World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseMitsuru Yoshida was born in Tokyo in 1923. In 1943, as an undergraduate student of law at Tokyo Imperial University, he was drafted into the Japanese Navy; "I was an average O.C.S. (Officer Candidate School) officer, a run-of-the-mill military man. Among the countless young men sent into battle at the end of the Pacific war, I was entirely unremarkable", he wrote in his memoir after the war. He became a radar officer aboard battleship Yamato with the rank of ensign serving at the ship's bridge. His survival of Yamato's final mission made him among the most important primary sources of the battleship. He completed his war time memoir in 1946, but the text remain unpublished as he carefully revised the draft over and over again. In Dec 1945, he began working for the Bank of Japan and remained there for his entire career, becoming an executive officer in the 1970s. He converted to Catholicism in 1948 and married Protestant Yoshiko Nakai in 1949. In 1952, his memoir was finally published under the title Senkan Yamato no Saigo, and several minor revisions were released afterwards. In 1957, he joined the United Church of Christ in Japan. In the 1960s and 1970s, Yoshida published several works on various topics, including several on the Pacific War and the Vietnam War. In most of his writings, he stressed the fact that war was hell, and it was not enough merely to hate war. He wrote:

ww2dbaseIn 1978, Richard Minear translated Senkan Yamato no Saigo into English under the title Requiem for Battleship Yamato.

ww2dbaseYoshida died in Tokyo in 1979.

Mitsuru Yoshida Timeline

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