[Source]Ryō’s mother, Alice Jay Little, was born and raised in Chicago. When she was 20 years old, she met a Japanese diplomat who worked at the consulate in New York named Kurusu Saburō (来栖三郎). They married in 1914, and had a daughter (Jaye) in 1915. Ryō was their second child, born in 1919. In order to accompany her husband to his next duty station in Italy, Alice relinquished her U.S. citizenship and adopted Japanese nationality. While in Italy, they had another daughter named Pia, in 1926.
The relationship between the U.S. and Japan was not particularly contentious at the time, but this changed in the 1930s. Japan set up a puppet state in Manchuria in 1931, and launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As the decade progressed, it became clear that the United States and the Empire of Japan were on a collision course.
As the son of a Japanese official, Ryō was expected to contribute to the war effort, so after graduating from the Yokohama Advanced Industrial College in 1940, he joined the Imperial Japanese Army as a second lieutenant pilot trainee.
[Source]Sadly, the duty of declaring war on the United States on December 7, 1941, fell to Ryō’s father Saburō. However, as depicted in the 1970 movie "Tora Tora Tora," it didn’t work out as planned.
Because of problems with the decryption process, the timing was off, and the official declaration came only after the attack on Pearl Harbor was over. Saburō was interned until he could be exchanged for the American ambassador in summer 1942.
Ryō had to deal with a lot of harassment because of his mixed parentage, but he finished flight school and served as an engineer and a test pilot. As the years passed, the war did not go well for Japan, and in 1945 he was pulled into the air defense of Tokyo.
On February 17 of that year, the U.S. Fifth Fleet conducted a series of raids on Tokyo to divert attention from the impending invasion of Iwo Jima. In the scramble to get planes launched to defend the city, Ryō was inadvertently struck by a taxiing Japanese airplane’s propellor, and he was instantly killed.
Although Ryō is enshrined at Yasukuni as one of Japan’s war dead, he is not buried there, nor are his remains interred there. Instead, his family’s grave site can found at the Aoyama Cemetery (青山墓地) in Tokyo.
At the gravesite, there is a tablet inscribed with a quote from the Roman philosopher Herodotus. It is written not in Latin, but in English, and reads, “In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.” On the back of the tablet are the names of the Kurusu family, though the names of Ryō’s two sisters are missing. His younger sister Pia is still alive; she gave an interview in 2020 about her father’s career.
Ryō’s older sister, Jaye, passed away in 1999. Of all places, she happens to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, beside her husband, a U.S. Air Force major general named William J. Maddox.
[Source][The Kurusu family biography]
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