by Ron Laytner
Published 10 December 1978
Takeo Yoshikawa is the spy who can never come in from the cold. His espionage was so successful that it ruined his life forever. Yoshikawa helped the Japanese in their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
World military circles have considered Yoshikawa one of the most successful spies in history. Yet, he has received no awards, no honors, not even a pension from the Japanese government. He has no job today. He lives as a down-and-out and drinks to forget.
“I have been wiped clean from Japanese history,” he said at his home on the island of Shikoku, south of Tokyo. “Five years ago when I applied for a pension, they said, ‘We never heard of you.’
“When I told them of my espionage assignment of the long years working to become an expert on the American Navy and of my dangerous mission in Honolulu, they were without sympathy. They told me Japan never spied on anyone.”
Pearl Harbor was a military feat so daring, so brilliant, so audaciously planned and so successfully carried out that it is worth a special volume in the annals of warfare. Here is Yoshikawa’s account.
“I was born in a very different world. It was in 1914 in the days of the great Japanese Empire when the Yamato race walked tall across Asia. It was something special then to be born a boy in Japan.
“It was a time when the empire was on the march,” he said. “But the world is not the same today. To die these days for one’s country is a waste of time.
“Today, war is bad, war is wrong. But in my day it was good. It was right. I was a true hero of Japan. But look what it has brought me in my old age. Look at me today.”
When Yoshikawa was a boy, the Japanese Empire indeed was on the march. In those times the death of a young man in battle was, in Japanese thinking, like the fall of a cherry blossom—which drops to its death at the height of its beauty.
The future spy enrolled at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy at Eta Jima as a 1929 cadet. Four years later he graduated at the top of his class.
He served outstandingly aboard the battleship Asama and later trained on submarines and as a pilot.
A serious stomach ailment forced him to retire after two years. It was a bitter blow and he thought of killing himself. But a high-ranking officer offered him a job in Japanese Naval Intelligence.
Yoshikawa set out to become an expert on the U.S. Navy. For four years he worked on the America desk studying Jane’s Fighting Ships and Aircraft and thousands of U.S. books, newspapers and magazines.
In 1940 Yoshikawa prepared for an espionage assignment abroad by passing the Foreign Ministry English examinations. Soon he was a junior diplomat. It would be his cover.
In 1941, Yoshikawa received a diplomatic passport and went to Honolulu as a vice consul using the cover name of Tadashi Morimura.
He found out later that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had prepared a detailed Pearl Harbor attack plan in early 1941 and that the plan was presented to the Naval General Staff in August 1941.
“I was a spy in the field without that secret inside information,” he said, “but I assumed my job was to help prepare for an attack on Pearl Harbor and I worked night and day getting necessary information.
“The Americans were very foolish. As a diplomat, I could move about the islands. No one bothered me. I often rented small planes at the John Rodgers Airport in Honolulu and flew around U.S. installations making observations. I never took notes or drew maps. I kept everything in my head.
“As a long-distance swimmer I completely covered the harbor installations. Sometimes I stayed underwater for a long time breathing through a hollow reed.
“And my favorite viewing place,” recalled Yoshikawa, “was a lovely Japanese teahouse overlooking the harbor. I knew what ships were in, how heavily they were loaded, who their officers were and what supplies were on board. The trusting young officers who visited the teahouse told the girls there everything. And anything they didn’t reveal I found out by giving rides to hitch-hiking American sailors and pumping them for information.”
The work was dangerous. “Once a U.S. Navy sailor on guard duty saw me crouched down near an electrified fence. He fired his rifle but missed me.”
The big day grew closer. Yoshikawa handed a secret Japanese courier 97 answers to intelligence questions asked by Admiral Yamamoto concerning ships, planes and personnel at Pearl Harbor during the fall of 1941. The admiral learned, for example, that most ships were at anchor in Pearl Harbor on Sunday—so he planned the attack for that day.
On 6 December, Yoshikawa sent out his final message: “No barrage balloons sighted. Battleships are without crinolines. No indications of air or sea alert wired to nearby islands. Enterprise and Lexington have sailed from Pearl Harbor.”
In Tokyo, Foreign Ministry officials passed the information on to Admiral Yamamoto, and the attack planner radioed his fleet, moving in for the kill: “Vessels moored in harbor—nine battleships, three class-B cruisers, three seaplane tenders, 17 destroyers. All aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers have departed harbor … no indication of any change in U.S. fleet or anything unusual.”
In the darkness 400 miles north of Honolulu, Vice Admiral Chichi Agumo received his order to attack—“Climb Mount Niitaka.”
Around him his thirty-one ships—six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers and three submarines and assorted tankers—surged to full speed ahead. His 350 attack planes would soon be a part of history.
The attack exploded Sunday, 7 December 1941, at 7:40 a.m. (Pacific Standard Time). Yoshikawa was eating breakfast and still sleepy when the first bombs began to fall. “The consul and I listened to the short-wave radio bringing the news from Tokyo,” he said.
They heard the secret attack code. “East wind, rain,” the Japanese announcer said twice very slowly during the forecast. This meant that Japan had decided on war with the United States, Yoshikawa said. Not used were other prearranged signals which would have called for attacks on England or Russia.
Yoshikawa and the consul shook hands. His work had been a success. They ran into their offices and began burning code books and secret diplomatic intelligence instructions.
“I heard new sounds and rushed outside,” he recalled. “I looked up at the sky and saw a most wonderful sight. Through the clouds a fighter-bomber streaked toward Pearl Harbor and disappeared into black clouds of smoke rising above the base. On the wings of the plane were painted the Rising Sun—the Rising Sun of Japan. Soon the sky was filled with our planes. It was a brilliant attack. We lost just thirty men that day—the Americans more than 3,000.”
Quickly the consulate was surrounded by hostile crowds and Yoshikawa and other Japanese employees remained locked inside for safety. At 8:30 a.m. police showed up to protect them until the arrival of FBI agents who arrested them.
“For ten days we were held prisoner at the Consulate. Then all of us were taken under heavy guard to a U.S. Coast Guard vessel at the docks and taken to San Diego, California. In March we were taken to an Arizona relocation camp which was full of innocent American-Japanese. They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke. You see, I couldn’t trust them in Hawaii to help me. They were loyal to the United States.”
Later the FBI took Yoshikawa and other diplomats to New York. Shortly afterward, they were sent back to Japan in a diplomat-prisoner exchange, the United States not realizing it had lost the Pearl Harbor spy.
But there was no hero’s reception when he got home—nothing official, then or now. He married and continued with the rank of ensign in Japanese intelligence.
When the war ended and U.S. troops occupied Japan, Yoshikawa, fearing he would be hanged, went into hiding and lived in the country posing as a Buddhist monk. When the Americans left he returned to his wife.
In 1955 Yoshikawa opened a candy business. But people knew who he was. They wouldn’t buy from a spy—a spy whose country had lost the war. “They even blamed me for the atomic bomb,” he declared with tears in his eyes. And he might have starved over the years if his loyal wife had not supported him by selling insurance.
“My wife alone shows me great respect,” said the old spy. “Every day she bows to me. She knows I am a man of history.”
Then he lifted his cup. “I am drinking to forget. I have so many thoughts now so many years after the war … Why has history cheated me?
 |
| Takeo Yoshikawa. |
 |
| Japanese Consulate staff photographed a few days before the attack. Takeo Yoshikawa is at the center of the front row. |
 |
| This captured Japanese map which was used by a Japanese naval aviator on the morning of 7 December shows the relative positions of American fleet units on that fateful morning. This crude chart, evidently prepared on the carrier from the last minute reports of spies operating in the Pearl Harbor area, is in itself ample testimony of the very effective spy system that existed in Hawaii prior to Pearl Harbor. Along the north shore of Ford Island, situated in the center of the chart, are the Japanese representations of Battleship Row. The chart identifies ship mooring locations and is entitled (at upper left): Report on positions of enemy fleet at anchorage A. Code at left represents ship types (Letter figures are written in katakana: A - battleship; I - aircraft carrier; E - cruiser; U - special service ship; O - light cruiser. Mooring locations are coded with paired katakana figures or with katakana plus an Arabic numeral, but do not specifically identify the ship types moored there. |
