A former American prisoner of war unexpectedly encountered one of his wartime torturers inside the Sears, Roebuck department store in Los Angeles, CA in October 1946. Tomoya Kawakita was born in California to immigrant parents. He lived there until age 18 when he and his father traveled to Japan in 1939. Kawakita stayed there for the duration of the war. In 1943 he was hired as an English interpreter at a metal refinery near the Oeyama mine. The plant used English-speaking prisoners of war to mine and transport nickel ore. Kawakita was well-known and much feared by the POWs at Oeyama. As a student of jiu jitsu, he would use the exhausted prisoners as practice dummies. He brutalized them in a variety of ways and was responsible for the death of US Marine Corps Private Einar Latvala. When the war ended, Kawakita was able to renew his American passport at the US consulate, claiming he’d only registered as a Japanese citizen under duress at the behest of the Japanese government. He returned to California in mid-1946 and enrolled in classes at the University of Southern California. But just weeks later, a survivor of the Bataan death march and former prisoner at Oeyama named William L. Bruce was shopping with his wife for a lawnmower in the Sears, Roebuck store in Los Angeles when he bumped into Kawakita inside. He followed Kawakita outside and took down his license plate number. Bruce later testified, “When I saw his face, I went limp inside. It was Oeyama all over again and Kawakita was standing there with the bamboo pole, and I was too weak to do any more than take it.” Bruce contacted the FBI who arrested Kawakita eight months later following an extensive investigation. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death in September 1948. However, President Eisenhower later commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, and in 1963 President Kennedy ordered him released from prison, and removed to Japan. Kawakita lived out the remainder of his life in Japan. #japan #ww2history #sears #prisoner #treason