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I met Mr. Sakai in 1982. He visited Elmendorf AFB in Alaska, where I was stationed as an F-15 pilot. His tour of Elmendorf and other military bases was arranged by the US government, and he traveled with one of the two US Army P-40 pilots who managed to get airborne from Wheeler Field during the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec 7, 1941. Although Saburo Sakai was not a participant in the Pearl Harbor attack (he was fighting in the Philippines on the Day of Infamy), the two were paired to represent the two sides of the air war in the Pacific. I gave the two men a tour of our F-15 simulator facility, including some cockpit time for each, and then they were whisked away by their escort officers. At the time, I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't know the first thing about Sakai or his remarkable record as a Japanese Imperial Navy fighter pilot during WWII. I'm trying to make up for that now.

As for his memoir, I was most interested in the details of how the IJN recruited pilot candidates, their rank structure (Sakai was an enlisted man until very late in the war), how they trained on the ground and in the air, how they were billeted and fed during deployments to Lae, Rabaul, and Iwo Jima, and how they communicated in the air (there being no radios in Zeros early in the war). I was disappointed in the descriptions of dogfights and tactics, and perhaps that is the fault of the translator. I wish he had gone into much more detail.

Sakai's description of life as a Navy man during the war, particularly as the tide turned against Japan, is fascinating, and here he does go into great detail, describing primitive facilities and the almost nonexistent supply chain between the homeland and forward-deployed units throughout the Pacific. The glimpses he provides of civilian life at home in Japan during occasional leaves and later, during his hospitalization, are also fascinating. The folks at home were fed a diet of non-stop propaganda utterly ungrounded in reality, and by the time they realized they were being lied to and were in fact losing the war there wasn't much anyone could do other than what they were already doing ... nearly everyone, by 1944, was working in direct support of the war in one role or another. Alas, I was not at all interested in the many pages Sakai devoted to his future wife and yawned my way through those sections, anxious to get back to the fighting.

I read the Kindle edition, which included a fair number of typos. I wondered if the print editions contained maps and illustrations, because those would have been helpful. As it was, I kept my iPad at my side to look up maps of the Pacific islands Sakai flew from and those he attacked, occasionally looking up Japanese fighter types on Wikipedia.

Of course Sakai was a patriotic Japanese citizen (and not just that ... he actually came from a samurai family). He was, in every way, prepared to die for his country. There is no tone of apology in his memories, nor should there be. For many Americans, including myself, the events Sakai describes, and their aftermath, are very much within living memory. My father, then a sailor, was in the fleet attacking Okinawa. I was stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, a Zero base during the war, and later at Hickam Field in Honolulu, living in a WWII-era bungalow bordering Pearl Harbor. I've been to Guam and Truk Lagoon, both occupied by the Japanese during the war. I've flown out of RAAF Darwin, once attacked by the Japanese, and the airfield at Shemya Island (ditto). I know people from both sides who lived through the war (though there aren't many left today).

There are many who on principle will never read the memoir of a man who fought on Japan's side, and I cannot blame them. But I wish I'd known who Sakai was when I met him in 1982 ... I'd have peppered him with questions!