Hideki Tojo was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army who served as Japan's prime minister from to He vocally supported Japanese expansion and a pre-emptive attack on the US and European colonial powers. Tojo lost the support of Japan's Emperor Hirohito in as the war turned against Japan and he was forced to resign. After the country's unconditional surrender in September following the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the former prime minister tried unsuccessfully to kill himself as US troops surrounded his home.
Tojo was convicted of war crimes at an international military tribunal in , including waging wars of aggression and ordering inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. He was sentenced to death that November and executed by hanging the following month. Japan's Yasukuni Shrine. Image source, Getty Images. What is Japan's Yasukuni Shrine? Hideki Tojo, prime minister during much of World War II, is a complicated figure, revered by some conservatives as a patriot but loathed by many in the West for prolonging the war, which ended only after the U.
About a month after Aug. Takazawa, the Nihon University professor specializing in war tribunal issues, found the documents during research at the U. The documents, he said, are valuable because they officially detail previously little-known facts about what happened and provide a rough location of where the ashes were scattered.
He plans to continue research into other executions. More than 4, people were convicted of war crimes in other international tribunals, and about of them were executed. Tojo and the six others who were hanged were among 28 Japanese wartime leaders tried for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Twenty-five were convicted, including 16 sentenced to life in prison, with two getting shorter prison terms. Two others died while on trial and one case was dropped.
In one of the newly revealed documents — dated Dec. Army Maj. One of them was Ishii Shiro, who had been head of Japanese bacteriological and chemical warfare research. His notorious Unit in Manchuria had carried out vicious experiments on captive Mongolians, Koreans, Russians and Americans, some of them prisoners of war, some civilians, and some Japanese criminals. The experiments included injecting American prisoners with bubonic plague.
The Americans have since been accused of protecting Shiro and his subordinates in return for getting the results of the experiments. On the whole, MacArthur and the Americans were agreeably surprised by Japanese acceptance of the trials.
Indeed, there were some who were horrified by the atrocities the trials revealed. When they fell, we followed along and spat on them. And now we have virtually forgotten about them.
In the end, Tojo was found guilty on various counts of waging wars of aggression in violation of international law and of ordering inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and others. He and six other defendants were sentenced to death and the rest to prison sentences. Many others were tried in other proceedings and either executed or imprisoned.
MacArthur declined to commute the death sentences, a decision he found very difficult to make, and Tojo and the six others were hanged in the Sugamo Prison.
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