Making of a Japanese Spy, 1936

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 15-17:

Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa steps out of the Imperial Navy’s Regional Headquarters and takes the first deep breath of his new life. His old one, so full of promise, ended in disappointment. Now he’s being given a second chance to fulfill what he always felt was an important destiny. Yoshikawa’s youth on Shikoku Island was defined by the pursuit of excellence, as demanded by his physically abusive father.

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By 1933 Yoshikawa was an honor student at the Imperial Japanese Naval College. There he’d been instructed that “the Navy stood for [a] southward advance and war against the United States; while the Army stood for northward expansion and war with Russia.” Yoshikawa recalled debates over ways to win a war with America; they all looked upon one as “inevitable.”

There was an introductory training cruise on a battleship and a short submarine deployment before Yoshikawa started pilot training in 1934. He was building the résumé of a promising career, and no one knew this more than Yoshikawa. Despite his philosophy of selflessness, he formed a strong ego. He told people his coming career was to be “stellar” and considered himself “the envy of [his] classmates.”

But after a few months of flight training, coming back from a practice sortie, the confident young man was struck down by severe abdominal pains and ordered to the hospital. He was sidelined from active duty, designated as physically unfit and shunted into a frustrating netherworld that he endured month after month. As he languished, things in Japan got more serious.

In 1936, officials in the Imperial Army murdered the Imperial advisor Makoto Saito, Army General Jotaro Watanabe and Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi and attempted to assassinate many others who opposed their expansionist plans. Tensions with China flared again, and Japan was squaring off against great global powers.

On the cusp of such historic events, Yoshikawa was forced to just watch. In 1936, the Imperial military finally retired him, leaving the youth “in great shock, since all my plans and hopes were bound up with the Navy.” He even contemplated suicide.

That was just two months ago. But with the change of the season came hope, when a captain from the regional headquarters summoned him for today’s meeting. The man’s words are still ringing in his ears: “There is still a place for you in the Navy, if you forgo any hope of advancement and return to active duty as an agent in naval intelligence.”