Hideki Tojo

Hideki Tojo was the army general who headed Japan's government from October 1941 to July 1944, the period that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ended with the loss of Saipan. A leading figure of the militarist army leadership of the 1930s, he was convicted after the war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and hanged in 1948. His name remains closely linked with Japan's wartime expansion and the atrocities committed during it.

Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on 30 December 1884, the son of an army officer of modest samurai descent. He graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1905, served briefly in the Siberian intervention of 1918–19, and was military attaché in Germany from 1919 to 1922. Like many officers he absorbed the German idea of a "defence state" in which the whole nation was organised for war. Colleagues knew him as hard-working, rigid and legalistic, and he was nicknamed "Razor".

In the 1930s Tojo rose as a leader of the Tōseiha, or Control Faction, which wanted to mobilise the country for war through the existing state rather than by coups. When officers of the rival Imperial Way faction attempted a coup in Tokyo in February 1936, Tojo, then commanding the military police of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, had suspected sympathisers arrested. In 1937 he became the Kwantung Army's chief of staff. After the Marco Polo Bridge incident opened the Second Sino-Japanese War that July, he directed operations in northern China. Recalled to Tokyo in 1938, he became vice-minister of the army and, in July 1940, army minister in Prince Konoe's cabinet, where he supported the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

After Japanese troops moved into southern French Indochina in July 1941, the United States answered with an oil embargo. In cabinet Tojo argued that withdrawing from China or Indochina would be ruinous to the army and that compromise would only invite further American demands. Konoe resigned in October, and Emperor Hirohito, on the advice of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, chose Tojo to succeed him, with instructions to review the decision for war. The review changed nothing. Tojo presented the American Hull note of 26 November to the cabinet as an ultimatum, a description historians consider inaccurate, and on 1 December an imperial conference approved war. The attack on Pearl Harbor followed on 7 December.

Tojo kept the army ministry while premier and at various times also ran the home, foreign, education and commerce ministries. He mobilised the Empire of Japan for total war, tightened censorship and used the military police against dissent. His power was nevertheless limited: the navy acted largely independently, and historians such as Herbert Bix describe his authority as resting on the emperor's support. After defeat at Midway in June 1942 the war turned against Japan. In 1944 he backed the invasion of India, joined by Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army, which ended in disaster at Imphal and Kohima. Japanese forces committed mass atrocities against prisoners and civilians across occupied Asia during his years in power. When Saipan fell that summer, elder statesmen and the court turned against him, and he resigned on 18 July 1944.

After Japan's surrender, as American soldiers came to arrest him on 11 September 1945, Tojo shot himself in the chest but survived. Before the Tokyo tribunal he was charged, with 27 other defendants, with waging aggressive war and with permitting the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. He declared himself ready to bear responsibility for the war. The court found him guilty on 12 November 1948, and he was hanged on 23 December 1948. Historians including Bix and John Dower have argued that the occupation authorities shaped the proceedings to shield the emperor and place blame on Tojo. His name is enshrined at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine.

Our 1938 map shows Japan's empire in the year after full war with China began, and the 1945 map shows East Asia at the war's end.