Christmas gave way to New Year’s Day 1950—the dawn of a new decade. Jake kept busy through January and February, although he was becoming increasingly concerned about the political situation in Asia. The region was still very unstable following the Second World War. On October 1, 1949, the communists had taken complete control of China and established the People’s Republic of China. Now it was looking as though the Korean Peninsula was also about to fall into the hands of the communists. Despite General MacArthur’s ban on communism in Japan, the ideology was making inroads. Jake was convinced that more had to be done to win the Japanese people over to Christianity, lest Japan also fall into the hands of the communists.
In late February, Jake decided to embark upon a forty-day fast, during which he ate nothing and drank only water. He still kept up his punishing travel and speaking schedule and his language study, along with long periods of prayer for the nation of Japan. This dramatic move on Jake’s part made a great impression on the Japanese people. They knew that Buddhist priests prayed from time to time, but it was unheard of for a foreign missionary to show such outward concern for their souls.
Once the fast was finished, larger crowds began to gather to hear Jake speak, but Jake could not shake the feeling that there was some other key to reaching the country that had yet to be unveiled to him.
One morning, less than a week after the end of his fast, Jake opened the door of his home to find two men standing there. One of the men was a fellow American, Glenn Wagner, the chief representative in Japan of the Pocket Testament League. The other man was Japanese and about Jake’s age.
Glenn introduced the man to Jake as Captain Mitsuo Fuchida. As Jake bowed to his visitors, as was customary in Japan, his mind raced with excitement. Mitsuo Fuchida was one of Japan’s most prominent war heroes. He had led the 360-strong squadron of airplanes that had bombed Pearl Harbor and forced the United States to enter the war. Jake wondered what the man was doing at his door.
Soon the three men were seated upstairs, and Jake was listening to an astonishing story. He sat spellbound as Captain Fuchida told how he had become a Christian. Two events had led up to this. The first had come as a result of his having been asked to testify in the war crimes tribunals held at the end of the war. Captain Fuchida himself had not been charged with any crimes, but he had been asked to describe situations he had seen during the war. He told Jake that as he listened to the trials, he became obsessed with the idea that each nation treats its prisoners of war badly and that it was a terrible injustice that the losing side in the war had to be humiliated because of their treatment of prisoners of war. To prove the point, he had begun tracking down and interviewing Japanese soldiers who had returned to Japan after being held as prisoners of war in the United States.
Captain Fuchida told how he met with one Japanese soldier named Kanegasaki, whom he had known from early in the war. This soldier had been a prisoner of war at a camp on the Colorado/Utah border. Kanegasaki told Captain Fuchida how an eighteen-year-old girl named Peggy Covell had befriended the entire camp. Peggy had visited the camp every day and had done whatever she could to help the captured Japanese soldiers.
Eventually one of the prisoners had asked her why she was so kind to them. Peggy told the prisoner that it was because Japanese soldiers had killed her parents, who had been missionaries in Yokohama and had fled to the Philippines at the beginning of the war. When the Japanese overran the Philippines, her parents had been found with a small radio and were accused of communicating with the outside world. They were given a mock trial, at which they were convicted of the crime and afterward beheaded.
At first, Peggy had explained, she was bitter about losing her parents. But then her heart softened, and she realized that her parents would have forgiven the Japanese before they died and that she needed to do the same. So she asked God to bless the Japanese people, and she began to volunteer at the camp helping the Japanese prisoners of war.
Fuchida explained to Jake how he could barely respond to this behavior. Until that time he believed completely in the principle of katakiuchi, the Japanese notion of revenge. A good Japanese warrior who had been captured and was awaiting death prayed that he would be born again seven times, so that in each of the seven lives he could extract revenge from whoever it was that had killed him.
Nonetheless, hearing the story of Peggy Covell’s kindness and humanity toward the Japanese prisoners of war had convinced Fuchida to give up his quest to prove that the military courts were unjust. Instead, Fuchida had focused on searching for the source of such pure love. Surely, he reasoned, that was what he and the rest of the Japanese people needed to stop the cycle of hatred and secure a peaceful future.
Not long after this experience, Captain Fuchida had been handed a copy of Jake’s I Was a Prisoner of Japan tract at a railway station in Tokyo. The captain explained how he had taken the tract home and read it many times, marveling at how God could change hatred into love. He explained to Jake that this was the second event that had convinced him that the God of the Christians was real. As a result, he bought a Bible and began to read it.
The process of turning his life over to Christ, Fuchida explained, had been a slow one, partly because of his strong Buddhist heritage. Now Mitsuo Fuchida sat in the DeShazers’ living room, asking Jake if they could pray together. Jake was struck by the enormity of the moment as he knelt beside Mitsuo Fuchida. These two men had once been on opposing sides: one the leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the first attack of the war on American soil, and the other a member of the Doolittle Raiders, who had been the first to bomb Japan. Yet here they were, kneeling together side by side, praying with love in their hearts toward each other. Before the two men parted, they both agreed to speak at a large evangelistic rally that the Pocket Testament League was planning at Central Public Hall in Osaka on May 14.
On May 14, 1950, Jake, accompanied by Kaneo Oda, made his way to the hall. When they arrived at their destination, Jake could hardly believe his eyes. A huge crowd thronged around Central Public Hall, struggling to get into the already packed auditorium, and the police were trying to restore order to the situation. As a result, the meeting was half an hour late in starting. When it did start, four thousand people were crammed into the hall, and another three thousand were listening outside on a public address system.
At one thirty in the afternoon, Glenn Wagner called the meeting to order. After the singing of some hymns and the distribution of copies of the Gospel of John to the audience, Jake was introduced. The crowd applauded loudly, and then Jake proceeded to tell the audience the story of his capture by the Japanese in China, his time in prison, and his conversion to Christianity and how that had changed his life. As Jake spoke, Kaneo Oda translated his words for the crowd. Jake ended his talk by declaring to the audience, “Now I love you as a brother in Christ. Come to know Christ now, this afternoon.”
Once again the crowd applauded loudly. Then Glenn introduced Mitsuo Fuchida, and again the crowd went wild with applause. This was their war hero, and this was the first time Fuchida had stood before such a large crowd to speak openly about his Christian faith.
Fuchida told about his training as a Japanese Navy pilot and then as a loyal soldier of Japan leading the attack on Pearl Harbor. He spoke of his disillusionment at his country’s defeat, and then he poured out his story, much as he had told it to Jake when they first met. He told of Peggy Covell and how her example had challenged him and his notion of katakiuchi. “Revenge has always been a major motif in Japanese thought. But I am here to say to you that forgiveness is a far greater moral than revenge,” he said.
Fuchida concluded his talk by saying, “I know you long for peace—personal peace as well as world peace. And real peace comes only through Jesus Christ.”
When he sat down, the crowd rose to their feet and cheered and applauded loudly. And when the applause finally died away, Glenn took over and invited those who wanted to become Christians to come to the front of the hall. Over five hundred people stood and made their way forward.
Jake was amazed. Throughout his year and a half of living and preaching in Japan, he had never seen such a large response of people wanting to give their lives to Christ. He felt that he was witnessing an extraordinary moment in Japanese history—a moment Jake firmly believed was the result of constant prayer for Japan and the Japanese people, by him and many Christians in North America and around the globe.
Chapter 17
The Ongoing Work
Spurred on by the success of the rally in Osaka, Jake and Kaneo Oda began an extensive evangelistic tour of Japan. Whenever he could, Mitsuo Fuchida joined them at speaking engagements. Larger crowds than ever before flocked to see the two opposing war heroes who were now united together in love for Christ. On the island of Kyushu, Jake spent a month preaching to coal miners. He conducted two meetings a day and spoke to an average of one thousand people at each meeting. As a result of Jake’s speaking, up to four hundred miners a day stepped forward after the meetings for personal prayer.
When Jake returned home to Osaka to Flo and the two boys, he was pleased by all Flo had accomplished in his absence. The nightly Bible studies were bursting at the seams, and five members of Mr. Yoshiki’s extended family had been converted to Christianity and now wanted to be baptized.
On Sunday, June 25, 1950, while eager and open Japanese audiences flocked to hear Jake speak at several church services, war descended on the Korean Peninsula. On that day an invasion force of heavily armed North Korean troops swept south in an attempt to capture South Korea and unite the two countries into a single, communist country. Americans in South Korea at the time were evacuated to Japan, and everyone waited to see what would happen next.
Two days later the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for North Korea’s immediate withdrawal from the south. If North Korea failed to comply immediately with the resolution, the Security Council authorized member states of the United Nations to act militarily against North Korea and drive their troops back to the 38th Parallel, the agreed-upon boundary established between the two Koreas at the end of World War II. When the North Koreans failed to comply with the resolution, President Harry Truman ordered American troops into South Korea as part of a UN force to help drive the North Koreans back. He put General Douglas MacArthur in charge of this operation. Soon an all-out war was raging on the Korean Peninsula.
Jake, like many in Japan, was greatly concerned about the war. If the UN force failed to achieve its objective, would Japan be the next country the communists set their sights on? Jake redoubled his evangelism efforts as he waited to see the outcome of the fighting in Korea.
In his monthly missionary newsletter home to the United States, Jake reported that he had preached forty sermons in the past month to a total of about sixty-five hundred people. He had given out six thousand Gospels of John and nearly twice that number of Christian tracts. As a result, over five thousand people had accepted Christ, and fourteen had been baptized. But, as Jake noted, plenty of work was still to be done in Japan.
As 1951 dawned, fighting still raged on the Korean Peninsula. In Japan, as the year rolled on, Jake and Florence busied themselves with their various ministry activities. They were particularly pleased with an ongoing youth outreach. At the end of July 1951, the two of them helped to arrange and teach at a youth conference in the fishing village of Yura, on Awaji Island. One hundred seventy young men and women gathered for the conference to pray, discuss their faith, and participate in worship services.
