Koichi Sakae was 14 and living on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and then hours later hit U.S. bases in the Philippines.

Sakae, the sixth of eight children of Yamaguchi Prefecture native Naokichi Sakae and Filipino tribeswoman Amoy Bagoba, said he had mostly enjoyed a "good life" until the war began, growing up in Davao City in southern Mindanao, where his father leased a plantation growing abaca, an indigenous plant harvested for its fiber.

When the war started, the Philippines had been under American rule for over four decades, but Davao already had attracted many thousands of Japanese settlers — in fact, the largest concentration of overseas Japanese migrants in all of Southeast Asia.