Takijiro Onishi



Takijirō Ōnishi (b. 1891) was a Japanese admiral. Early in the Pacific Campaign of World War II he was the head of the Naval Aviation Development Division in the Munitions Ministry and was responsible for some of the technical details of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, under command of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Onishi himself opposed the attack on the grounds that it would lead to a full-scale war with an implacable foe who had the resources to overpower Japan into an unconditional surrender. He was even more resistant to Commander Minoru Genda's idea of occupying the whole of the Hawaiian islands.