The morning sky was dull gray with low-hanging clouds over the battleship on which the war that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor more than a thousand days before ended with Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945. The highest-ranked military leaders of the victorious Allied nations, along with representatives of the defeated Empire of Japan, were standing in designated spots on the teak deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. In the superstructure rising high above, every level and catwalk was filled with hundreds of white-capped sailors gawking at the scene below.
Standing nearby on a subdeck to observe the ceremony with a group of U.S. news correspondents was their official interpreter, Thomas Sakamoto, 27, of San Jose, Calif., a tall Japanese American who was one of the Army’s newest second lieutenants in the Pacific.
When General Douglas MacArthur stepped from a sea cabin, he strode stiffly to a cluster of microphones, and read a short statement. He then invited the representatives of Japan and the Allies to sign the surrender document.
Sakamoto was honored to be a witness to such history, something he appreciated even more when he learned he was one of only three Japanese American servicemen aboard Missouri that morning. A decade earlier, he had attended a boarding high school in Japan, where his immigrant parents who settled in California sent him to learn about their homeland. He was proud of his lineage, but during his stay in Japan he was a student of the culture, not a convert. He did not have divided loyalties. He was an American by birth and upbringing, and Japanese by ancestry. All of which had made Tom Sakamoto— and thousands of other Japanese American soldiers—invaluable to the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service in the war against Japan.