John Wilpers, a young intelligence officer with the Office of Strategic Services, knocked at the door of a residence in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo. Hearing a single gunshot from within, he drew his own sidearm and banged again. He and the rest of his five-man OSS and military police team wondered if they had arrived too late.
Bursting inside, they saw a man lying on the floor of a room that was being used as a home office. There was blood visibly trickling from the bullet wound, so Wilpers immediately went into action, applying pressure to the injury and trying to save the man’s life.
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, had issued orders for the arrest of 40 individuals in Occupied Japan who were considered to be war criminals, and the man who lay dying on the floor was at the head of that list. Wilpers intended to take him alive.
Hideki Tojo, once the most powerful man in Asia short of Emperor Hirohito, had been out of the limelight for the 14 months since he was relieved of his jobs as prime minister, war minister, and chief of the IJA General Staff. Unwanted then, as Japan’s fortunes in World War II turned sour, he was now very much a wanted man.
He had not been hard to find. It was September 8, 1945. The war had been officially over for six days, and the American occupation troops were pouring into Japan. With them, and in some cases ahead of them, had come the journalists. They had found Tojo before Wilpers had got his arrest warrant, and were camped out around his home. He had already started to give interviews, but when he learned that the OSS was coming, he decided that it was time to depart the cruel world.
Under bushido, the samurai code of honor, seppuku, or ritual suicide, is considered an honorable exit for someone who is about to be captured by his enemies. Usually, it is done with a knife and great ceremony, but Tojo was in a hurry. Wilpers and his team, who had come to arrest the symbol of Japanese militarism, had cut it close, but they had arrived in time.
They had also left the front door open. As Wilpers fought to save the man in the pool of blood, the reporters crowded around him to watch. Tojo’s shirt had been ripped back and they could see charcoal markings on his chest. As they later learned, these had been put there by a doctor so that Tojo would know the location of his heart. If that had been his target, he had missed.
At last, they heard him start to speak, and the Americans watched as two Japanese reporters jotted down what he was saying.
“What’d he say?” the American reporters asked in unison.
George Jones of the New York Times wrote down the words as an English-speaking Japanese journalist translated.
“I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die,” Tojo said. “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.”
It had, and Tojo was taken to a US Army medical facility, patched up and transferred to Sugamo Prison, a facility that had been used previously to house political prisoners.
Tojo survived to endure a war crimes trial, but others succeeded in cheating the tribunals. Fumimaro Konoe, the prewar prime minister and champion of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere concept, became involved in forming a postwar Japanese government under American supervision, but later came under suspicion. When he was ordered to turn himself in, he bit a potassium cyanide capsule, and passed from the scene on December 16, 1945.
Tojo was tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, the counterpart of the International Military Tribunal empanelled at the same time in Nuremberg, Germany, to try the accused war criminals of the Third Reich. Tojo was convicted on seven of the more than 50 counts of his indictment, including waging wars of aggression in violation of international law and authorizing inhumane treatment of POWs. He told the court:
It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter … To shade one’s words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.
Hideki Tojo went to the gallows on December 23, 1948.
Meanwhile, the Allies, especially MacArthur, went to great lengths to ensure that Emperor Hirohito would be shielded from war crimes accusations. MacArthur writes in his memoirs:
I had an uneasy feeling he might plead his own cause against indictment as a war criminal. There had been considerable outcry from some of the Allies, notably the Russians and the British, to include him in this category. Indeed, the initial list of those proposed by them was headed by the Emperor’s name. Realizing the tragic consequences that would follow such an unjust action, I had stoutly resisted such efforts. When Washington seemed to be veering toward the British point of view, I had advised that I would need at least one million reinforcements should such action be taken. I believed that if the Emperor were indicted, and perhaps hanged, as a war criminal, military government would have to be instituted throughout all Japan, and guerrilla warfare would probably break out … He played a major role in the spiritual regeneration of Japan, and his loyal co-operation and influence had much to do with the success of the occupation.
What then happened to the others of note in this saga of the IJA? We turn back to November 1941 and to the Imperial General Headquarters conference when Tojo unveiled the assignments for the momentous journey down the Southern Road, and to those present who would take those assignments and prove their service to be, for a moment in history, invincible.
Count Hisaichi Terauchi, of the class of 1909 at the IJA Academy, was the commander of the whole of Southeast Asia as head of the Southern Expeditionary Army in November 1941. Holding the hereditary title of count (hakushaku), he had become a full general in 1935, and was promoted to field marshal (gensui) in June 1943. He suffered his first stroke on May 10, 1944, having learned of the Allied recapture of Burma. Still in feeble condition in September 1945, he missed the Japanese surrender of Singapore, but Lord Mountbatten came to him two months later. In Saigon on November 30, as the two noblemen met face-to-face, Terauchi handed over a wakizashi short sword that had been in the Terauchi family since the fifteenth century. Having been taken into custody, the count suffered a second, more serious stroke and died on June 12, 1946. The sword is still kept at Windsor Castle.
Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, class of 1907 at the IJA Academy, had been given command of the 14th Army for operations in the Philippines in November 1941. He was constantly criticized by the Imperial General Headquarters for the sluggishness of his offensive, and for taking five months to conquer the Philippines. Relieved of command in 1943, Homma was forced into retirement and faded from public view. After the war, he was arrested for his role in the atrocities of the Bataan Death March. Rather than his being tried in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, MacArthur ordered him to be extradited to the Philippines, where the Death March had taken place and where the witnesses were living. Having been convicted by the United States Military Commission, Manila, Homma was executed by a firing squad on April 3, 1946.
Lieutenant General Shojiro Iida, class of 1908 at the IJA Academy, commanded the 15th Army in the overnight conquest of Thailand and the significantly longer Burma operations. He stayed on in Burma as military commander for the colony until 1943, when he was rotated back to Japan for a desk job at the General Defense Command. He briefly commanded Central District Army in Japan before his retirement in 1944. In the summer of 1945, as the war was nearing its climax, he was brought back into uniform and sent to command the 30th Army in Manchukuo. Shortly after he arrived, the Soviets declared war, and swept across the border. Defeated in this action, Iida was captured and spent the next five years as a POW in the Soviet Union. He returned to Japan, where he lived until his death on January 23, 1980 at the age of 91.
General Hitoshi Imamura, class of 1907 at the IJA Academy, was given the assignment to command the 16th Army in Java, where he wound up swimming ashore when his transport ship was hit by friendly fire on the first night. A lieutenant general since 1938, he remained as head of the occupation force in Java until November 9, 1942, when he was given command of the IJA 8th Area Army, based in Rabaul. In this post, he commanded both the 17th and 18th Armies during operations in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Having been promoted to full general in May 1943, he was still in this job on August 15, 1945, when he surrendered to the Australians. He was charged with permitting the murder of POWs by troops under his command, convicted, and sent to Sugamo Prison, where he remained until 1954. Imamura died on October 4, 1980 at the age of 82.
Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, class of 1910 at the IJA Academy, commanded the 18th Division in Malaya and later Burma, seeing more action than most division commanders in the IJA. He took over command of the 15th Army from Shojiro Iida on March 18, 1943 and went on to promote the ultimately disastrous invasion of India via Imphal. Relieved of this command on August 30, 1944, he returned to Japan and forced retirement. In 1945, he was reactivated briefly as the commandant of a military prep school. He was arrested as a war criminal in 1945 and extradited to Singapore to stand trial. He was released from prison in 1948 and returned to Japan, where he died on August 2, 1966 at the age of 77.
And then there was Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, whom John Toland described as “a brilliant maverick spirit [revered] as Japan’s ‘God of Operations,’ the hope of the Orient.” This mercurial character, who was the key technical planner of the Malaya–Singapore campaign, and the operations officer for Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Army, reemerged in Japan in 1948, having spent three years on the run, fearing war crimes charges which never materialized. In his 1952 memoir, Underground Escape, he wrote that he was based in Thailand at war’s end, having just returned from Saigon and a failed attempt to sell a plan to “go underground in China [for up to 20 years] to open up a new way for the future of Asia.”
When the ceasefire was announced, Tsuji did go underground, exchanging his IJA uniform for the yellow robes of a Buddhist monk. He slipped out of Bangkok as the British troops arrived, bound for Vietnam. Changing disguises and dodging firefights between the French and Viet Minh, he stole a car and drove to Hanoi. Here he remained from late November until March 1946, when he caught a ride on an American aircraft flying into China. In Nanking (now Nanjing) and elsewhere, he was employed by a series of Nationalist Chinese government agencies translating wartime Japanese intelligence documents related to the Soviet military and the Chinese Communists, about which he claimed to have become an expert.
Returning to Japan in May 1948, Tsuji writes that he kissed the ground, observing that “though the country was defeated, the hills and the streams were still left, together with the Emperor.” He was elected to the Japanese Diet in 1952 and wrote several books, including his highly regarded memoir of the Malaya–Singapore campaign, Singapore: The Japanese Version.
Arthur Swinson writes, in his 1968 book Four Samurai:
He still lived mysteriously, travelling on secret missions, and in April 1961, he went to Vietnam. Since this date he has not reappeared but information reaching the author from Japan indicates that he is back in uniform and serving as an Operations Staff officer under Vo Nguyen Giap. When one considers the ruthlessness and brilliance of the North Vietnamese operations, the hand of Masanobu Tsuji can be seen clearly.
Indeed, he was never seen again, and was declared dead in 1968. There is no evidence that he was ever a consultant to the North Vietnamese, although, with Tsuji’s record, it is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Finally, we turn to General Tomoyuki Yamashita, class of 1910 at the IJA Academy, the Tiger of Malaya, who walked out of the jungle on September 2, 1945 and surrendered the 14th Area Army. He was taken to New Bilibid Prison in Manila and charged in connection with atrocities against civilians, especially in the Manila Massacre of February 1945 in which Sanji Iwabuchi’s naval troops killed or injured countless civilians.
As with Homma, Yamashita was not tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, but by the United States Military Commission, Manila, near where his alleged war crimes were committed. He was the first Japanese general to be tried, with his trial beginning on October 29, 1945. In later years, there has been a great deal of criticism of this trial, particularly of the court’s rules of evidence. There were days of heart-rending testimony from victims of the atrocities, many of whom still showed the scars of mutilation. However, the prosecution was unable to present conclusive evidence showing that Yamashita ordered or knew about the massacre at the time it was happening.
Colonel Harry Clarke, heading Yamashita’s US Army defense team, observed in exasperation that Yamashita “is not charged with having done something or having failed to do something, but solely with having been something … American jurisprudence recognizes no such principle so far as its own military personnel are concerned … one man is not held to answer for the crime of another.”
When he took the stand, Yamashita told the court that he had not ordered the Manila Massacre, but rather had ordered the evacuation of Manila by Japanese troops. Referring to the massacre and to the accusations of cruelty to captured civilians in late 1944, Yamashita said:
The matters which are referred to in the charges, I have known for the first time from the testimony of the witnesses before this court. And if such acts were committed by my subordinates, they are in complete disagreement with my own ideas. And if such did occur, I feel that they occurred at such a time and place that I could not have known of it beforehand. I have never ordered such things, and I have never condoned such actions, nor have I ever recognized such actions, and if I had known of them in advance, I would have taken every possible means to have caused them to stop. And if I had found out about them afterwards, I would have punished them to the fullest extent of military law.
Yamashita was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging on December 7, 1945. This was a cruel irony for someone who had in fact disciplined subordinates for similar actions in Malaya. His attorneys appealed to the United States Supreme Court, who refused to hear the case.
“My death does not matter,” Tomoyuki Yamashita told John Deane Potter in Manila in their last conversation before Yamashita went to the gallows on February 23, 1946. “I know nothing except being a soldier and now I am no longer young. My usefulness to my country is over. I am too old to fight another war, so if the Americans wish to kill me, they will not be harming my country.”
When Potter rose to leave him for the last time, Yamashita bowed politely and walked with him to the door. Several other generals were sitting in the corridor, playing a game with hundreds of counters which looked to Potter “like checkers gone crazy.”
“That is a typical game of ours, called Go,” the erstwhile Tiger of Malaya replied calmly when Potter asked about the game. “It is very Japanese indeed. The idea of so many counters is so you can take as much territory as you can from your opponent in the shortest time.”
With this, the man born amid the ancient cedars of Shikoku went to meet his fate, and ultimately his executioner.