Didn't know about Sakai.
Mitsuo Fuchida, 1902-1976, was a Japanese captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and a bomber aviator in the INJ before and during WWII. He is perhaps best known for leading the 1st air wave attacks on Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941. Working under the overall fleet commander, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, Fuchida was responsible for the coordination of the entire aerial attack.
After the war, Fuchida was called on to testify at the trials of some of the Japanese military for Japanese war crimes. This infuriated him as he believed this was little more than "victor's justice". In the spring of 1947, convinced that the Americans had treated Japanese POWs the same way and determined to bring that evidence to the next trial, Fuchida went to Uraga Harbor near Yokosuka to meet a group of returning Japanese POWs. He was surprised to find his former flight engineer, Kazuo Kanegasaki, who all had believed had died in the Battle of Midway. When questioned, Kanegasaki told Fuchida that they were not tortured or abused, much to Fuchida's disappointment, then went on to tell him of a young lady, Peggy Covell, who served them with the deepest love and respect, but whose parents, missionaries, had been killed by Japanese soldiers on the island of Panay in the Philippines. For Fuchida, this was inexplicable, as in the Bushido code revenge was not only permitted, it was "a responsibility" for an offended party to carry out revenge to restore honor. The murderer of one's parents would be a sworn enemy for life. He became almost obsessed trying to understand why anyone would treat their enemies with love and forgiveness.
In the fall of 1948, Fuchida was passing by the bronze statue of Hachiko at the Shibuya Station when he was handed a pamphlet about the life of Jacob DeShazer, a member of the 1942 Doolittle Raid who was captured by the Japanese after his B-25 bomber ran out of fuel over occupied China. In the pamphlet, "I Was a Prisoner of Japan", DeShazer, himself a former U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant and bombardier, told his story of imprisonment, torture and his account of an "awakening to God." This experience increased Fuchida's curiosity of the Christian faith. In SEP 1949, after reading the Bible for himself, he became a Christian. In May 1950, Fuchida and DeShazer met for the 1st time.
In 1951, Fuchida, along with a colleague, published an account of the Battle of Midway from the Japanese side. In 1952, he toured the U.S. as a member of the Worldwide Christian Missionary Army of Sky Pilots and wrote another book, From Pearl Harbor to Gologoth in 1953. Fuchida remained dedicated to a similar initiative of the group for the remainder of his life. During his travels he met the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, Col. Paul Tibbetts, and told him that he did the right thing by dropping the atomic bomb because the Japanese people would not have stopped fighting when American forces were scheduled to invade the Japanese home islands in late 1945.