don't I think the stories are true? First of all, there weren't even 300,000 people in Nanjing at the time. Most of the city's population had fled when they heard the Japanese were coming. Secondly, there were over 200 foreign journalists in the area, and you can't find any mention of an atrocity like that in the papers of the day. There's no way you could hide something that big, but the stories about it didn't emerge until AFTER the war. And the only photos from the supposed event that ever get published are taken from a documentary about it and are fakes, staged for the film. [See the Rape of Nanjing]

On "comfort women's" demands for compensation

Demanding compensation from a foreign government 50 years after something happened? Come on. The statute of limitations for murder is only 15 years. After the war, the Japanese government signed agreements with Korea and other nations settling war liability claims. These are binding, international agreements made by the legal governments of their nations. If certain victim's groups have a claim, they have to address it to their own government, not to some foreign government. You don't see A-bomb victims groups going to Washington demanding that the U.S. government pay for their suffering, do you? No, instead, the Japanese government pays them an allowance. If the comfort women have a claim, it should be with their own Korean or Philippine government. They're just looking for cash now that Japan is a rich nation. [See the Comfort Women]

On protests of U.S. bases in Japan

Those people are so stupid. Do they think that soldiers actually want to start a war or something, even though they would be the first ones killed? Do they think that if we get rid of armies, that we can rid the world of war? Do they also think that if we banish doctors, that we can rid the world of disease? Why don't they understand that armed forces are like an insurance policy for use in case of emergency. Who do they think is going to protect them if someone were to actually invade Japan? Article 9 of the Constitution [the part of the Japanese Constitution that renounces war as a sovereign right]? Do they think that if they staple copies of Article 9 onto boards and post them all around Japan's shores that a foreign invader is going to turn around and go home if they read it?

And another memory of Sakai-san

[More recently, I received this email from Richard Lawless:]

The Sakai post, plus the news of his death, brought back some memories of my discussions with him in Tokyo circa 1985. At that time I had commissioned noted aviation artist Segio Koike to paint a very specific air combat scene for a limited edition print. I had done some preliminary research on the piece, which was inspired by a particular event described in Martin Caidin's "Ragged, Rugged Warriors"--a B-26 mission against the Japanese airdrome at Lae, and had located the gentleman who was at the controls of the B-26 that day. After developing a reasonably accurate account of what happen on that day and with this mission from the U.S. side (to include a very detailed account of the non-combat mission of old LBJ) we sat down with Sakai and the artist to discuss the painting. Sakai was most generous with his time and his account very closely paralleled that provided from the left seat of the B-26 ("Kansas Komet") - so the painting was completed. I wrote the narrative which accompanied the print (a limited edition that was signed by Sakai and the artist) and was very pleased with the outcome, to include the incredible detail achieved by the artist. Some months later I received a phone call from the tail gunner - retired and disabled in Florida- who noted that he had collected a copy of the print at his unit's reunion the past month in Vegas, plus was able to discussed that action with the pilot. He noted that the painting was "absolutely how it was that day, right down to the angle of approach by Sakai and the cloud formations over the target"- to include the fear that he experienced in the tail of the aircraft as the (a) Zero bore in on him. I explained that Sakai appeared to have a great memory and was not above correcting the Caidin account, in either book, when it got a bit out of hand.

Although we went on, in the context of this personal mission-historical project, to do three additional paintings with Koike (the Yamamoto shoot down, the Wake Island defense and U-2 mission over Lop Nor) none of these involved the quality of detail and the combination of personalities recreated in "Zero Scramble Over Lae".

Another visit and a bit of Sakai's scarf