Memoirs
Sakamaki wrote a memoir titled Four Years as a Prisoner-of-War, No. 1. He told of receiving mail from some Japanese denouncing him for not having committed suicide when it appeared he could be captured. His memoirs were translated and published in the United States on the eighth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack under the title I Attacked Pearl Harbor.
Another Japanese World War II veteran, Sadaichi Fukui, said that though Sakamaki wrote his memoirs, he did not speak much about the war. Fukui said, "I think he had a lot of feelings he could not put in words about becoming the first prisoner of war at a time when falling into the hands of the enemy was the biggest shame."
Sakamaki's experience as a prisoner of war was detailed in "The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II" by Ulrich Straus (2004).
Read more about this topic: Kazuo Sakamaki
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“There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.”
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