Via Anna Puma; US Senate - January 30, 1996
SEN. AKAKA. "Mr. President, I want to take the floor of the U.S. Senate to tell my colleagues and the people of Hawaii and the country about a Hawaii-born unsung hero of World War II. His extraordinary story has never been fully told. Colonel Sakakida, one of America's genuine war heroes, faced death with the same stoicism and dignity as he displayed in facing the dangers of war and the constant pain of his war injuries. Colonel Sakakida will be mourned by the many who knew him personally or by reputation, including the thousands of Japanese-Americans who followed his footsteps to serve in their country during the Second World War. He is survived by his beloved wife of many years, Cherry, to whom I offer my deepest condolences. Colonel Sakakida was a true hero, one whose contributions, tragically, have never fully been recognized by his own Government. His was one of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II. As a United States Army undercover agent and prisoner of war of the Japanese in the Philippines 50 years ago, he endured isolation, privation, disease, shrapnel wounds, the constant threat of discovery, and unspeakable physical torture in carrying out daring intelligence missions for his country. His sacrifices not only resulted in the advancement of the Allied cause during the Second World War, they reflected a great sense of duty and personal courage rarely seen even in that great conflict." ...
America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps
BY IAN SAYER AND DOUGLAS BOTTING
"Of all the unsung heroes of World War Two, Richard Sakakida must rank as one of the most remarkable. For courage, fortitude and loyalty to his adopted homeland there were few to rival him. Yet outside a small circle of veteran CIC agents Sakakida's name is almost unknown, and his extraordinary story has never been fully told. Richard Sakakida was a native of Hawaii, the son of Japanese parents who had emigrated there from Hiroshima at the beginning of the century. Most Americans would have described him as a Japanese-American, but the Japanese had a special word for such expatriates--Nisei, meaning the firstborn away from the homeland. Educated at a American high school in Honolulu and brought up as an American citizen in a Japanese family, Sakakida was a man of two cultures and two languages. The outbreak of war between America and Japan might easily have led to a hopeless confusion of loyalties in a person of his dual background, but it did not. Like the great majority of Nisei, many of whom were later to distinguish themselves in action against the Germans in Europe, Sakakida firmly considered himself to be an American first and last. In March 1941, nine months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this resolute, soft-voiced, earnest-mannered young man was invited to put his unusual linguistic and cultural qualifications to practical use by joining the specialist branch of the U.S. Army best able to take advantage of them--the CIC. Along with another young Nisei, Arthur Komori, he was sworn in as a CIC agent in Hawaii with the rank of sergeant. These were the first Japanese-Americans ever to be recruited into the CIC, and they were to be among the handful of their detachment to survive the war against Japan. After an intensive training course in the use of codes and ciphers and the recognition of prime targets, Sakakida and Komori were told to prepare to embark on a secret mission, the nature of which would be revealed to them later. They were told that their destination was Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, an American possession on the point of independence, where the United States still maintained a substantial military presence. They were warned that their assignment would certainly be a source of inconvenience and probably of danger. They were to say nothing except to their immediate family--in Sakakida's case his widowed mother. Less than a month later the two agents set sail for Manila on board a U.S. Army transport, traveling as deck hands in order to conceal their identity as members of the armed forces. In Manila, a city of tropical languor and almost colonial ease, they were met by the Commanding Officer of the CIC Detachment in the Philippines and briefed for the first time about the nature of their mission. The magnitude of their task took their breath away. It involved nothing less than the counter intelligence investigation of the entire Japanese community in Manila, into which they were required to infiltrate themselves as undercover miles in order to target those individuals who had connections with the Japanese military and posed a threat to the security of the United States Army. As a cover story they were to claim that they were crew members of a freighter and had jumped ship after tiring of life at sea--a story Komori enhanced by adding that he was also a draft dodger, a state of affairs which he reported later `was favourably received by the pro-Emperor sons of Japan.' Sakakida was instructed to register at a small hotel called the Nishikawa, while Komori checked in at the Toyo Hotel. From these two bases the tyro agents were to start looking around for roles in keeping with their assumed identities. Their case officers, Major Raymond and Agent Grenfell D. Drisko, were the only members of the CIC Detachment who knew that they were Nisei agents. In order to stay in contact they were given keys to a mailbox at the Central Post Office in Manila under the name of Sixto Borja and told to check the box twice daily for instructions about rendezvous places. Major Raymond or Agent Drisko would then pick them up at a prearranged spot and drive them by a roundabout route to the Military Intelligence section in Forth Santiago, where they could submit their report in safety and receive new briefings. For Major Raymond, a long-time Agent, Sakakida and Komori developed tremendous admiration and affection. `He gradually instilled in us the techniques of subtle investigations and subterfuges in the best traditions of the CIC,' Komori recalled later. To him they owed everything they knew about working as undercover agents amongst the impendingly hostile Japanese. And so, in the months preceding the outbreak of war, the two young and apprehensive Nisei began the delicate task of burrowing into the warren of the main Japanese community in the Philippines, numbering more than 2,000 in all. Sakakida posed as a sales representative of Sears, Roebuck, whose sales brochures he had learnt by heart, and spent most of his evenings in the Japanese Club, where he assiduously ingratiated himself with the Japanese businessmen who frequented this hotbed of Nippon orthodoxy. Meanwhile Komori obtained a post as a teacher of English at the Japanese Cultural Hall in Manila and made use of this respectable position to win the confidence and even the friendship of some of the leading Japanese residents of the city--the Japanese Consul General, the Chief of the Japanese News Agency, the Chief of the Japanese Tourist Bureau, the Chief of the Japanese Cultural Hall and many others. With few exceptions he found the Japanese `arrogant and expansionist-minded,' openly sympathetic to the militaristic ambitions of the Japanese Army generals and increasingly dismissive of the more peaceable and compromising civil government in Tokyo. War fever had developed to such an extent, Komori reported, that one of his students in his English class, a journalist who wrote for a newspaper in Osaka, even reported the likely route of advance of the Japanese forces once they had launched their attack against the British in Singapore. Komori had to go along with all this, of course, in order to keep up his cover. He even had to seem to join in the jinjoistic euphoria when Japanese planes bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December and drink toasts to the Emperor when America declared war on Japan the following day. The outbreak of war now put him in grave danger, for it meant that henceforth he would be spying on an enemy people, and would have to face the consequences if he put a foot wrong. The war was only a few hours old when the complexities of Komori's new situation were brutally brought home to him. He was in the Japanese News Agency in Manila, downing yet another sake in yet another toast to the Emperor, when the door burst open and he found himself ringed by a group of Filipino Constabulary with bayonets fixed. To the Filipinos he was just another Japanese. Along with officials of the News Agency, Komori was herded down the stairs and into a waiting bus. He was then driven to the stinking old Bilibid Prison--`the hell hole' as he recalled, `of Manila'--and here he languished, an American agent amidst a gaggle of enemy subjects, completely confident that Major Raymond would eventually learn his whereabouts and rescue him. Meanwhile, in the wake of the rising tide of anti-Japanese feeling in the Philippines that followed the outbreak of hostilities, Sakakida too had been thrown into the Bilibid Prison, though via a much more circuitous chain of events..."
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