Hideki Tojo
The general who led Japan as prime minister through most of the Pacific War and was hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
For Americans and their allies during the war, Hideki Tojo was the enemy's face: the bespectacled, shaven-headed general who ran Japan when it attacked Pearl Harbor. Wartime propaganda made him a dictator, a Japanese Hitler. The reality was narrower and in some ways more revealing. Tojo was a career army bureaucrat, disciplined and hard-working, who rose because he embodied the institution he served, and who was discarded by that same institution the moment the war turned against it.
An army man's rise
Tojo built his career inside the Imperial Japanese Army, the most powerful institution in prewar Japan. Nicknamed 'the Razor' for his sharp, by-the-book efficiency, he served as chief of staff of the Kwantung Army in occupied Manchuria in the late 1930s, a posting at the heart of Japanese expansion. He rose to vice-minister and then minister of war, a hard-line voice for confronting the West, and in October 1941 he became prime minister while keeping the war ministry and, for stretches, several other portfolios too. Weeks later, with his backing, Japan struck Pearl Harbor. As premier he presided over the opening run of conquests across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and he became, at home and abroad, the human symbol of Japan's war. Yet even at his peak his authority, though real, was bounded: he never ruled as Hitler or Mussolini did, and rival army and navy factions checked him. Cabinet decisions still required consensus, and the emperor sat above him.
Fall and reckoning
His power was never absolute; it rested on victories. When those stopped, so did he. The fall of Saipan in July 1944 put American bombers in range of the Japanese home islands and broke his government, and Tojo resigned that month. A year later Japan surrendered; by then he was a private citizen, out of power for over a year. As US forces moved to arrest him, Tojo shot himself in the chest but survived, was nursed back to health, and was put on trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. There the prosecution cast him as the arch-architect of Japanese aggression. He accepted broad responsibility for the war while insisting he had committed no crime under the law as he understood it, and at one point he walked back testimony that seemed to implicate the emperor in the decision for war. The tribunal convicted him, and on 23 December 1948 he was hanged at Sugamo Prison. Postwar Japan and its former enemies alike found it convenient to load much of the war's guilt onto the man with the mustache and the round glasses, even though the machine that made the war was far larger than any one general. Tojo was its most visible product, and in the end its designated villain.