Unique Story of Pearl Harbor - Japanese Military Leader Converted to Christianity

Japanese military leader converted to Christianity
By Donald L. Gilleland

On December 7th Patrick Air Force Base honored ten survivors from the
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, a day President Franklin Roosevelt said would live in infamy. We traditionally remember that day because the Japanese attack ushered us into World War II and took the lives of 2,388 Americans.

However, there is a little known story about that event that few Americans
have ever heard. Mitsuo Fuchida, a Commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the air-strike leader of the Japanese carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor. Considered one of Japan's most skillful fliers, Commander Fuchida, who was later promoted to Captain, led the first wave of 183 airplanes against the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor; he was the one who shouted the war cry "Tora, Tora, Tora."

Of the 70 Japanese officers who participated in the raid on Pearl Harbor,
Fuchida was the only one who returned to Japan alive. He later fought
against the United States throughout the war in the Pacific. Fuchida was a national hero in Japan, but at war's end he was a disillusioned and bitter man. In 1951 he published his recollections of those historic events and his book was subsequently translated and published in English in 1955.

Following the war, Fuchida met Jacob DeShazer, an American Doolittle
Raider who was captured and imprisoned from 1942-1945. DeShazer had
become a Christian missionary who returned to Japan in 1948 to preach to the nation that held him captive for 40 months. He wrote a tract, "I Was a Prisoner of Japan," which Fuchida read. Fuchida was so impressed by what he read that he sought out and met with DeShazer, who subsequently converted Fuchida from Buddhism to Christianity.

Fuchida wrote of his salvation experience in a book titled From Pearl
Harbor to Calvary, in which he recounts how profoundly he was affected by the bible passages describing the Crucifixion--particularly the passage in hich Christ says: "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
That experience changed his life dramatically and he became a Christian
evangelist, traveling across Japan and the Orient introducing others to
Christianity.

In From Pearl Harbor to Calvary he wrote: "I would give anything to
retract my actions of twenty-nine years ago at Pearl Harbor, but it is
impossible. Instead, I now work at striking the death-blow to the basic hatred which infests the human heart and causes such tragedies."

In 1952, Fuchida toured the United States as a member of the Worldwide
Christian Missionary Army of Sky Pilots. In 1960 he became an American
citizen, in the country he hated as a young man. Fuchida embraced Christianity completely and spent the rest of his life telling others what God had done for him and apologizing for the pain he had caused at Pearl Harbor.

He died of complications caused by diabetes on May 30, 1976. A Fuchida
Film Project is in preproduction to make a $140 million motion picture to
tell Fuchida's life story, which should interest Pearl Harbor survivors.