Hideki Tojo (30 December 1884 – 23 December 1948) was a Japanese military officer and politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1941 to 1944 during World War II. His leadership was marked by widespread state violence and mass killings perpetrated in the name of Japanese nationalism.
Born into a military family of samurai descent in Kōjimachi, Tokyo, Tojo followed in his father's footsteps by pursuing a military career, graduating from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1905. After serving as a military attaché in Germany, he rose to prominence in the 1930s as a member of the Tōseiha (lit. 'Control Faction') within the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). In 1937, as chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, he led operations during the Japanese invasion of China. By 1940, he was appointed Minister of the Army, where he advocated a tripartite alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In October 1941, he was appointed Prime Minister of Japan by Emperor Hirohito.
Upon taking office as Prime Minister, Tojo prioritized the total mobilization of the Empire of Japan for "total war". He enforced strict censorship and utilized the Kempeitai (military police) to suppress dissent while promoting an ideology of absolute loyalty to the Emperor. His foreign policy was defined by the pursuit of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a concept used to justify aggressive expansion into Southeast Asia and the Pacific in order to secure natural resources. On 7 December 1941, Tojo's cabinet oversaw the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which resulted in his country's entry into World War II on the side of the Axis powers. Despite achieving significant territorial gains in Asia and the Pacific during the opening months of the conflict, the tide decisively turned against Japan following its defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. In the capacity of his nation's head of government throughout most of the war, Tojo presided over numerous war crimes, including the massacre and starvation of thousands of POWs and millions of civilians.
As Allied forces closed in on the Japanese home islands, Tojo's hold on power steadily declined before he was ultimately forced to resign on 18 July 1944 upon the fall of Saipan. After his nation's surrender to the Allied powers in September 1945, he was arrested, convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the Tokyo Trials, sentenced to death, and hanged on 23 December 1948. To this day, Tojo's complicity in the July 1937 invasion of China, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and numerous acts of mass murder have firmly intertwined his legacy with the Empire of Japan's warmongering brutality during the early Shōwa era.
Hideki Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on 30 December 1884, as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army. Under the bakufu, Japanese society was organized into a rigid status hierarchy consisting of samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Although this feudal status system was formally abolished in 1871 after the Meiji Restoration, many social distinctions continued to influence Japanese society. Tojo's family belonged to the samurai class, though they were relatively low-ranking retainers in service to a powerful daimyō. Tojo's father was a samurai turned Army officer and his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making his family very respectable but poor.
Tojo had an education typical of Japanese youth in the Meiji era. As a boy, Tojo was known for his stubbornness, lack of a sense of humor, and tenacious way of pursuing what he wanted. He was an opinionated and combative youth who was fond of getting into fights with other boys. Japanese schools in the Meiji era were very competitive, and there was no tradition of sympathy for those who failed, and were often bullied by the teachers. Those who knew him during his formative years deemed him to be of only average intelligence. However, he was known to compensate for his observed lack of intellect with a willingness to work extremely hard. Tojo's boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who issued the injunction: "Avoid the things you like, turn your attention to unpleasant duties." Tojo 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." In 1899, Tojo enrolled in the Army Cadet School.
In 1905, Tojo shared in the general outrage in Japan at the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war with Russia and was seen by the Japanese people as a betrayal, as the war did not end with Japan annexing Siberia, which popular opinion had demanded. The Treaty of Portsmouth was so unpopular that it set off anti-American riots known as the Hibiya incendiary incident, as many Japanese were enraged at the way the Americans had apparently cheated Japan as the Japanese gains in the treaty were far less than what public opinion had expected. Very few Japanese people at the time had understood that the war against Russia had pushed their nation to the verge of bankruptcy, and most people in Japan believed that U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt who had mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth had cheated Japan out of its rightful gains. Tojo's anger at the Treaty of Portsmouth left him with an abiding dislike of Americans. In 1909, he married Katsuko Ito, with whom he had three sons (Hidetake, Teruo, and Toshio) and four daughters (Mitsue, Makie, Sachie, and Kimie).
Upon graduating from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy (ranked 10th of 363 cadets) in March 1905, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the IJA. In 1918–19, he briefly served in Siberia as part of the Japanese expeditionary force sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. He served as a Japanese military attache to Germany between 1919 and 1922. As the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, the Japanese Army was always very strongly influenced by intellectual developments in the German Army, and Tojo was no exception. In the 1920s, the German military favored preparing for the next war by creating a totalitarian Wehrstaat (Defense State), an idea that was taken up by the Japanese military as the "national defense state." In 1922, on his way home to Japan, he took a train ride across the United States, his first and only visit to North America, which left him with the impression that the Americans were a materialistic soft people devoted only to making money and to hedonistic pursuits like sex, partying, and (despite Prohibition) drinking.
Tojo boasted that his only hobby was his work, and he customarily brought home his paperwork to work late into the night and refused to have any part in raising his children, which he viewed both as a distraction from his work and a woman's duty. He had his wife do all the work of taking care of his children. A stern, humorless man, he was known for his brusque manner, his obsession with etiquette, and his coldness. Like almost all Japanese officers at the time, he routinely slapped the faces of the men under his command when giving orders. He said that face-slapping was a "means of training" men who came from families that were not part of the samurai caste and for whom bushido was not second nature.
In 1924, Tojo was greatly offended by the Immigration Control Act, which was passed by the US Congress. It banned all Asian immigration into the United States, with many representatives and senators openly saying the act was necessary because Asians worked harder than whites. He wrote with bitterness at the time that American whites would never accept Asians as equals: "It [the Immigration Control Act] shows how the strong will always put their own interests first. Japan, too, has to be strong to survive in the world."
By 1928, he was bureau chief of the Japanese Army and was shortly thereafter promoted to colonel. He began to take an interest in militarist politics during his command of the 8th Infantry Regiment. Reflecting the imagery often used in Japan to describe people in power, he told his officers that they were to be both a "father" and a "mother" to the men under their command. Tojo often visited the homes of the men under his command, assisted his men with personal problems, and made loans to officers short of money. Like many other Japanese officers, he disliked Western cultural influence in Japan, which was often disparaged as resulting in the ero guro nansensu ("eroticism, grotesquerie and nonsense") movement as he complained about such forms of "Western decadence" like young couples holding hands and kissing in public, which were undermining traditional values necessary to uphold the kokutai.