APPENDIX VI

JAPANESE RAID LEADER IS NOW A

PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER

The following cutting is taken from a South African newspaper (the name and date of which I have not kept). It shows that the Japanese commander who led the 360-plane raid on the United States Fleet in Pearl Harbour became (like the author) an ordained Presbyterian minister:

Twenty-nine years ago, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Remember that engaging character in the film Tora! Tora! Tora! Commander Mitsuo Fuchida (portrayed by Takahiro Tamura) who led the raiding aircraft?

Today Fuchida is an ordained Presbyterian minister. His story is that of a sort of spiritual pilgrimage through Shintoism, Buddhism and Emperor Worship to Christianity.

On a journey to Tokyo in 1949 to meet General MacArthur he was given a tract entitled "I was a Prisoner of Japan". It told the story of one Jacob de Shazer, an American who had been captured during a special mission behind Japanese lines.

In prison he had been given a Bible, and after the war he returned to Japan as a missionary to the people he had once fought and hated.

This tract had a profound effect on ex-Commander Fuchida, and he began to read the Bible carefully himself.

"One month after the tract was given me I read in Luke's Gospel the words, 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do', and it came home to me just what Christ had done for me."

After twenty-six years of dedicated Christian ministry the Rev. Mitsuo Fuchida died in hospital at Kashiwarashi, Naraken, Japan, in May 1976.