Hideki Tojo

• 1. Introduction

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  Hideki Tojo was awakened at 5:00 a.m. on the 8th of December 1941 and told that Japanese planes had struck the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Within hours, he was on the radio announcing that Japan was now at war with the United States, the British Empire, and the Netherlands. The man delivering that message was the Prime Minister of Japan, a general who had risen from a poor samurai family in Tokyo to hold more concentrated power than perhaps any Japanese leader since the shoguns. Who was Tojo? How did a stubborn, humorless boy from the Kojimachi district become the face of a Pacific war that would kill millions? And what happened when the man who declared that war found himself, at the end, seated before a tribunal that would decide whether he would live or die?

• 2. A Samurai Family's Inheritance

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  Tojo was born on the 30th of December 1884 as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army. The Tojo family traced its lineage to the samurai caste, though they occupied a lowly rank within it, serving as retainer warriors to powerful lords. After the Meiji Restoration abolished the formal caste system in 1871, the social prestige of former samurai households persisted, and the family carried that status even as they remained relatively poor.

  As a boy in Meiji-era Tokyo, Tojo was noted for stubbornness, combativeness, and a tendency to fight other boys. Those who knew him in those years rated him as only average in intelligence. He acknowledged this himself. He liked to say: "I am just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents. Anything I have achieved I owe to my capacity for hard work and never giving up." His boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who counseled seeking out unpleasant duties rather than comfortable ones.

  Tojo enrolled in the Army Cadet School in 1899. When he graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in March 1905, he ranked 10th among 363 cadets and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry. That same year brought a formative humiliation: the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended Japan's war with Russia and was seen by most Japanese as a betrayal of the sacrifices they had made. The treaty sparked the Hibiya incendiary incident, anti-American riots in Tokyo driven by the belief that U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt had cheated Japan. Tojo carried that grievance for the rest of his life.

• 3. Germany's Shadow, America's Insult

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  Between 1919 and 1922, Tojo served as a Japanese military attache in Germany, an assignment that shaped his understanding of modern warfare. The Imperial Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the previous century, and German strategic thinking carried unusual weight inside the IJA. In the 1920s, German military thinkers were developing the concept of the totalitarian Wehrstaat, or "Defense State," a nation fully mobilized for the next war. Japanese officers absorbed the idea and renamed it the "national defense state." Tojo would return to that concept again and again.

  On his journey home in 1922, Tojo passed through the United States for his first and only visit to North America. He came away dismissing Americans as a soft, materialistic people. Two years later, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Control Act of 1924, which banned all Asian immigration. Tojo wrote bitterly at the time: "It shows how the strong will always put their own interests first. Japan, too, has to be strong to survive in the world." That sense of racial grievance fused with his existing dislike of Americans to produce a lasting hostility.

  At home, Tojo boasted that his only hobby was his work. He brought paperwork home to work late into the night and declined to participate in raising his seven children, viewing childcare as a woman's duty. He was known for his obsession with etiquette and his coldness toward subordinates. Like virtually all Japanese officers of his era, he slapped the faces of the men under his command. He described face-slapping as a "means of training" for those who had not grown up in the samurai tradition.

• 4. The Control Faction's Rise

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  In March 1934, the Japanese Army Ministry published a book called Hijoji kokumin zenshu, a collection of essays by senior generals arguing that Japan should become a totalitarian national defense state. Tojo wrote one of those essays. He argued that modern war "extends over a great many areas" and requires "a state that can monolithically control" every sphere of national life. He accused Britain, France, and the United States of waging an "ideological war" against Japan since 1919 and closed with a call for Japan to "spread its own moral principles to the world."

  Tojo belonged to the Army's Toseiha, or "Control Faction," which competed for influence against the rival Kodaha, or "Imperial Way" faction. Both were militarist and expansionist, but they disagreed on method. The Imperial Way faction wanted a coup and a Soviet war; the Control faction preferred working within state structures while building toward a national defense state. When a group of Imperial Way officers attempted the February 26 coup of 1936, Tojo, as commander of the Kwantung Army's Kempeitai, ordered the arrest of officers suspected of supporting the rebellion. The coup failed. Emperor Hirohito was outraged at the attacks on his advisors. In the aftermath, the Control faction purged the army of Imperial Way officers, and Tojo emerged as one of the faction's key figures.

  By 1937 Tojo was chief of staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, where he also developed close ties with Yosuke Matsuoka, the ultra-nationalist president of the South Manchuria Railway, and Nobusuke Kishi, the man effectively running Manchukuo's economy. In July 1937, Tojo personally led units of the 1st Independent Mixed Brigade in Operation Chahar, his only direct combat experience. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident triggered the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War, he ordered attacks on Hebei Province and other targets in northern China.

• 5. The Road to Pearl Harbor

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  On the 30th of July 1940, Tojo was appointed Army Minister in the cabinet of Prince Fumimaro Konoe. Konoe needed a hard-line general to secure the Army's support for his foreign policy, and Tojo, respected for his work ethic and his unquestioned ultra-nationalism, was the fit. Tojo pushed strongly for the Tripartite Pact binding Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy. After Japan moved troops into southern French Indochina in July 1941, the United States retaliated with a total embargo on oil and gasoline.

  At the last cabinet meetings of the Konoe government in October 1941, Tojo emerged as the loudest hawkish voice. He portrayed the Americans as arrogant white supremacists and argued that any retreat from China or French Indochina would destroy the "fruits of the China incident" and undermine Japanese control of Korea. When Konoe resigned on the 16th of October, later telling his chief cabinet secretary that the Emperor had gradually absorbed the views of the Army and Navy high commands, Hirohito turned to Kido for a recommendation. Kido pushed for Tojo. Former Admiral Keisuke Okada opposed the appointment, but a compromise was reached: Tojo would become prime minister while nominally "re-examining" the options for resolving the crisis with the United States.

  On the 27th of November 1941, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave Japan's ambassadors a document that would become known in Japan as the "Hull note," which proposed Japanese withdrawal from China and French Indochina in exchange for lifting the oil embargo. Tojo misrepresented this document to the Cabinet as an ultimatum, even though it was marked "tentative" in its opening sentence and set no deadline. That misrepresentation became one of the principal justifications for choosing war. On the 1st of December 1941, an imperial conference sanctioned war against the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands.

• 6. Power, Failure, and Forced Exit

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  Tojo held a remarkable concentration of posts. He remained Army Minister throughout his prime ministership, served concurrently as home minister in 1941-1942, took on the foreign minister portfolio in September 1942, and held the education and commerce portfolios in 1943. On the 21st of February 1944, he added the post of Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, making him simultaneously the top civilian and the top military figure within the Army.

  Yet his formal power had clear limits. The American historian Herbert Bix noted that Tojo was a "dictator" only in the narrow sense that from September 1942 on he could generally impose his will on the Cabinet. The true supreme authority remained the Emperor. The American historian Stanley Falk described the Japanese command structure as characterized by "bitter inter-service antagonisms," with the Army and Navy working "at cross-purposes" in a system that was "uncoordinated, ill-defined and inefficient."

  The military disasters came in sequence. Japan's defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 reversed the tide. The Battles of Imphal and Kohima destroyed the U-Go offensive into India, which had been launched on the 12th of March 1944. By the 5th of July 1944, when the Emperor accepted Tojo's advice to end the invasion, approximately 72,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed in battle and a similar number had starved or died of disease; of the 150,000 who had entered India in March, most were dead. In June-July 1944, Japan lost Saipan and suffered catastrophic naval losses in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where U.S. airmen shot down over 350 Japanese planes at the cost of only 30 of their own. With Saipan in American hands, Japanese cities fell within range of B-29 Superfortress bombers.

  The elder statesmen, the jushin, advised the Emperor that Tojo must go. When Tojo attempted to survive by reorganizing his cabinet, the Emperor rejected the offer and signaled that the entire government should leave power. The Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Marquis Koichi Kido, spread word that imperial support had been withdrawn. Tojo resigned on the 18th of July 1944.

• 7. Trial, Execution, and Contested Memory

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  U.S. general Douglas MacArthur ordered the arrest of 43 suspected war criminals after Japan's surrender in 1945. On the 11th of September, as American soldiers surrounded his house, Tojo shot himself in the chest with a pistol. He missed his heart. As he bled, he told two Japanese reporters: "I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die. The Greater East Asia War was justified and righteous. I am very sorry for the nation and all the races of the Greater Asiatic powers. I wait for the righteous judgment of history. I wished to commit suicide but sometimes that fails."

  Tojo recovered and was moved to Sugamo Prison. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found him guilty of waging wars of aggression, violating international law, and ordering, authorizing, and permitting inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. At his sentencing, he accepted full responsibility. He told the tribunal he intended to speak frankly, that "what is true is true and what is false is false," and that to shade his words in flattery "would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation."

  Historians Herbert P. Bix and John W. Dower have documented a deliberate effort by MacArthur and Brigadier General Bonner Fellers to shield Emperor Hirohito from prosecution and concentrate responsibility on Tojo. A written report by interpreter Shuichi Mizota records that on the 6th of March 1946, Fellers told Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai: "It would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the Emperor is completely blameless. Tojo, in particular, should be made to bear all responsibility at this trial." When Tojo momentarily strayed from this agreed line during his testimony on the 31st of December 1947, American prosecutors secretly arranged for him to be coached to recant.

  Tojo was sentenced to death on the 12th of November 1948. He was hanged on the 23rd of December 1948, one week before his 64th birthday. His ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean approximately 30 miles east of Yokohama from a U.S. Army aircraft that same afternoon, along with the ashes of six other Class-A war criminals. In 2021, the U.S. Army declassified and published the details of what had been done with his remains. Some ashes were stolen from the crematorium beforehand and are today buried at Mount Sangane and the Koa Kannon, and his name is enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.