by Jules Archer
As Japanese planes roared in to put the finishing touches to America’s worst defeat, Takeo Yoshikawa swelled with pride. For he, and he alone, had been responsible for the success of the infamous sneak attack.
Takeo Yoshikawa was just sitting down to breakfast at the Japanese Consulate on the outskirts of Honolulu when he heard the first rumbling blasts from nearby Pearl Harbor. Some kind of maneuver, he reflected, yawning. He felt a little bleary-eyed from his late work the night before.
Suddenly his narrow eyes came fully awake with an electrifying thought. Jumping up, he rushed to his office. Through powerful binoculars he peered eagerly out of the open window at the great American naval base.
“At last,” he exulted. “At last!”
Twenty-seven Japanese dive bombers were hurtling out of the blue tropic skies toward Ford Island and Hickam Field. Another forty torpedo planes were swooping down upon Battleship Row. Pressing home the attack behind them were fifty horizontal bombers, followed by forty-five fighters. Every important naval and air installation on Oahu was under simultaneous attack.
Yoshikawa’s eyes glowed as he watched the proud harbor taken by surprise turned into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. The big PBY hangar on Ford Island blew up suddenly, its twenty-nine patrol planes blazing and exploding. Nipponese torpedo planes skimmed across the harbor, dropping their deadly loads at the helpless naval giants whose crews stared up in disbelief and horror.
The battleship Arizona exploded, engulfed in giant oil fires and black smoke. South of her the West Virginia began to burn brilliantly amidships, sinking. Four fiery flashes leaped up from the hull of the Oklahoma, which keeled helplessly over on her side. The California burst into flames and began settling at its moorings.
At last stunned crews of many of the ninety-six U.S. ships in the harbor started firing away at the Oriental hornets in the sky. Some of the attackers were hit; these made spectacular torches until extinguished by the hissing blue waters of the harbor. But the retaliatory fire came too late. Most of the damage had been done in just fifteen swift minutes of a totally successful surprise attack.
Yoshikawa watched, heart leaping excitedly, as ship after ship became a flaming funeral pyre. Swinging his binoculars around, he could see other spectacular sights that warmed his heart. Westward, the Marine airfield at Ewa was alight with forty-nine torches that moments ago had been planes. Wheeler and Hickam Fields were smoking, blazing shambles. And raising his glasses to the sky, Yoshikawa could watch a second wave of 171 Japanese planes roar in to put the finishing touches on America’s greatest military disaster.
“Banzai!” Yoshikawa said with great pride. Because he, and he alone, had been the architect of the stunning surprise attack which would make every American remember 7 December 1941 for as long as he lived.
Takeo Yoshikawa was the sole intelligence agent in Hawaii for the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff in Tokyo. In official Honolulu circles he was known as Ito Morimura, Vice Consul of the Japanese Consulate under Consul Nagao Kita.
It was this amazingly clever spy who, single-handedly, actually blueprinted the attack on Pearl for Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto. It was Yoshikawa who told Tokyo that the battleships in Pearl Harbor were always moored in pairs, so that any torpedo attacks would not damage the inboard ships. This had led Yamamoto to plan the assault on Pearl Harbor largely as a raid of dive bombers, using 16 inch armor-piercing shells.
Yoshikawa’s reports on the restricted and shallow waters of Pearl Harbor led the Japanese to develop special torpedoes with short vanes, to prevent their diving to the bottom when dropped. Yoshikawa also advised Tokyo that, if the attack were a complete surprise, the planes could come in very close to the water, making the torpedoes doubly effective.
And it was Yoshikawa who answered Tokyo’s question: “On what day of the week would the largest number of ships be in Pearl Harbor?”
His one-word reply: “Sunday.”
Who was this almost unknown Japanese who admitted, two decades after Pearl Harbor, “In truth, if only for a moment in time, I held history in the palm of my hand!”
Takeo Yoshikawa was born on 7 March 1914 on the island of Shikoku, southeast of Tokyo. His father, a policeman, held a highly respected position in the days when police were the personification of Imperial law. He grew up in an era of expanding Japanese imperialism, when the greatest glory a boy could aspire to was to die young in battle for the Emperor.
In the tradition of the island of Shikoku, which produced some of Japan’s most famous sea fighters, Yoshikawa was given a military upbringing by his father and teachers. In high school he became a champion at kendo, or staff dueling, and was able to swim eight miles in the choppy seas off the rock-bound coast.
He was further molded to his destiny by the rigid mind training which gave Japan a nation of perfect pawns to deploy craftily on the international chessboard. Yoshikawa learned bushido, the medieval code of the samurai prescribing unquestionable, absolute loyalty; and he mastered Zen, the Buddhist sect teaching self-disciplined and ruthless selflessness.
This education was completed at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in Eta Jima, which Yoshikawa entered in 1929. Upon graduating four years later, he was given special training cruises on a battleship, a light cruiser and a submarine. He also qualified as a naval aviator in 1934.
The envy of his classmates, Yoshikawa dreamed of a steady, rapid ascent to the highest levels of the Imperial Navy. But his dreams suddenly turned to ashes one day when he was seized by excruciating pains in the abdomen while coming back from the flight line. Rushed to the hospital, he was found to have a serious ailment which kept him off active duty for two years.
During this time Yoshikawa spent twelve hours a day pouring over studies of sea power and naval strategy. He even committed to memory large portions of the works of Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, the U.S. Navy’s classic strategist, “to know and outguess the enemy mind.” For even then he knew that Japan was planning a naval war against the United States.
At the Naval Academy he had been taught that the Navy stood for commercial expansion southward to include the Philippines, Dutch East Indies and Australia. To make this possible it was first necessary to paralyze the naval forces of the United States, a nation unalterably opposed to Japanese expansion.
Yoshikawa suffered a crushing blow when, after seven years of fanatical devotion to mastering naval strategy in classrooms, ships, planes, and books, he was forced to retire as an ensign from the Imperial Japanese Navy because of broken health. For a while he gloomily contemplated hari kiri. Then he was visited in his home on Shikoku by a staff captain from Navy Regional Headquarters in Kagawa.
“How would you like to get back in the service?”
“But that isn’t possible,” Yoshikawa said. “I still couldn’t pass the physical requirements for combat service.”
“Not combat service,” he was told. “Naval intelligence!”
Yoshikawa jumped at the chance. Sent to Tokyo, he was assigned to the highly secret 3rd Division, an intelligence corps made up of only twenty-nine officers. Here he was given the American Desk, and ordered to study the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its bases at Guam, Manila, and Pearl Harbor. There was relief for all his twenty-eight brother officers in tours of sea and shore duty. But for four years Yoshikawa burned the midnight oil at the American Desk unrelentingly, becoming an expert on the U.S. Navy.
He poured over millions of words in obscure American newspapers, trade magazines, military and scientific journals, unclassified brochures, popular periodicals and naval memoirs. He visited regularly at the offices of foreign naval attaches, picking up their available publications.
Reports from naval attaches in Japanese embassies and consulates abroad found their way to Yoshikawa’s desk. He kept up on changes in U.S. naval armament and equipment through the reports and photos of Japanese agents in foreign ports who boarded American ships under commercial pretexts.
So skillfully did he put together all pieces of this involved jigsaw that by 1940 he knew every U.S. warship and aircraft type by name, hull number, configuration and technical characteristics. He was also Japan’s top expert on U.S. naval bases in the Pacific. His superior officer summoned him and declared, “Yoshikawa, you are ready now.”
“Hai,” he asserted happily with a low bow. He knew that he would soon be serving Japan as an espionage agent.
“Although I was by then twenty-five years old and had ten years' service in the Navy,” Yoshikawa recalls, “I had given no thought to marriage and little to social life. My whole being was dedicated to the mission on which I would shortly be sent.”
During the winter of 1940 he was given his official cover—an appointment as a junior diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. He worked there mornings, continuing his studies afternoons and evenings. He also attended functions in other embassies to pick up missing pieces of his jigsaw in seemingly innocent bits of social conversation.
While with the ministry he intercepted a short wave radio broadcast in English from Australia, revealing that seventeen Australian troop transports had cleared Fremantle for England. He relayed this information to the German Embassy. Shortly afterwards he received a personal letter of appreciation from Adolf Hitler.
In January 1941 Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, conceived of the plan of a carrier-based air attack on Pearl Harbor, and put his staff to work on scheming it out. Ironically, it was a poorly-kept secret; America had its first warning as early as 27 January 1941—practically a full year before the disaster at Pearl.
“A member of my embassy,” Ambassador Joseph C. Grew radioed Washington in code, “was told by my Peruvian colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of ‘trouble’ between Japan and the United States.”
In April Yoshikawa was called into his chief’s office and told: “You are going to Honolulu as vice-consul. Your name will be Ito Morimura, and your task will be to report on the daily readiness of the American fleet and bases. Do not use secret short wave radio transmitters because these would quickly be spotted by radio direction finders. Instead, use the consulate’s regular short wave communication in diplomatic code.
“You will be our only agent in Honolulu. Trust absolutely no one you don’t have to, and remember this: the fate of Japan is likely to rest in your hands!”
Flying out of Tokyo, Yoshikawa stared, for what he was convinced would be the last time, at the beloved cone of Mount Fuji and the multi-colored farm patches of Honshu. He was not afraid of the death that inevitably awaited him at the end of his dangerous assignment, or before. But it made him sad to think that he would never again see his homeland.
Landing in Honolulu, he was driven at once through the palm-lined avenue leading to the Japanese Consulate, a stately-pillared building lined with taro trees. He was shown immediately into the airy office of Consulate General Nagao Kita, an amiable bachelor. Yoshikawa liked and trusted him at once.
“You’re aware of my mission?” Yoshikawa asked tactfully.
Kita nodded. “I know you will be reporting directly to Tokyo. You need not worry about any interference from me. I’ve arranged for you to have full use of the consulate code room for transmission of your reports.”
Yoshikawa bowed correctly and politely declined a drink Kita offered him. Then the spy was told, “By the way, photo exposures are considerably different here than in Tokyo. If you’d like me to, I can brief you for the most satisfactory camera results.”
“You are kind. But it won’t be necessary. My field trips will usually be made without photographs or sketches.”
Kita looked surprised.
“I’ve trained my memory,” the spy explained. “I prefer to keep any details of installations I observe in my head until I return to the consulate. If the Americans arrest me on suspicion, they will never be able to find any evidence on me which could embarrass or compromise the consulate.”
Kita nodded, pleased. Lighting an American cigarette, he asked, “Do you plan to use any Hawaiian Japanese as agents?”
“No. I cannot afford to trust anyone. Except you.”
Kita nodded again. “Honolulu is full of Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, Japanese papers and schools. You’ll even see funds raised for our forces in China, and the Imperial Army’s relief fund. But don’t be deceived. Most Hawaiian Japanese are also strongly pro-American. In fact, lots of them come to the consulate to renounce their Japanese nationality.”
“How much freedom will I have to move around?”
“Plenty.” Kita chuckled. “The Americans are so confident that Pearl Harbor is impregnable that they hardly take any security precautions. Your diplomatic status will get you just about anywhere. If you prefer to dress inconspicuously, you’ll simply be taken for one of Hawaii’s several hundred thousand Japanese or Filipinos.”
Yoshikawa quickly learned how true this was. He first oriented himself to Honolulu by walking through its streets and outskirts, familiarizing himself with the gathering places of American sailors and restaurants with commanding views of the harbor and coastline. He roamed the Iwilei red-light district, the crowded Oriental quarter around Aala Park, the hills of Alewa and Maunalani Heights.
Disguising himself as a Filipino laborer, unshaven, barefoot and in an aloha shirt he walked along the entrance to Pearl Harbor near Fort Kamehameha until challenged and turned back. He tried getting through on several occasions, making sure first that each time a different guard was on duty. Frustrated, Yoshikawa vowed the secrets of Pearl Harbor would not remain secret much longer.
One morning a U.S. Army anti-sabotage guard stopped walking his beat near the harbor entrance. His gaze inched suspiciously along the rolling breakers. Something had flashed out there. Probably a fish jumping. It was hardly likely that anyone would be swimming in the heavy surf.
He started to resume his patrol. But just as he was turning away, he saw the man’s head break the surface. The swimmer took a deep breath, then plunged again.
The guard wheeled, whipping out his revolver. He waited for the swimmer to surface again. When the man did, about ten yards further on toward the Pearl Harbor entrance, the guard aimed his gun and yelled for the swimmer to come out of the water. The man promptly dove again.
Lips set, the guard kept his revolver aimed at the breakers. His hand quavered. He had never shot anyone before, but he knew his orders. It seemed an eternity before the swimmer surfaced again. The guard squeezed off a shot.
The bullet missed. However, the roar of the gun seemed to scare the wits out of the man in the water. He turned his head toward the beach, mouth open in surprise. The guard furiously waved him in with the gun, then re-aimed it grimly.
The swimmer hastily raised his right arm and shook it in a gesture that obviously meant “Don’t shoot!” In a few powerful strokes he coasted over the breakers into the beach shallows. Rising, he ran in hastily toward the guard. He carried a spear, and around his waist was tied a string of butterfly fish, awelas, laipalas and zebra fish.
“Whassamatta me?” he quavered in Hawaiian pidgin. He was an exceptionally good-looking man of about twenty-seven, taller than most of the Filipino fishermen who haunted the beaches.
“This place kapu!” roared the guard, pointing his gun to Army warnings posted behind him. “Kapu, sabe? Keep out! You come again pilikia! Plenty trouble!”
“No pilikia!” the fisherman squealed in alarm. “Me go!”
In a feeble attempt to placate the glowering American soldier, he unhooked one of the butterfly fish from his string and held it out hopefully. The GI made a wry face and snarled, “Get the hell out of here—quick!”
The fisherman hastened to obey, grateful at not being detained for questioning. He had, of course, plenty of reason to be grateful. As Japan’s master spy Vice-Consul “Morimura”—really Yoshikawa—had been making a study of underwater obstructions, tides, beach gradients and other vital navigational facts which later were to let midget Japanese subs sneak into the harbor during the big attack. He had also been hoping to find out whether there were anti-sub nets stretched across the harbor entrance.
If the American guard patrolling the harbor entrance that morning had taken Yoshikawa into custody, there might never have been a Pearl Harbor disaster.
Yoshikawa’s other acts of espionage were more fruitful. High in the heights of Alewa, beyond Pearl, he discovered the Shunch-ro Restaurant, a perfect observatory. Here, from a private Tokyo-style dining room overlooking the harbor, he studied U.S. fleet movements. Uncle Sam helpfully kept his ships lighted at night. They were also highly visible in the Hawaiian dawn.
To find out where the carriers went when they left Pearl, Yoshikawa frequently gave sailors a lift in his car. Posing as a Japanese playboy fond of Americans, he also stood drinks for servicemen in the bars of Waikiki. He asked no questions until his affability had inspired an answering warmth. Then, during conversational chitchat, he would drop a casual, seemingly harmless question or two.
Most Americans were prudent, or didn’t know the answers. Occasionally one of them, too much liquor under his belt, would boastfully tell Yoshikawa what he wanted.
Yoshikawa also observed geishas when they entertained American sailors or fliers fresh off the ships. Afterwards he would engage the girls for his own “entertainment.” He never revealed his true identity. Only an idiot confided important state secrets to women! With the geishas unaware that he was pumping them, he often extracted bits of valuable information they had gleaned from the Americans.
His weekly reports to Tokyo helped bring naval operations at Pearl Harbor into sharp focus for Admiral Yamamoto. By August, Yamamoto was able to present a completed operation plan to the Naval General Staff. It was tested in “table-top maneuvers” at Tokyo Naval War College between 10 and 13 September.
The exercise showed that a Pearl Harbor strike was practicable. But many of Yamamoto’s colleagues felt it was too risky. that the U.S. Pacific Fleet might not be in port on the day of the attack. and that the danger of discovery during the long voyage to Hawaii was too great.
“My intelligence in Honolulu,” Yamamoto replied coldly, “is such that I can guarantee the success of the operation. I can only tell you that if you do not respect my judgment in this matter, I will feel compelled to offer my resignation.”
That sealed the doom of Pearl Harbor.
On 24 September Yoshikawa received a coded message from Tokyo ordering him to concentrate on reporting information of immediate tactical significance. His reports of shipping in the harbor now had to pinpoint the ships’ grouping in five distinct mapped areas.
Yoshikawa increasingly spent his time walking around Pearl City and Hospital Point, to observe every new development in Battleship Row and the various lochs. He kept a careful eye on any unusual movement of lighters which might indicate provisioning the fleet for combat.
To avoid the possibility of calling attention to himself by being seen too often in the same places, he also strolled through the hills of Aiea beyond Pearl Harbor, and on Tantalus Mountain above Honolulu. Both heights offered excellent vantage points to observe the practice sorties of the fleet’s units through field glasses.
He wound up his vigils on most evenings by dining at the Shuncho-ro, where the Japanese management reserved for him a room with a magnificent view of the harbor. Here, sitting on rice-straw tatmi mats with a geisha, he would play at relaxing as he kept ship movements in the lochs under sharp observation. He often stayed past dawn, when most sorties usually began.
In addition to what he could see for himself, Yoshikawa paid careful attention to news items concerning the U.S. forces in garrison. These appeared liberally in the Honolulu press and on local broadcasts. Piecing together a scrap here and a scrap there, he was able to develop shrewd guesses as to which U.S. air and sea forces were outward or inward bound.
It was during this period that he warned Yamamoto of the U.S. Navy’s practice of mooring battleships in pairs, a stratagem designed to save fifty percent of the big wagons from torpedo attack.
To check the number of aircraft present on the military fields in the main Hawaiian islands, and their dispersal patterns, Yoshikawa simply rented planes from the John Rodgers Airport in Honolulu. He flew freely and frequently around the islands, taking aerial photographs, and even flying low enough to study structural detail on the hangars at Hickam and Wheeler Fields.
His flight also provided Tokyo with a bonus in the form of comprehensive maps Yoshikawa sketched showing the location of all the fuel and ammunition depots on the islands.
On 11 November, ten long-range “I”-type Japanese submarines from Yokosuka set a course toward Hawaii, planning to arrive off Pearl Harbor not later than the evening before the attack. Five of them carried two-man midget subs on their backs, to be launched in a suicidal attempt to get through the harbor entrance. The big subs would lie outside the harbor to torpedo the surviving American ships as they fled from the planned air attack.
On 20 November, Yoshikawa received this message at the consulate: “Strictly Secret. Please investigate comprehensively the fleet, bases in the neighborhood of the Hawaiian Military Reservation.” He hastened to comply and sent them off a full report within twenty-four hours. Tokyo then demanded: “Send exact report on ships anchored in area N, Pearl Harbor.” Once more Yoshikawa delivered the goods promptly.
But unknown to him or to Tokyo, U.S. intelligence had cracked the top Japanese diplomatic code. Every coded message broadcast by Tokyo was being monitored, flashed to Washington, and decoded. Had Admiral Yamamoto realized this, the Pearl Harbor operation would undoubtedly have been called off.
Unfortunately, however, the Army and Navy cryptanalytic divisions in Washington were so swamped with work that translations of the messages to Yoshikawa did not reach the desks of U.S. intelligence brass until 5 December. That still would have given them forty-eight hours to press the panic button for an instant Hawaii-wide alert, and to get the battleships steaming out of the harbor.
Incredible as it seems, Washington did not even bother to notify Oahu of these intercepted messages. Army and Naval Intelligence were convinced that the Japanese were mounting an attack against Indochina.
Yoshikawa, realizing that “The Day” was rapidly approaching, stepped up his reports on shipping in the harbor to once every three days. He knew Admiral Yamamoto would try to spring his surprise on the Americans at a time when he could catch as much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the harbor as possible.
On 24 November, Admiral Harold E. Stark, chief of Naval Operations, finally became alarmed at the rapid deterioration of Japanese-American diplomatic relations. He rushed a warning to Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor:
“This situation coupled with statements of Japanese government and movements of their naval and military forces indicate in our opinion that a surprise aggressive movement in any direction including attack on Philippines or Guam is a possibility.”
Admiral Kimmel still didn’t think it meant him. Two days later the Japanese Pearl Harbor Striking Force left its assembly area in the remote, snowbound Kuriles and sailed due east on its way to sunny Hawaii. It consisted of six carriers with 360 planes, two battleships, three cruisers and nine destroyers.
All counting on one man: Takeo Yoshikawa.
On Oahu, meanwhile, Admiral Kimmel’s staff assured General Walter C. Short, in charge of the Army garrison, that there was no chance of a surprise attack on Honolulu. Short decided not to issue any all-out alert, or an alert against air attack, but simply to issue an alert against sabotage.
He did this on 27 November. Ironically, on the same day the Japanese liner Taiyo Maru arrived in Honolulu, bringing a “ship’s steward” who called on Consul-General Kita for some advice on sight-seeing. During the course of the chat, Suzuki slipped a tiny ball of crumpled rice paper into Kita’s hand.
Lieutenant Commander Suguru Suzuki—for that was his correct name and rank—was taking no chances that any Japanese employed at the consulate might also be picking up a second paycheck from American intelligence.
When Suzuki left, Kita passed the rice paper to Yoshikawa. It contained no less than ninety-seven questions, giving Japan’s master spy exactly one day to come up with detailed answers, along with maps, sketches, and photographs—the very latest possible information on which Admiral Yamamoto would base his strike.
Yoshikawa got busy. Most questions he could answer without stirring from the consulate. For example: “How many large seaplanes patrol from Pearl at dawn and sunset?” He wrote confidently, “About ten both times.” He’d anticipated this question by spending many nights on the consulate lawn at dawn and sunset—the usual times when patrols went out and returned—observing the size of the flights and their vectors.
When he’d finished replying to most of the questions, he scouted the harbor once more from Pearl City and Hospital Point for a late report on ship groupings, and to make sure they were not being made battle-ready. He was standing on a pier at Pearl City, the peninsula which juts southward into the middle of the anchorage, when he felt a pistol pressed into the small of his back. A quiet voice said, “FBI. Come with us.”
Fright paralyzed Yoshikawa. Face ashen, he turned and saw two stern-lipped Americans in civilian clothes.
“There must be some mistake,” he stammered.
“Maybe,” one of the men said dryly. “If you can explain why you went to the expense of making a transocean phone call to Tokyo two days ago, to talk about flying conditions in Oahu, and the number of troops and sailors in the streets.”
Yoshikawa was genuinely bewildered. “You… you must have the wrong person!” he sputtered. “Just whom do you want?”
“You’re Doctor Mori, aren’t you?”
“Mori? Oh, no, sir! Morimura. Ito Morimura. I’m the Japanese vice-consul.” He took out his wallet and showed his credentials. “If you prefer further proof, gentlemen, come with me to the consulate. They will identify me.”
The two FBI men looked at each other. The man with the gun returned it to his shoulder holster. “Sorry, Mr. Morimura,” he said curtly. “I’m afraid the wrong man was pointed out to us.”
“Quite all right, gentlemen. Mistakes will happen!”
Trembling with relief, Yoshikawa watched them go. He was amazed by the incident because it suggested that Tokyo had another spy in Honolulu beside himself. The fact was a Japanese dentist named Doctor Mori had made an oceanic phone call to someone in Tokyo. The call had been monitored and translated, and the gist of the conversation had R. L. Shivers, local head of the FBI, suspicious; he had ordered Doctor Mori located and questioned at once.
It turned out later that the call had been an innocent one. Ironically, it had almost resulted in the arrest of the real master spy, whose assumed name had been confusingly similar to the dentist’s.
Returning to the consulate, Yoshikawa hastily finished his report for Commander Suzuki. He added last-minute maps and sketches, along with aerial photographs, then offered his opinion that Sunday would be the ideal day to destroy the most ships in Pearl Harbor.
Consul-General Kita saw to it that this all-important blueprint of the impending Pearl Harbor attack was discreetly delivered to Commander Suzuki aboard the Taiyo Maru.
On 29 November Tokyo notified Yoshikawa in code: “We have been receiving reports from you on ship movements, but in the future will you also report even when there are no movements.”
This message, too, was intercepted and decoded by U.S. Naval Intelligence on 5 December. But even such an obvious red flag failed to alert Washington or arouse any suspicions.
Yoshikawa had no way of knowing that a Japanese task force was already at sea; that on 2 December it received the code order to attack Pearl Harbor: “Climb Mount Nitaka”; or that the date had been set for the morning of 7 December. “To entrust knowledge of such a vital decision to an expendable espionage agent,” he said years later, “would have been foolish.”
On 5 December, the master spy reported that the carrier Lexington, accompanied by three heavy cruisers and a division of destroyers, had steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Departure of the carrier-based planes, he estimated, reduced the air defense of Oahu to under a hundred operative fighters.
On 6 December Yoshikawa visited the harbor and counted thirty-nine U.S. warships. What a bag full, he thought with a thrill. It was the first time since the Fourth of July that all nine American battleships were tied up in port together.
He hurried back to the consulate to notify Tokyo. At the end of the message he added: “No barrage balloons sighted. Battleships are without crinolines. No indications of air or sea alert wired to nearby islands.”
Pressing his desk buzzer for the radio room clerk, Yoshikawa felt a sense of deep weariness. The eight months at Pearl had been a great strain. He had never allowed himself more than a few hours’ sleep a night. Yet even now his devotion to duty was so rigid that he felt impelled to ride up to the Shuncho-ro Restaurant for a final study of harbor movements.
“Remain on duty until I return,” he told the code clerk.
Several hours later, he hurried back through the clear, balmy tropical night. Slumping at his desk in exhaustion he wrote what was to be his final message to Tokyo: “Enterprise and Lexington have both sailed from Pearl Harbor.”
Then the catalyst of the tremendous drama about to take place took his usual stroll about the consulate grounds before turning in. The bright haze in the distance told him the lights were on at the Pearl Harbor naval base. No patrol planes droned overhead. Just another Saturday night, he thought with a sigh, and wearily went to bed.
Startling things happened as he slept.
At 3:30 a.m. an American minesweeper, the Condor, thought she spotted a submerged submarine a mile or two south of the Pearl Harbor entrance buoy. She notified the nearby patrolling destroyer Ward, which went to general quarters and searched the area. When no trace of the sub could be found, the sighting was considered dubious, and neither ship reported the incident.
At 7:00 a.m. Opana Radar Station shut down their training operation. But Private George Elliott wanted practice operating the oscilloscope, and Private Joseph Lockard agreed to teach him until the breakfast truck came for them. At 7:02 Lockard was stunned at the sight of a blip flashing on the screen bigger than anything he had ever seen in radar before. The privates excitedly phoned the information through to a bored lieutenant, who told them to forget it. “Unquestionably a friendly flight.”
As the minutes ticked off to 7:55, both the Ward and a Navy patrol PBY sighted subs and sank them. Both of these messages were reported to shore in code. By the time they were encoded, deliberated over, and passed up the ladder of command, the first twenty-seven dive bombers with red ball markings were plunging toward Ford Island and Hickam, and the first forty torpedo planes were swinging into position for their turn at the big ships.
Takeo Yoshikawa was having breakfast at the consulate when the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. It was exactly 7:55 a.m. After rushing to his office to watch the holocaust of flame and black smoke rising over the harbor, he eagerly switched on the short wave radio. Consul Kita—who also had been kept in the dark about the impending attack—hurried in, his eyes glowing.
They tuned in the 8:00 a.m. news from Tokyo. The broadcast was routine except for a single phrase, twice repeated. Giving the weather, the announcer carefully forecasted, “East wind, rain.” That was the code message to notify all embassies and consulates that the Imperial Council of Japan had declared war against the United States.
“At last,” Yoshikawa murmured. “At last!”
“Quickly,” Kita said, “there is work to be done.”
The two men hurried to the consulate offices, where they worked feverishly at burning code books and secret diplomatic and intelligence instructions. The growing, deafening thunder of bombs and the wailing of sirens told them that they didn’t have a moment to lose.
Yoshikawa noticed that the consulate grounds were already surrounded by volunteer soldiers. But the evidence had already been destroyed. And thanks to the skillful espionage of Takeo Yoshikawa, eighteen American warships were either sunk or seriously damaged in the harbor; 2,403 American servicemen were killed, almost half of them when the Arizona blew up; and 188 planes were destroyed on the ground at Hickam, Kaneohe, and Ewa.
At 8:30 a.m. the Honolulu police arrived and put everyone in the consulate under guard. FBI men searched the offices and living quarters for evidence of espionage. They found nothing except a half-finished sketch of Pearl Harbor in Yoshikawa’s wastebasket. He had forgotten it in the urgency of burning the secret code books.
He stiffened, stoically ready to pay for the slip with his life as his last measure of devotion to the Emperor.
But the FBI did not consider this one item of evidence incriminating, especially in view of Yoshikawa’s diplomatic status. The two consular officials and their staff were taken into custody. Ten days later a U.S. Coast Guard ship took them from Honolulu to San Diego. From there the Gripsholm brought them back to Tokyo in August 1942 in a diplomatic exchange.
Yoshikawa returned to duty with the 3rd Division of the Naval General Staff, ending the war as a staff intelligence officer. When the war was lost, and the Navy no longer held any future for him, Yoshikawa went home to Ehime and entered private business. His secret remained undisclosed for twelve years, until an ex-officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy revealed it in an interview published in the Ehime Shimbun, a weekly newspaper.
Yoshikawa still refused to talk for another seven years, until most of his old comrades were dead. He then revealed the truth about his astonishing top secret assignment to Lieutenant Colonel Norman Stanford, our Assistant Naval Attaché in Tokyo, for publication in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.
“It is my hope that in telling it now I will harm no one still alive,” Yoshikawa declared, “and perhaps contribute something to the naval history of the war in the Pacific. So it was that I, who was reared as a naval officer, never came to serve in action, but look back on my single top-secret assignment as the raison d’être of the long years of training in my youth and early manhood.”
Thanks to what was perhaps the most amazing job of one-man espionage in history, aided by appalling bumbling and fumbling of the American generals and admirals he outwitted, the United States has good reason to long remember Takeo Yoshikawa—and Pearl Harbor.
