If you have never read Sakai’s biography “Samurai!”, do so. He wrote it with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito and it is a very good read. Amazingly, Sakai not only survived the war, he scored a couple more air-to-air kills while flying with only one good eye and fought off around fifteen Hellcats in his lone Zero to land safely when stationed on Iwo Jima in 1944.
Sakai, interestingly, was not shot up over Guadalcanal by a fighter. He attempted a bounce of what he thought were Wildcats but turned out to be Dauntless dive-bombers (Sakai identified them as Avengers in “Samurai!”). He got two, but their rear gunners shot through his unarmored canopy and grievously wounded him.
}:-)4
Thanks for the tip on “Samurai!” I can’t believe the guy survived the war, but that is what he obviously was...a survivor!
More from the Sakai Wiki site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabur%C5%8D_Sakai
About the same time, Sakai married his cousin Hatsuyo, who asked him for a dagger so she could kill herself if he fell in battle. His autobiography, Samurai!, ends happily with Hatsuyo throwing away the dagger after Japan’s surrender, saying she no longer needed it.
After the war, Sakai retired from the Navy. He became a Buddhist acolyte and vowed he would never again kill any living thing, not even a mosquito.[15] Sakai harbored no animosity toward those who had been “the enemy” during WW2, and urged others not to do so either. When asked about Japan’s eventual surrender, he responded: “Had I been ordered to bomb Seattle or Los Angeles in order to end the war, I wouldn’t have hesitated. So I perfectly understand why the Americans bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
Sakai expressed concern for Japan’s collective inability to accept responsibility for starting the war, and over the popular sentiment that only the military — not the political leaders — were responsible. He decried the kamikaze campaign as brutally wasteful of young lives; Sakai also drew attention with his critical comments about Emperor Hirohito’s role. “Who gave the orders for that stupid war?” he asked in an interview reported August 10, 2000, by The Associated Press. “The closer you get to the emperor, the fuzzier everything gets.”
Just months before he died, Sakai officially admitted to reporters that he still prayed for the souls of the airmen (Chinese, American, Australian and Dutch alike) he had killed in action. “I pray every day for the souls of my enemies as well as my comrades,” he said. “We all did our best for our respective countries...Glorifying death was a mistake; because I survived, I was able to move on - to make friends in the U.S. and other countries.”
Saburo Sakai died of a heart attack in 2000, following a U.S. Navy formal dinner - where he had been an honored guest - at Atsugi Naval Air Station. He was 84. Sakai had sent his daughter to college in the United States “to learn English and democracy.” There she married an American, and gave Saburo two American-born grandchildren. He is survived by all three.