Three score and 17 years ago, Kazuo Sakamaki was likely the most hated man in America — and his reputation wasn’t any better in his native Japan.

Today, the 77th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the day after the burial of World War II Navy pilot and President George H.W. Bush, Sakamaki’s story takes on special significance.

Sakamaki took part in the Pearl Harbor invasion. He was aboard one of five Japanese mini-submarines, each weighing 40 tons and measuring 76 feet. The subs were jammed with torpedoes and batteries and had barely enough space for a two-man crew.

Sakamaki’s mission failed. His mini-sub was knocked around by rough seas, lost battery power and couldn’t enter Pearl Harbor. The mini-sub grounded on a coral reef, and Sakamaki set an explosive charge to destroy it. The charge failed to go off. He was captured and his crew mate drowned.

Sakamaki’s capture brought him instant notoriety on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. He became the first Japanese WWII prisoner of war. He was the lone survivor among the 10 men aboard the five mini-subs.

“It was a very interesting story,” said Rob Esterlein of the Admiral Nimitz Foundation, in a news story published in 2013. “They became national heroes in Japan — all except the 10th, Kazuo Sakamaki. They put out promotional posters in Japan of the nine heroes. His face was missing.”

Sakamaki wanted to die of shame. While a POW at Sand Island prisoner camp near Honolulu, he asked permission to commit a ceremonial suicide. He was denied. Meanwhile, Imperial Japan erased all records of Sakamaki — it was as if he never existed.

Bush postponed his college studies at Yale to join the war. He enlisted in the Navy on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday, and became one of the youngest aviators in the service.

“My Navy experience took a scared kid and made a man out of him,” Bush once said. “For me the Navy was both honorable and most satisfying. No question about that.”

On Thursday, the remains of our 41st president were laid to rest in College Station, Texas, a three-hour drive east of Fredericksburg, hometown of the famed Adm. Chester Nimitz, who took command of American naval forces in the Pacific after the Pearl Harbor attack. Today Fredericksburg hosts a sprawling 50,000-square-foot museum of the Pacific War that honors the memory of Nimitz. Its multitude of exhibits includes Sakamaki’s mini-submarine.

In the extensive recent coverage of Bush’s funeral, it was frequently repeated that he was burdened with the question about why he survived the war when crew mates did not. He concluded that God had a mission for him, and he dedicated a life of service to this conclusion.

Likewise, Sakamaki must have been burdened with the same question. After the war, he worked for Toyota Motor Corp. and was president of its Brazilian subsidiary from 1969 until 1983, when he returned to Japan. He wrote his account of Pearl Harbor and his POW experience but spoke very little about the war. Those who knew him described Sakamaki as deeply committed to pacifism.

At a historic conference in Texas in 1991, Sakamaki was reunited with his sub for the first time in 50 years. He wept.

War changes things. It changes people. It turns enemies into allies, relocates Japanese warriors to Brazil and turns a Massachusetts-born Yalie into a Texas oilman — and drops a submarine into West Texas hill country as surely as Noah’s Ark got dropped on Mount Ararat.

If there’s a moral, maybe it’s that good things always come, even from bad experiences. Of course, there’s the ubiquitous moral that always fits wartime: in fact, it’s engraved at the entrance to the museum in Texas and is attributed to the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”