Masamitsu Yoshioka stands in front of a Japanese bomber in 1941. (JAPAN Forward)
When Pearl Harbor came into view, black smoke was already rising from the U.S. ships hit by the first wave of Japan’s surprise attack. The crew of a Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bomber readied for its run.
The 23-year-old navigator and bombardier on board, Masamitsu Yoshioka, had practiced his part of the maneuver for months without knowing the mission. He was stunned when he was told his carrier group was part of a massive strike on American territory that included more than 300 Japanese warplanes. “The blood rushed out of my head,” Yoshioka recalled. “I knew that this meant a gigantic war.”
The Nakajima’s pilot steadied the wings at about 35 feet above the water. Yoshioka released the nearly 1,800-pound torpedo on a path toward the battleship USS Utah, which was being used as a training vessel.
By the time Yoshioka and the Nakajima crew were back on the aircraft carrier Soryu, a total of 58 men aboard the Utah had died — among the more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel and civilians killed and nearly 1,800 wounded in the Dec. 7, 1941, blitz on Hawaii that plunged the United States into World War II.
“Now I think of the men who were on board those ships we torpedoed. I think of the people who died because of me. They were young men, just like we were,” Yoshioka said in a 2023 interview in the Japan Forward, which described him as the last known surviving Japanese veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack.
“I am so sorry about it,” added Yoshioka, who died last month at age 106. “I hope there will not be any more wars.” His death was first announced Aug. 28 in social media posts and confirmed by Japanese media, but other details have not been made public.
As the ranks of World War II personnel fade, Yoshioka gained attention in Japan in recent years for being widely acknowledged as the only remaining witness to the Pearl Harbor attack from the side of the Imperial Japanese forces. His memory of the events remained vivid, recalling even the bite of the strong easterly wind before sunrise on the Soryu’s deck. The island of Oahu was more than 200 miles away.
The attack squadrons were under strict rules of radio silence, Yoshioka said. As navigator on the Nakajima torpedo bomber — a model dubbed “Kate” by American pilots — he relied on instruments and flight time to set their course. At one point, he flicked on a device that picked up a radio station from Hawaii. He listened for a few seconds. “We were right on track,” he recalled.
They saw Pearl Harbor just before 8 a.m. The naval base was “wrapped in black smoke,” he said in the Japan Forward interview with Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan. “There were only two ships that I could clearly see.”
He remembered seeing columns of seawater blast upward as the torpedo made a direct hit on the Utah. Then he realized the miscalculation that was made. Japanese commanders issued orders to ignore the Utah since it was no longer combat ready and was being used for anti-aircraft gunnery training. “As we flew over the deck I could see, in a flash going by, gun turrets without any barrels,” Yoshioka recalled. “A training ship. It was the Utah. A mistake!”
The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech to senators and representatives on Capitol Hill. “Yesterday,” he said, “December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.” A declaration of war on Japan was swiftly approved by Congress. A formal state of war with Germany and its allies came days later.
Japan lost 29 aircraft and five mini-submarines at Pearl Harbor, claiming a total of more than 120 lives. Yoshioka said he did not expect to return — and a sense of guilt kept him silent about the war as the decades passed. “I’m ashamed that I’m the only one who survived and lived such a long life,” he said.
Masamitsu Yoshioka was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in western Japan on Jan. 5, 1918. He joined the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1936, assigned to a ground crew whose work included keeping aloft an aging fleet of biplanes.
He began navigator training in 1938 and was posted the next year to the Soryu, a 746-foot carrier that was then involved in Japan’s war in China against the forces of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
Then in August 1941, Yoshioka was shifted suddenly to torpedo training. At bases on the mainland, pilots practiced maintaining a flat flight-line just above the surface; Yoshioka and others were taught the precise moment and angle to release torpedoes.
“Despite all of our training, we got only one practice run with a real torpedo,” Yoshioka said.
On Nov. 26, 1941, the Soryu left the Kuril Islands, an archipelago now under Russian control. The crew still had no idea of the destination. They had been told to pack shorts, leading to rumors that the target was somewhere to the south, Yoshioka recalled.
The Soryu joined an armada of five other carriers, as well as battleships and other vessels. On Dec. 2, word came that talks had broken down between U.S. and Japanese envoys over issues including a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States, which effectively cut off access to U.S. oil shipments desperately needed by Japan.
As the war spread across the Pacific, he flew support missions during the battle for Wake Island just after Pearl Harbor and took part in Japan’s attack on Allied ships off British-controlled Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in spring 1942.
The Soryu was sunk in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Yoshioka was at home on leave at the time. On the island of Peleliu, he contracted malaria and was evacuated for treatment before it was shelled and stormed by U.S. forces in 1944 in a grinding fight that left heavy casualties on both sides.
In August 1945, he was at an air base when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender after atomic bombs ravaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Yoshioka worked at a transport company and was part of the postwar Japanese navy, known as the Maritime Self-Defense Force, he told Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper in 2021.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
During an interview in 2023, Yoshioka was asked if he had visited Hawaii after the war. No, he replied.
“If I could go, I would like to,” he added. “I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect.”
