After Pearl Harbor: From Hatred to Love, from Bitterness to Forgiveness

On the morning of December 7, 1941, a Japanese pilot named Mitsuo Fuchida led a force of 360 warplanes toward Hawaii.  He gave the command "Tora, Tora, Tora!" and the Japanese began a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the surrounding area which would severely cripple the US military's Pacific fleet and bring the USA into World War II.  In the words of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it would be "a date which will live in infamy".

On that same morning, a young American soldier named Jacob DeShazer was working in the kitchen at an Army camp in California.  When he heard the news of the attack over the radio, the anger boiled up within him and he hurled a potato at the wall, shouting "Jap, just wait and see what we'll do to you!" Five months later, he got his revenge by participating in a surprise air attack on Tokyo as one of the famous "Doolittle Raiders".  But when his plane ran out of fuel, he had to parachute into Japanese-held territory in China and he was taken prisoner.  Mitsuo Fuchida, meanwhile – now a national hero – continued to serve in the Japanese military, determined to defeat the enemy Americans and her allies.

Jacob DeShazer would spend more than three years as a prisoner of the Japanese in China where he would be cruelly treated, fuelling his hatred even more.  But he remembered hearing about how Christianity could change hatred into love and so he begged his captors for a Bible.  When he was finally given one, he read it eagerly and came to understand that his sin – including his hatred for the Japanese – separated him from God.  But he also learned that he could be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ: "if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9).  DeShazer accepted the forgiveness of sins offered through faith in Jesus Christ and this changed his attitude toward the Japanese, turning his intense hatred into love and concern.

When the war finally ended, the Japanese military was disbanded and Mitsuo Fuchida reluctantly returned to his hometown and became a farmer.  Five years later, he was in Tokyo to testify in the war crimes trials, when one day as he got off the train he was handed a pamphlet entitled "I Was a Prisoner of Japan".  Fuchida read the fascinating story of an American soldier who had suffered terribly in a Japanese POW camp but who had somehow forgiven his captors through the liberating power of God's love and who had now returned to Japan to share the good news of salvation and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.  The pamphlet had been written by none other than Jacob DeShazer.

Fuchida wanted this same forgiveness and peace for himself, and so he purchased a Bible and began to read it.  When he read the prayer of Jesus Christ at His crucifixion – "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34) – he felt that the Lord was talking about him.  He had caused the death of many people in the name of patriotism because he did not understand the love which God wanted to reign in every person's heart.  He prayed to God, asking Him to forgive his sins and remove the bitterness from him.  For Fuchida, it was a second "day to remember", giving him a new hope and purpose in living.  He would spend the rest of his life serving God as an evangelist across Japan and the Orient.

The lives of Jacob DeShazer and Mitsuo Fuchida demonstrate that it is possible to change hatred into love, to truly forgive those who have done us wrong, and even to receive forgiveness from God for our own sins.  But there is only One who is powerful enough to do this work, and that is God himself through His Son Jesus Christ.  Why don't you allow God to transform your life, too?

- Kevin Wood (December 7, 2011)

P.S. For more information, see Mitsuo Fuchida's testimony "From Pearl Harbor to Calvary".