Tojo: The Last Banzai

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TOJO:

THE LAST BANZAI Courtney Browne Holt, Rinehart and Winston New York

Chicago

San Francisco

Copyright © 1967 by Courtney Browne All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt. Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-12904 F IR S T ED ITIO N

Designer: S. Neil Fujita 8639551 Printed in the United States of America

Penguin Books Limited, for permission to use selections from three poems by the Emperor Yuryaku, Emperor Meiji, and Kaneko Mitsuharu, as they appeared in The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, translated by Geoffrey Bownas and An­ thony Thwaite, copyright © 1964 by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite. Tourist Industry Bureau, Ministry of Transportation, Tokyo, for permission to use an extract from a poem by Basho, as it appeared in their Japan: The Official Guide. Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York, for permission to quote from The Cause of Japan by Shigenori Togo, copyright © 1956 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

Foreword My interest in General Hideki Tojo as a person, as distinct from the latter-day Ghengis Khan figure of western war-time report and caricature, was first aroused when I saw him seated impassively on trial for his life in the court room of the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo in 1947. I began collecting cuttings and material with the object eventually of writing a feature article on the man who in the tense months before Pearl Harbor—virtually a minority of one among doubting cabinet colleagues and senior statesmen—forced through the decision which embarked Japan on the ruinous Pacific war. The article was never written. There seemed always to be something else to find out about Tojo who, until 1938, was practically unknown, even in Japan. This biography, while not claiming to be definitive, does reveal hitherto little known aspects of his personality. It dispels something of the obscurity of his early life and background. And— within the context of the progress of Japan since Perry— it unravels Hideki Tojo’s role in the second great usurpation of power by a military shogunate in Japan. Many books written about the period and persons in­ volved in Japanese events from 1931 to the surrender in 1945 rely heavily on the Proceedings of the International Tribunal, Far East; the Kido Diaries; and the Konoye Memoirs. This is no exception. Also, particularly valuable as sources of information were The vii

FOREWORD

Cause of Japan by Shigenori Togo (Simon & Schuster); Japan and Her Destiny by Mamoru Shigemitsu (Hutchinson, London; E. P. Dutton, New Y ork); Journey to the Missouri by Toshikazu Kase (Yale University Press; published in England by Jonathan Cape under the title Eclipse of the Rising Sun)', Land of the Dragonfly by Lewis Bush (Robert Hale, London) and Tojo and the Coming of the War by Robert J. C. Butow (Princeton University Press). Other sources have been many and are listed sepa­ rately, but grateful personal acknowledgment is made to: Mrs. Katsuko Tojo for her kind permission to use family photographs, to use excerpts from her memoirs and the Prison Diary of Hideki Tojo as published in Bungei Shunju maga­ zine, and for much new information given about General Tojo. Ian Mutsu and Dai Inoshita for valuable assistance in interviewing Mrs. Tojo and other much appreciated help and advice. The late Gunther Stein, veteran Far Eastern journal­ ist, for the loans of books and for generous help in drawing on his wide knowledge of pre-war Japan and the Japanese military. My wife, Sakaye, for patient and indispensable as­ sistance in gathering material and in preparing the manuscript.

Contents. Part One:

Equal with the Heavens

Part Two:

The Gardens of Battle

Part Three:

The Saipan Mask

Part Four:

The Summer Grass Index

3 129 153 181 254

Part One EQUAL WITH THE HEAVENS “The Land of Yamato Is equal with the heavens It is 1 that rule it all” From a poem by the EMPEROR YURYAKU

(418-479)

One On the afternoon of Tuesday, the 11th of September, 1945, Japa­ nese on the streets leading to the outskirts of bomb-gutted Tokyo watched apathetically as a convoy of U.S. Occupation Force jeeps sped past them. The vehicles bumped over ground pocked and potholed, shaking their passengers like dice in a box, and passed through fire-razed wastes which had once been close-packed streets until they came to a house in the Setagaya suburb. It was smaller and more modest than others in the area around it, but more fortunate than many in that it still stood undamaged. As the jeeps pulled up in front of the house, soldiers jumped out while Major Paul Kraus strode swiftly with his detach­ ment of U.S. counterintelligence men to the door. They were not the first to arrive there. A clamorous and impatient gaggle of newsmen and photographers— preponderantly American —were already crowded in the front garden. Their excitement ascended to a higher key as the Major hammered on the door. The noise of the pressmen subsided briefly while they waited and then broke out with greater intensity as a face appeared at an open side window. It was one well familiar to most of those present, almost the personification of the wartime caricature of the Japanese army officer; shaven head, hooded eyes glittering behind thick horn­ rimmed glasses, sparse clipped moustache and parchment fea­ tures. 5

TOj o : the last banzai

The man at the window exchanged a few words with the Major’s interpreter, who told him that he was to be taken to Occupation Headquarters. He nodded and indicated that they should go to the front door. Once again the CIC men went to the entrance with the newsmen pressing after them. Then the sound of a shot cracked out from within the house. The momentary shocked silence that followed was shattered almost immediately as the two leading CIC men, pistols drawn, smashed the lock on the door, burst through into the hallway of the house, and kicked open the door of the small side room. The man who lay back in an armchair, grimacing with pain, his forehead shining with sweat, appeared shrunken and in­ significant beneath the large painting of him, bemedaled and arro­ gant, which dominated the room. He was wearing military breeches and riding boots, and his white shirt, pulled open at the front, was already soaked in the blood from a wound above his heart. In the room, pandemonium reigned as the newsmen pushed in, shoving and gesticulating. In the confusion of sound the words “yellow bastard” and “son of a bitch” rose above all others. More people, officers and GIs, newsmen and photographers swarmed into the room where the air now hung heavy with to­ bacco smoke. One of the newcomers, a GI with a cigar in his mouth, looked down at the man in the chair, the life ebbing away from him but still conscious and blinking at the rapid suc­ cession of exploding flashbulbs. Raising his camera he took a photograph. “Say, bud,” he asked, “Who is the character?” A correspondent, busily making notes, answered offhand­ edly, “Tojo.” . . . The photographer turned to another correspondent. “Say, who is this guy Tojo?” “Tojo. General Tojo, the Japanese dictator, prime minister at the time of Pearl Harbor,” he was told.1

6

Tw o The case against Hideki Tojo, as amplified and presented by the lawyers of the victorious Allied powers in 1946, was that he had committed crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and cer­ tain specified war crimes. But behind the formal charges, which ran to many pages and thousands of words, was a basic accusation not spelled out in the legal terminology. Tojo was the archetype of the militarists who had made themselves masters of government in Japan and led the Japanese into a war initiated with treachery and