The spy did not see Adam Sterling come into the open doorway behind him, and the grocer didn't see the FBI agent in time to warn Morimura, either. With a swift, vicious chop to the base of the neck, Sterling sent Morimura sprawling to the floor, the.38 tumbling from the spy's hands.
Burroughs caught the weapon in midair, and Hully snatched the L?ger from the counter, while Sterling was pointing a.38 revolver of his own at the grocer behind the counter.
Though he had a shotgun in hand, Harada was facingthree guns, all trained on him, from various directions.
"Drop it," Sterling advised. "You can't win this game."
Harada thought that over; then he swung the sawed-off shotgun up and around and under his chin and squeezed both triggers, the explosion shaking everything-and everyone-in the small shop. What had been Harada's head dripped and dribbled and slithered down the weird jars of roots, herbs and skeletons, crawling like strange sea creatures. Then the mostly headless body slid down to the floor and sat, out of sight.
Hully was covering his mouth, horrified. Through his fingers, he said the obvious: "He … he took his own life."
"You're going to be seeing a lot of that," Burroughs said, "in the coming days."
Sterling was hauling Morimura to his feet; the dazed spy, his perfect hair askew, looking fairly idiotic in the golf togs, gave the FBI man a bewildered look.
"Judo," Sterling explained.
Less than two hours after it had begun, the sneak air attack on Pearl Harbor was over. The silver planes again receded into specks on the horizon, taking off in varied directions, one more act of deception designed to confuse the enemy as to the attackers' origin point. The raiders left behind a Pearl Harbor that was a smoldering, twisted landscape of inconceivable devastation. The two pieces of the Arizona lay on the bottom of the harbor; the West Virginia, too. The Utah and Oklahoma, capsized; the California sinking; the Cur-tiss, Helena, and Honolulu damaged; the Raleigh barely afloat; the Nevada, the Vestal, beached. Fires raged on bomb-damaged ships-the Maryland, the Pennsylvania, the Tennessee.
On Ford Island, the husks of dozens of planes lay in charred disarray, while hangars burned around them. On the oil-pooled surface of the harbor floated debris, much of it human. And along the Oahu shores, the pummeled air bases continued to ooze smoke.
Corpsman attempted, often vainly, to identify bodies and body parts at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital. At the base of Alewa Heights, just below the Shuncho-ro teahouse-where the Japanese vice consul had wooed geishas and perpetrated espionage-a makeshift morgue was set up.
The triumph of the Japanese, however, was not complete. Huge fuel tanks, holding millions of barrels of oil, had gone unsullied. The Navy Yard itself, that sprawl of repair facilities and shops, was secure. The Naval ammo depot went untouched, as did the submarine pens. Smaller warships by the score escaped damage; and the raiders had failed to find-much less destroy-the aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet.
The greatest miscalculation, of course, was the nature of the attack itself-the sheer villainy of such a peacetime assault To the Japanese military, this was a glorious day of victory, but just one day-a war, after all, was made of many days.
But December 7, 1941, was not just any day.
Americans would remember it
Epilogue
On the afternoon after the attack-in response to a radio request for help from all able-bodied men-Ed and Hully Burroughs were issued Springfield rifles and dispatched to patrol the waterfront in a civilian guard, helping to dig slit trenches along the shore.
With the help of his friend Colonel Kendall Fielder, Burroughs earned the distinction of becoming the oldest American correspondent to cover the Second World War, making three trips to Pacific war zones. He was vocal in his support for Hawaii's Japanese-Americans, though his stereotypical, propagandist portrayal of "Japs" in his WWII novel, Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, rivaled that of the Germans in Tarzan the Untamed.
Colonel Fielder also became known for championing the rights of Japanese-Americans; possibly he'd been touched in some private way by the deaths of his son and his son's nisei fiancee. At any rate, largely due to the efforts of Fielder and a few others-including FBI agent Adam Sterling-99 percent of Hawaii's 160,000 Japanese-Americans remained free, unlike the widespread mainland interments.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Burroughs turned his hand to mystery writing, even briefly converting Tar-zan into a detective, though without particular success, including a wild crime story entitled "More Fun! More People Killed!" that The Saturday Evening Post turned down.
After suffering several heart attacks, Edgar Rice Burroughs died in bed, on March 19, 1950, slumping over the funny papers, which were open to 'Tarzan."
Ed Burroughs was very proud of his son Hully, who a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor raid enlisted in the Army Air Corps at Hickam Field; First Lieutenant Hul-bert Burroughs went on to be a distinguished aerial combat photographer. Toward the end of the war, Hully married Marion Thrasher; after his father's death, he took the reins of ERB, Inc., working with his brother John Coleman Burroughs to effectively administer the legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Otto Kuhn and his wife were arrested at a beach house, and imprisoned at the Sand Island Detention Center; Tadeo Yoshikawa (alias Tadashi Morimura) was transported to an interment camp in Arizona and, in August 1942, exchanged for American diplomats held in Japan.
Kuhn and Yoshikawa were two of only a dozen individuals determined to have actively engaged in prewar espionage in Hawaii; grocer Tosbio Harada was another. All of them had been sent to Hawaii under false names and/or pretenses; none were representatives of any local fifth column of Japanese-Americans. No such fifth column was ever shown to exist.
Sam Fujimoto fought with the celebrated all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and later graduated from Yale Law School, becoming a successful Honolulu attorney.
Harry Kamana and a smaller version of his band toured the Pacific Theater for the USO.
After the war, Detective John Jardine was instrumental in the cleaning up of police corruption on Oahu; he retired in 1968, died a year later, widely regarded as the finest homicide detective Oahu had ever known.
Both Admiral Kimmel and General Short were forced to retire and a hurried government report in January 1942 branded them with "dereliction of duty." Though a later report absolved them of this charge, the stigma remains, and Admiral Kimmel's son Edward has made a concerted effort to have his father and General Short advanced on the retired lists to their highest wartime ranks of four-star admiral and three-star general.
General Short in his later years spent much time on his garden, cultivating flowers, not actively seeking rehabilitation of his reputation; he died in 1949. Admiral Kimmel-though on December 7, 1941, he seemed to blame himself, at least in part-spent the rest of his life trying to restore his good name, dying of a heart attack in 1968.
The exact circumstances of the attack on Pearl
Harbor, and the reasons for the success of that attack, remain the subject of controversy and debate, involving Congress, the president and media coverage, even sixty years after the fact.