Kazuo Sakamaki, who became the first Japanese prisoner of war captured by American forces in World War II when his midget submarine ran aground during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died on Nov. 29. He was 81.
His death, in Japan, was reported yesterday by a Japanese veterans' group.
A midget submarine of the Japanese Imperial Navy carrying Ensign Sakamaki and Chief Warrant Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki was launched from a mother submarine 10 miles off Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at 3:33 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. About four and a half hours later, Japanese bombers attacked the United States Pacific Fleet, plunging America into World War II. But Ensign Sakamaki was frustrated by mechanical misadventures.
His 78.5-foot-long submarine, HA-19, and four other midget subs, each armed with a pair of 1,000-pound torpedoes, were to attack American destroyers or battleships.
But Ensign Sakamaki's gyrocompass, which had given him trouble even before the mission began, continued to malfunction, causing his submarine to run in circles while at periscope depth. He struck submerged coral reefs three times, then surfaced just after 8 a.m. -- moments after the Japanese bombers' first wave -- and ran aground.
The submarine was spotted by an American destroyer, the Helm, which fired at it. The shots missed, but they blasted the submarine off the reef and knocked Ensign Sakamaki unconscious.
After he revived, Ensign Sakamaki tried to get his submarine going. It managed to avoid American depth charges, but the firing mechanisms for its torpedoes were damaged. The submarine became partially flooded, it filled with smoke and fumes from its batteries, causing the two crewmen to pass out.
Ensign Sakamaki revived once again late Sunday night, opened the hatch, noted that he was near land and tried to run his submarine onto a stretch of beach. But the engines died, and the submarine grounded on yet another coral reef.
After ordering Warrant Officer Inagaki to abandon the submarine, Ensign Sakamaki lit the fuses of the self-destruct charges and leaped into the surf. The charges did not explode, and the other crewman drowned.
Ensign Sakamaki reached a stretch of beach, but fell unconscious once more. When he awakened the next morning, an American soldier, Sgt. David Akui, was standing over him. He was the only crewman to survive from the midget submarines. All five were lost. and none were known to have caused damage to American ships.
Ensign Sakamaki was questioned at nearby Fort Shafter, then sent to a prisoner of war camp in the United States.
At the end of the war, he returned to Japan and wrote his memoirs, ''Four Years as a Prisoner-of-War, No. 1,'' in which he told of receiving mail from some Japanese denouncing him for not having committed suicide when it appeared he could be taken captive. His memoirs were published in the United States on the eighth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with the title, ''I Attacked Pearl Harbor.''
Mr. Sakamaki became a businessman, serving as president of a Brazilian subsidiary of Toyota and then working for a Toyota-affiliated company in Japan before retiring in 1987.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
His submarine was salvaged by American troops, shipped to the United States in January 1942, and taken on a nationwide tour to sell War Bonds. It was placed on display at a submarine base in Key West, Fla., in 1947 and later transferred in 1990 to its current site, the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Tex. In 1991, Mr. Sakamaki paid a visit to his old sub during a symposium on the Pearl Harbor attack.
A fellow Japanese naval veteran, Sadaichi Fukui, said that although Mr. Sakamaki wrote his memoirs, he did not speak much about his war experiences. As Mr. Fukui put it, ''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.''