Through our friends at BACEPOW, and by author's permission, I now can post a copy of an Introduction which Peter Parsons has written concerning why it was that he found the Sakakida story deeply unsatisfactory.
History is important, otherwise revisionists would not spend so much time trying to change it. What we have here is more than a little scent of a scandal - the "cleansing" of WWII records by someone clearly most powerful and influential. XO
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How About Plain Old Traitor?
A forward to the following article by Louis Jurika;
By Peter Parsons
I had an affidavit signed by Richard Sakakida saying that he was a witness to the execution of my grandmother, Blanche Walker Jurika. This small document was written in Japanese and was amongst my father’s (Chick Parsons’) archival stash. Some time in the early 1980s I had asked Dulce Festin Baybay to research for me whatever she could find about this execution, and to find out where this Sakakida had vanished to.
In the course of her searches she found his California address and wrote him twice asking for any information about what took place in North Cemetery at the end of August, 1944, or even in the earlier “trials.” He never responded to her.
I then wrote a letter to which he replied essentially that, yes, he had witnessed said execution and further that he would have gladly changed places with those prisoners—which apparently he did not do. I wrote him again for more details, but he stonewalled all my efforts to draw further comment from him.
I left this project behind me and went onto research in the mid 1990s the life and work of my own father. This took me to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. While browsing through various files, I decided to see what I could find from the Sakakida material. I put in my request. And waited. Eventually the cart person returned with other items but he told me there was nothing on Sakakida. I squawked, because the stuff was listed; so I was taken to the head archivist.
This person took me into the archives to prove to me that an obvious error had been made. We got to the right section. This was deep in the heart of the holiest of holy places. The man looked up a few shelves, down several, to the left and to the right. He scratched his head.
“Someone wants this file not to be here,” he pronounced solemnly. “It’s definitely not here.”
Fast forward to 2011. I am now part of a fairly large number of people engaged in assisting my cousin Lou Jurika in researching the subject of Richard Sakakida. Lou’s article for the BACEPOW journal, Beyond the Wire, follows. I asked a friendly researcher at NARA, Bonnie Rowan, if she would look for the Sakakida papers—to see if they were still missing.
She replied that they were back in the archives, but it looked like our target did not exist before 1947. Everything earlier was gone. To use my own expression, the papers had been “sanitized.” It seemed to me that someone of immense political power or “pull” had removed the papers for this purpose.
Meanwhile, Sakakida and his brother in law had written/published a biography in which Sakakida claimed to have performed brave, invaluable feats of derring do in Manila.
On the other side of the Pacific I interviewed, once again, for different purposes, several guerrillas, Gustavo Ingles, Frisco San Juan, Manuel de Ocampo—all of them of the Hunters group. To a man they told me that Sakakida had nothing to do with the guerrillas, he did not assist in any way whatever in the planning of the famous escape from New Bilibid (in Muntinlupa) Prison, that he had never passed any information to them for MacArthur’s GHQ. In fact, their only knowledge of Sakakida was that he was a rough “interpreter” for the KempeiTai, and was known for beating prisoner witnesses if they did not remain quiet and accept the Japanese judicial process.
Cousin Lou very ably puts together a case against the bogus claims of Mr. Sakakida, and I hope you enjoy reading his article as much as I have. I do not want to step on his punch lines or any of his story, so I will end with a parting shot at Sakaida:
To date, I am not aware of other researchers or published authors who have been prepared to leave behind the legalistic weasel-word
'turncoat' and to call Sakakida out for the traitor he was. One could understand this during the time Sakakida was alive, which is one of the valid reasons why the most accurate histories are written after the death of everyone relevant. As a turncoat, Sakakida might have passively conducted his self-serving pro-Japanese activities. A traitor, on the other hand, is a "pro-active" participant for the enemy. Given that the Japanese Army regularly taught brutality to its lower ranks by forcing them to be brutal to lesser mortals, so as to harden them, I cannot accept that Sakakida was not similarly tested and hardened during his unexamined years. The Kempeitai were Gestapo-like in their ruthlessness, and became all the more so as time progressed, and Sakakida spent his war within that perverted culture.
He was captured by US forces at the end of the war, wandering around north central Luzon with a bullet wound festering in his own gut. He was not “rescued” as he and others would like us to believe. He was captured as an enemy soldier. When he was being “debriefed” (read: “grilled”) in the earliest of CIC interviews with him, he was being questioned as an unreliable, dubious witness. It is interesting that during these sessions he went so far as to say he did not have guerrilla contacts. No mention was made of his having masterminded the Muntinlupa breakout.
I am sure he made these stories up much later to cover up a much more toxic reality, and to further distract interested parties away from the truth.
I am sure that he, while on Bataan and Corregidor as an American soldier, witnessed the mighty Imperial Japanese Army at its best. He experienced perhaps the most punishing artillery and aerial bombardments ever in history! The American side had lied to its troops about assistance being on its way. It’s General had “abandoned” his men. By the time Corregidor surrendered, Sakakida had made up his mind: I look like them; I speak their language; I have been educated like them. I am them. Before the American POWs had been marched to Old Bilibid [which I witnessed, by the way], Richard Sakakida was already in a Japanese uniform. He was already a Japanese soldier, i.e. “one of them.”
He had been content, in his retirement, to lie low in California, but when Dulce Baybay, then I, and then Lou Jurika discovered his existence and his whereabouts—and with Lou actually visiting him in his own home—heaven forbid—he felt it was time to come out with his distracting and highly entertaining as well as self-serving claims to heroism, all of which claims have turned out to be false. The hot breath of researchers was getting close to his neck.
This man’s whole new life as a “hero” was made possible by the single, unsubstantiated statement of approval made by his prewar friend and cohort, Art Komori, who had not seen or known anything of Sakakida since Corregidor days and knew nothing of his activities in occupied Manila. I’m sure he’s OK, says Komori to GHQ. And thus begins the whole new life, the past immediately erased, just as was done years later, literally, at the National Archives.
Richard Sakakida, I name you not only a heartless liar, one who never talked to the survivors of the thousands of executed victims you saw to their graves, but I also call you a traitor; and I only wish you were alive to face these comments in person. You were a traitor to the USA, to the Philippines and even, in the end oddly enough, to Japan.
J'accuse!
Peter Parsons
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