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Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Peter Mok
So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Peter Mok
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Dr. Peter Mok
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Peter Mok about his book titled the Rise and Fall of Japan's Most controversial World War II general, which, I mean, the book tells us what we're going to be talking about. And there is a lot to get into here. Right. On the one hand, it's in many ways it is a biography of, as the title suggests, Tojo. But no one comes out of a vacuum. Right. So what is the context in which he's operating in. Right. We're talking about the rise of sort of imperial, militaristic Japan that he's very much embedded in. Well, before we get to World War II itself. And of course, that's also about politics. So there's a military history element, but very much also all sorts of imperial and cabinet and electoral politics running around here as well. So through the lens of kind of this one person, really a whole world sort of opens up. So, Peter, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Tell us about it.
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Dr. Peter Mok
Thanks very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book? How have you approached this project?
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Dr. Peter Mok
Certainly. So I teach Asian history at Western Sydney University in Australia. I wrote the book initially. Initially, the book was not, I guess you could say, my idea as such. So Harvard contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in writing a biography of Tojo. And my immediate response to that was one of extreme hesitation, shall I say? And that owed, I think, to two or there were two driving forces behind that hesitation. So on the one hand, I had been trained as a naval historian, and of course, as you've just noted, Tojo belonged very much to the Imperial Japanese Army. And so I found myself locked in this. This concern over whether a naval historian could in fact, research and write a military figure. In other words, I was kind of concerned about this naval military history divide, and that might strike listeners as a little niche, shall we say. And yet, I think in a Japanese context, that seems particularly pertinent. The two services, so long as they remained in existence, did not barely ever saw eye to eye on anything. And that has continued into the post World War II period. So that, for example, official histories, for example, have been written. There have been a series of volumes written for. For the Japanese military, and there have been a series of volumes written for the Japanese Navy. And not once have they ever actually got together to write, excuse me, an overarching or take an overarching approach. And that also extends into scholarship as well. So that very rarely, again, in a Japanese context would a naval historian move into military history space and vice versa. So there's the first, say, driving force behind that hesitation to write a biography of Torjo. The second one was perhaps a little. A little simpler almost in a way. My grad level supervisor is on record as stating that Tojo had, and I quote, an unappealing personality. And at least when my advisor was writing back in the late 1980s, this would have been. He saw that unappealing personality as enough to in many ways, kind of ward any potential or many potential biographers and or historians off from Torjo. So put those two things together and it really left me hesitant to take up the task of writing this biography. Ultimately I. Well, obviously I changed my mind or I don't know if I changed my mind. I set aside those hesitations and set myself to writing the book. Interestingly, initially I found him every bit as difficult as I had expected. I think I got myself, I was reading for the most part books written not necessarily by professional historians, but rather by those who have sought to revive and resuscitate Tojo's image in Japanese public memory. And these, if I'm to be perfectly frank, I found a little bit tiresome. And so I found myself grinding through a lot of these books early in the research process. And so that, to be perfectly honest, that had me wondering whether I'd made a good choice or not. I think the deeper I got into the topic, once I moved away from those, I'm not sure what we call them, kind of pseudo histories almost in a way, but once I moved away from them, I think and started diving much deeper into military histories and so on, then I think I started realizing that this man was indeed a subject for that would really create. I could really do something quite interesting with him and hopefully write a biography that, as you mentioned in your introductory remarks, that hopefully is not just biography, but equally it's history at the same time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really interesting start to the conversation. It makes me even more intrigued that you've written this book, given that starting point. Point. And I think it is now a good point then to dive into a bit of kind of the key context that he comes up through. Obviously no one starts off, comes to life fully formed as a 40 year old adult, for instance. So what do we need to understand about kind of his background, his family, his early years, both sort of immediate family, but also kind of the broader picture in which he is a young person before he's famous, certainly.
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Dr. Peter Mok
So he was, well, effectively the third born son in his family. The first two had died in infancy, which I guess made him for all intents and purposes say the firstborn. He was born into a military family. His father was an officer, an early generation officer of the Imperial Japanese Army. So right there I think is the first. This gives us some indication of his background and in fact it actually leads in some really interesting ways, I would suggest. So on the one hand we might consider that for Tojo himself, a military career was perhaps given his, his father's career, a military career quite simply made sense to him. And that would be entirely true so far as it goes. I think we can add some layers or at least one layer to this which I think again, just adds to the intrigue and makes him a much more interesting. It makes him become a bit more three dimensional, shall we say, rather than a two dimensional figure. And this would be the fact that his father, despite being one of the early generation or one of the, how shall I put this, one of the finest staff officers in the Japanese, in that early generation of Japanese army officers, he ultimately was pushed out of the army on simply because the army was beholden to what the Japanese call hambatsu personnel practices, which is to say that there was favoritism shown towards any officers coming from one or two, one in particular areas of Japan. His father came from a decidedly different area of Japan and ultimately, at least partly for those purposes, found himself very much on the outer and ultimately was chased out of the army. And this, I think this left a very, very, very real and lasting legacy with Tojo himself because ultimately through the entirety of his career, he carried with him within him. He carried the most intensely burning hatred for those personnel practices. Equally, he held a hatred for any officer hailing from that domain which had dominated these army, the army's personnel practices through the first couple of decades of its existence. So right there I think we have the. Again we can conclude on the basis of his father's career that again, for Torjo himself, joining the army was an entirely natural course. But there was a whole lot more to it than just that. Right from basically the day he began his military education, Tojo effectively entered the service with a very, very large chip on his shoulder. And that chip was directly or was aimed almost directly at the Army's leadership and its highest assurance.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is a really fascinating family background. Right. It's not just, oh, do what your dad did, it's like, hang on a second, there's a very personal example to live up to. Right. His dad, as you talk about in the book, wasn't just any officer, but like a really notable one. But then there's all these politics sort of there from day one. So already a whole bunch of things in his very formative years. And then there's also kind of what he's being taught. As you mentioned, the military education is key too. So what sorts of things was he learning in that environment? And also crucially, what sorts of things were not taught to young officers of his cohort?
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Dr. Peter Mok
Certainly, certainly. So I guess we might note just set out some building blocks here. So Tojo entered the Army's educational apparatus in his teens. He entered the army preparatory school system. He went on to the military academy and then ultimately he finished up his education at the War College. And I might just note, before talking about what he actually learned, I might just note that that effectively three step educational process, so preparatory schools, military academy, and then ultimately the War College, any officer aspiring to general rank within the NA, within the army had necessary, almost necessarily had to complete all three of those educational steps. Anything less so, for example, had any officer whose education ended at the Military Academy, that had a very real impact on, or it meant that he could only advance so far up the ranks within the Army. So with that in mind, to think briefly and maybe we might just focus on the education he received at the War College. This is in the mid-1910s, including so effectively halfway through his time at the War College, World War I broke out in Europe. And so I think this gives us, it gives us an interesting context in which to consider the education he was receiving at the War College. Because the War College emphasized to a very, very great degree the necessity of winning a war via the offensive. This was embedded so deeply into Japanese military doctrine that officers, Certainly in the mid-1910s, it was very, very difficult for an officer to concede or for a Japanese military officer to conceive of a war in which, or at least a victorious war that did not involve taking the offensive and effectively forcing the enemy into what officers called a decisive battle. And in said decisive, well, as the name suggests, deciding the war there and then, and so creating those, or entering into a decisive battle necessarily required going on the offensive and again compelling the enemy to fight said decisive battle. Of course, what was happening over on the European continent was a very, very different kind of warfare. And rather than get detained by all of the reasons why this might have been the case, we might simply note that the trench warfare that so characterized the Western front in Europe, it was, I mean, the fact that you've got forces in trenches, this, this kind of underlines the point, the fact that this was defensive warfare. So maybe what we might note is that warfare was changing or had changed drastically. And so I guess the, the, the question then is why did the army, why did it persist in teaching the offensive and teaching officers how to essentially to take the offensive? Why did it do this even as warfare was taking a, had taken a drastic turn over in Europe? And I think there are a few things we might note. One is that it was all well and good to see and note that World War I was playing out quite differently in Europe to certainly what was being taught in the War College classroom. But I think it's A bridge too far perhaps, to suggest that the army should necessarily have realized on the spot that warfare itself had completely changed. In other words, there's a. There were at least those. There were questions, and I would suggest healthy questions as to whether warfare had in fact changed or whether what was happening over in Europe was in some way or form an anomaly. In any event, I think we can say that at least in this sense, the training that office, or, excuse me, the education that officers were receiving at the War College again in the mid-1910s, in some ways it really wasn't preparing them for what certainly what warfare was becoming. But we might pause there and just note because the officers did encounter more than. Oh, actually, sorry, before I go there, before I go there, I might also note one other point. The education was designed in particular to create or to make of Japanese army office to make them very, very good staff officers. In essence, the idea was that they would be trained to plan operations to the minutest possible detail and that. That. That they would. Anytime that a conflict arose, that they would be perfectly prepared for said conflict by means of their operational planning. And again, that this would. This was not operational planning on a. In a kind of a broad brushstroke sense. It was paying the minutest attention to all of the minutiae, and I'm kind of repeating myself there, but it's. I think it's important to note that the focus was very, very much on detail. And so these officers were well able to plan operations on said basis. The problem, if we think of these two emphases and perhaps think of maybe some of the. The blind spots in this. In these educational emphases, I think we can see there are maybe two blind spots. So on the one hand, sticking with this operational planning for a second, it meant that officers were exceptionally well trained, again, at effectively envisioning and understanding battle on a particular battlefield, but ultimately planning an overall war that for that they received no training. The idea was certainly in the War College at least, the idea was that this attention to detail that as an officer became more and more responsible for maybe not just a battlefield, but instead, perhaps for an entire theater of war or beyond a theater, once he became responsible for overseeing a war in its entirety, that he would be able to apply these principles that had been forged on the minute scale, and that these would simply translate across into a much, much bigger theater, as it were. And that perhaps Otojo himself acknowledged at one point, at least, that this was something of a blind spot in his education. I think the other point we might note is that his father had written a book in the early 1910s which in many ways might be considered a kind of a. And I hesitate to put it quite so simply, but it certainly echoed Clausewitz's On War. And so, and this was required reading at the War College. And of course, for Tojo himself, this became, I suggest in the book that it became almost for him something like a sacred text. This was something that his father, who had died in the meantime, had more or less, at least as he saw it, had left behind. In particular, he saw it as being left for him. And so he pored over this relentlessly. And this is quite interesting because this book that his father wrote shifted that focus beyond the minutiae and among other things, as does Clausewitz in his On War, Torjo's father was, for example, questioning the very nature of war itself. And it was almost again, as is the case with Clausewitzes On War, in some ways it became almost a work of philosophy. But perhaps most importantly for Torjo, what it also opened his eyes to was this idea that war was not a matter simply for an army, that war ultimately would test a nation's resources in their absolute entirety. In other words, war and conflict was not, or at its most, in its most extreme form, would not be limited to soldiers and limited in time, limited in scope, limited in goals. But he was foreseeing at least the possibility that warfare, that all of those limits and all of those restraints would be removed and that war would become total. And so in the end, Tojo received an education which on the one hand might seem somewhat almost in its way, that was not necessarily keeping up with the times, as it were. And yet, and yet, in the course of that education, officers did receive and were required to read books which really pushed the boundaries of their thinking about warfare and pushed it in ways that quite neatly captured this drastic change in warfare that was taking place in World
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
War I. Yeah, the timing of this is really interesting. So thank you for helping us understand the kind of many currents going together in his education. Of course, then there's the question of implementing this. So obviously we're not going to be able to cover every aspect of his career. But if we go, for example, to what he did in Manchuria, how might we see some of these ideas being implemented there? What were the sort of short and long term impacts of what he did over there?
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Dr. Peter Mok
That's a great question and not necessarily the easiest one to answer. I think maybe we should note that the Japanese army had in fact created a Garrison force which remained on a permanent basis in Manchuria. It was known as the Kwantung army. And the Kwantung army had its own staff. It in essence and in very, very many ways operated with a very high degree of independence from Tokyo and in many offices, when posted to the Quantum army, pushed those that independence to its and possibly even beyond its outermost limits. Certainly the Quantum army, in many ways it really was genuinely was the backbone of Japan's Manchurian experiment. And so this meant that certainly the vast majority of officers attached to the Kuantung army regarded or believed that they ought to exercise a voice in practically all aspects of Manchurian affairs. So not just military affairs, but certainly political affairs, certainly say diplomatic affairs, economic, industrial, commercial, almost. They believed that they had a say and should exercise a very powerful voice across all of these sectors. And this ties back to what I was saying before, because in their OP, as they saw it, this, by operating in this way, by exercising a very powerful voice not just in military affairs, but across everything, it essentially meant that they would be best able to shape and form this fledgling state. We might correctly consider it a puppet state. But they felt that they were creating a state that was best prepared for this form of total warfare that they foresaw at some point on the horizon. And Tojo very much agreed with those basic premises. And so when he was posted to the Kwantung army in the mid-1930s, he certainly did not question these baseline assumptions that as a high ranking officer in the Kwantung army, that his voice in Manchurian affairs should necessarily be, at the very least we'd say that it should be powerful. So that's one point we might note. I think we might also note that it created certainly in particularly in Kwantong army officers, a sense that almost they knew best. And so we see this with tojo himself. In June 1937 there was a. The. The Soviets sparked a border clash along the Soviet Manchurian border and Tojo responded with a preponderance of force as the the border clash escalated and veered dangerously close to becoming full scale warfare. Tojo directly or disobeyed orders from the central military authorities in Tokyo and continued essentially to escalate the situation rather than as they were asking him to do or ordering him to do, rather than de escalating the situation. So here again we see that this idea that these officers in the field or the Quantum army officers perhaps knew best. Equally we see this independent streak, this sense that there was no need necessarily to follow orders from Tokyo.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's really interesting to think about because he then becomes, I mean, in many ways the center of army things in Tokyo, right? He becomes Army Minister. Did he want to be Army Minister? How did that happen?
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Dr. Peter Mok
We can answer that question in two ways. So the most immediate way. So when he was first approached about the army Minister's post, his response is really interesting. He said that he had effectively no interest in a job that looked like a barmaid's job. And by this, essentially, he meant that a barmaid's task was to keep all of her customers happy, effectively refilling their drinks, et cetera. And he firmly rebuffed this initial approach about the ministerial position because, as he put it, he was trained to command armies and not to keep all comers happy. So we might conclude on that basis that he actually was not interested in the army minister's position. But frankly, there he was giving voice. Essentially, he was establishing his apolitical credentials. So an army minister, as the title suggests, belonged very much on the cabinet. And so by saying this effectively, Tojo was doing as any good soldier should do, was basically again establishing his apolitical credentials and saying that actually he has no interest in politics. Having established those credentials, he then did accept the army Minister's post. And I would suggest that he very much craved this post. This happened in July 1940, and his entire career up until that point. So there was that period in the mid-1930s with the Kwantung army, but prior to that, and certainly after that, his entire career, he had. He'd been. He'd forged his career, not so much, for example, commanding armies, but instead he had been in the army's administrative and or operational nerve center in Tokyo. And so he had effectively, as an officer, had grown from being a junior officer now to very much a senior officer. And this, his entire career had been effectively forged in this. In the. The political maelstrom, almost as it were, of. In Tokyo. And so he very much craved the minister's position. And I might just add as a. A further note to this, perhaps one. One driving force behind all of this, at least so far as he was concerned, was the thought that if. If the. As minister, that he would be in a position to decide the course that the army took. And in this way, at Least in the back of his mind, there are these old burning grievances and hatreds, including most particularly the one I mentioned before. What was for him the never ending hatred of those officers and those personnel practices that had driven his father from the army.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, okay, so very interesting there in terms of what he's saying versus what actually he might be wanting. Does the reality of having the job actually live up to that though? Like, how does he do balancing all these competing factional demands?
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Dr. Peter Mok
So, yes, that's such a great question. There's a really, really interesting episode. The moment in his first audience with his emperor, as his first audience as army minister with the Emperor gives rise to this, I think, an incredibly interesting episode whereby the Emperor dresses Torjo down in the harshest tones possible and essentially tells him that the army has been effectively out of control. I don't know that he necessarily puts a time period on this, but he, he, he points to essentially a whole, a whole almost like a shopping list of grievances with the army for its, its willingness to dispense with orderly policy making processes. Its, its willingness to effectively impose its own ideas as to what Japan ought to do to impose these ideas on the rest of the Japanese government. And he, the Emperor effectively demanded that Tojo rein in all of these tendencies. So there's yet another layer to, for Tojo to contend with as he takes up his minister's role. And I'd simply note that in contrast to very many Japanese officers, or no, let me try again, all Japanese officers professed the fiercest law, loyalty to the Emperor. Very, very many Japanese army officers, their actions did not necessarily align with their words. This was not the case with Tojo. He did everything within his power to meet his Emperor's wishes. And here we have a perfect instance. And it actually gives rise to a fascinating dynamic that takes place in these early days as minister, because on the one hand, as minister, Tojo effectively delivered on a couple of the army's pet projects. And here we might note, for example, for years until this point, the army had been clamoring for an alliance, a military alliance with Nazi Germany. Torjo and the cabinet on which he served delivered that the army had also been clamoring, at least since, say, spring of 1940. The army had been clamoring for a military advance into the defenseless colonial regions of Southeast Asia. And Tojo and the cabinet on which he served delivered on precisely that. So what we might say, just keeping those two points in mind, we might consider that essentially Tojo is giving the army what it wanted. He's placating the army in a sense by giving it what it wanted. But at the same time, Tojo is working furiously within the army to reimpose discipline and order. And so, for example, when army forces, or in the course of the military advance into French Indochina, there were a number of officers disobeyed orders and effectively sparked what remained small scale conflicts with French forces in Indochina. And Tojo was, his reaction was one of extreme anger. And ultimately he removed officers from the active service list. He removed officers from those in Tokyo who had connived with officers on the ground to effectively set up these clashes with the French. He removed those officers from Tokyo. He made it very, very clear to all concerned within the army that when he spoke, they listened. And this created in accord with the Emperor's wishes, this served to reimpose discipline in an army that had long since forsaken such discipline. And that I think is really interesting. But I think we can add a further layer to this because I would also suggest that army officers, until this point, army officers willingness to pursue what they themselves thought was the best possible course of action. It essentially meant that different officers were pursuing different pet projects and kind of shooting off in all manner of directions with all manner of conversations with. If we focus in on Tokyo for a minute, so officers in the Army Ministry, you would have, for example, there would be a couple of officers in conversations with, say some diplomats from the Foreign Ministry, you'd have a couple of other officers in conversation with perhaps officers from the Navy Ministry, etc. And they're all pushing and pulling in all manner of different directions. The moment that Tojo becomes Minister, all of that stops. And the only conversations that he sanctioned outside of the Army Ministry. Let me try that again. Conversations beyond the Army Ministry really were only taking place with his sanctions. So what this did was it created a situation in which an army that again, hitherto had been pushing and pulling in all manner of different directions. But now everything is. This immense institutional strength of the army is effectively all being channeled through Tojo himself so that all the officers are to, to a greater or lesser extent obeying his orders. And thereby the, the personal power that he gains through this is, is. Well, essentially he, he personalizes and in some ways kind of symbolizes that immense institutional strength of the Imperial Japanese Army.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this really sounds like it's then pretty expected or it's certainly not a big surprise that he goes from being Army Minister to, to being Prime Minister. But is that right? Was this also a job that he wanted. Even if maybe he had to pretend he was apolitical.
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Dr. Peter Mok
I don't think that he personally wanted the Prime Minister's role. So just to put a quick timeline on this, he, he was appointed or initially appointed army minister in July 1940. He was appointed Prime Minister and he retained the Army Minister's post in October 1941. And I'm not at all convinced that he, he certainly did not in any way or form actively pursue the Prime Minister's role. In fact, what he had played the key role in pulling down the cabinets on which he had the Cabinet on which he had served as Army Minister. So the Prime Minister through that time, so from July 1940 through to October 41, the Prime Minister was the very aristocratic Konoye Fumimaro. And Tojo had played the key role in pulling, in tearing down Konoye's cabinet. The disagreement between those two men. I'm just trying to think how I can say this in a reasonably short space of time. It boiled down to so the Cabinet along with the Supreme Command, so along with the army and Navy general Staffs had in early September met in the presence of the Emperor at a so called Imperial Conference and had agreed to effectively put a impose a deadline for war with the United States. So what they were essentially acknowledging was that Japan and the United States had been engaged in diplomatic negotiations basically for the better part of 1941 and that those negotiations were going nowhere. And in this decision reached in September, early September, the idea was that were or had diplomacy not achieved any kind of breakthrough by the last 10 days of October, then Japan would march to war. Konoye. Subsequent to that decision, Prime Minister Konoya started belatedly fretting about Japan's chances of victory if it went to war against the United States in the Pacific. And so he began effectively trying to reverse this decision to impose a deadline he ran headlong into to. And here we have, there are some really interesting narratives playing out. So on the one hand, Konoye argued that Tojo was a warmonger and therefore he pulled down the Konoye Cabinet. Tojo for his part argued that he didn't maybe respond directly to that charge. Instead he suggested or argued that decisions reached at Imperial conferences were sacrosanct. So in other words, once the Emperor himself had signed off on a decision, then that decision was binding and that a Prime Minister simply could not on some kind of whim, suddenly turn around and decide that he wanted to change things. So that was Tojo's first argument. His second argument was that even if the Prime Minister were to try somehow to throw out an Imperial conference decision, and even if the Prime Minister could convince his members of Cabinet to follow him in these actions, there was nothing compelling the army and Navy Chiefs of Staff to agree. And what Tojo was pointing to here was a constitutional provision for the, effectively, what was the mutual independence of the Cabinet and the army and Navy general staffs. So because, long story short, because the General Staffs were independent of the Cabinet, Tojo's argument was, well, the Prime Minister can say what he wants, but there's actually nothing compelling, again, the army and Navy Chiefs of Staff to accept what he's saying. And so he was essentially pointing to a situation in which the Japanese government, the Japanese decision making process, would quite simply crumble if Tojo, excuse me, if Prime Minister Konoye pressed ahead and somehow tried to reverse that Imperial conference decision, so on, because these two men, ultimately, they just refused. There was no concessions from either of them and the Cabinet simply could not agree. It could not, it could no longer function. So the Konoye Cabinet falls, at which point Tojo was called to an audience with the Emperor. And certainly there were whispers within the army and without that, Torjo may well be appointed Prime Minister, but he himself didn't pay a lot of attention to those whispers. He, as he left for that audience with the Emperor, he was quietly convinced that he was going to, that the Emperor was going to again dress him down effectively for tearing down the Conway Cabinet. And interestingly, when he arrived at the audience, usually ministers would be invited to sit. When he arrived the room, there were no chairs in the room. And so he was told, well, you're just going to have to wait and stand there. And so this kind of reinforced for him this. He, when the Emperor entered the room, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that he was quite literally trembling, thinking that he was again about to cop or about to be dressed down by his Emperor for his actions. The Emperor, however, went in the opposite direction and of course appointed him Prime Minister. And here, of course, certainly outside of Japan at the time, there was this idea that, oh, the Emperor's appointed or there's an army general who is now prime minister. Oh, Japan's marching to war. Certainly within the Japanese army itself, there was hope that, and the thought that, oh, now that Tojo is Prime Minister, that means we will be marching to war. But that wasn't necessarily the case either. So the Emperor made two requests of Tojo first he asked him to reduce that earlier decision to impose a deadline for war. He asked him to basically. Well, he delivered what is known as the clean slate message. So he said you are to open with a clean slate, in other words, discard that decision to impose a deadline for war. But at the same time the Emperor also insisted that Tojo follow due decision making process. So in his own way there with that second request, we could take that in any number of directions. But maybe for now I'll simply note that in its own way, the Emperor by requesting that was in fact endorsing Tojo's actions in those later days of the Konoye Cabinet when he squared off against Konoye.
- [47:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how much all of the politics and military decisions are intermixed with also kind of the personal politics of it too. So now Tojo is Prime Minister. Obviously we're talking, as you said, sort of early or late 1941. There's a lot happening in terms of being Prime Minister and coming from an army background at that point. So can you give us a sense of sort of how he's approaching the sort of various problems on the board and kind of how he deals with the fact that in many ways it sort of feels like no matter what he tries, it doesn't seem to be working. Is that, I mean, is it as simple as that? Kind of he tried to win, that didn't happen, therefore he fell from power or what else do we need to understand?
- [48:01]
Dr. Peter Mok
So as Prime Minister. Well, his first task as Prime Minister was to pay very close attention to all of the foundations of decisions that had been made before he became Prime Minister. In other words, he was looking at the very basis of Japanese policy. And it wasn't just him, it was his cabinet in its entirety. It also involved the army and Navy chiefs of Staff. Ultimately, he. Well, long story short, he managed to basically, basically extend the existing deadline for war. So that whereas the original decision had to had been to set that deadline for the last 10 days of October, now it became early December and ultimately that, well, Pearl harbor and the attack on Malaya occur December 8, Japan time. So ultimately that this new deadline stuck. I guess it's difficult to try and characterize everything that he was doing as prime minister. So he remained as prime minister from October 41 through until July 1944. And in that time, I think as many listeners will know, certainly in the early months after the attacks on Pearl harbor and Malaya, Japanese forces enjoyed incredible successes through Asia and the Pacific. And Tojo was certainly a very, very popular figure at this point. And in fact, I think it's not an oversimplification to say that he rigged or tried to rig an election so as to capitalize on these successes and that the popularity that this earned or domestic popularity that it earned him. But of course, Japan's. Again, as listeners will know, Japan's war fortunes turned. And Tojo found himself effectively through, let's say from the, the back half of 1942 through 1943 and then into 1944 war, he spent a lot of time arguing with the army and Navy chiefs and staff. Essentially there were some very, very deep divisions over how Japan might best fight and somehow get out of this war. In essence, the army or the General Staffs generally argued for, for example, greatest deal allocations. So the Navy needed more ships, the army needed more guns, tanks, et cetera. And so they were their appetite, particularly for steel. But for resources in general, that appetite was almost bottomless. And Tojo would, did his level best to talk them down from their demands because in his conception of things, well, ultimately the more resources which went, which were funneled into the armed services then meant that industry, that in a wider sense, industry and so on would miss out on these resources and the Japanese wartime economy would just grind to a halt. So a very large part of his time as Prime Minister during the war was spent in these just interminable arguments with the General Staffs. He also spent quite a lot of time trying to determine, again, I, I think I've already used the phrase, so I'll say it again, but he spent quite a deal of time and quite a deal of energy trying to determine how Japan was going to get out of this war. And maybe on this note, rather than go into details, I might simply note that that herein was one of Tojo's greatest faults, I think, because really it pays before a nation goes to war. It pays to have an exit strategy firmly in mind before one goes to war. Now, to be fair, they did go to war with an exit strategy, but it just proved patently impossible. And so over the ensuing years, so again, through, say particularly through 1943 and 44, Torjo basically flipped or would settle on an exit strategy and then he would jump to another one when that proved not feasible, and then he would jump to another one and then to another. It was kind of this never ending game of gee, how are we going to get out of this one. Noting that basically following on from battlefield defeats somewhere in the Pacific, he beat. Yeah, okay, so my Newly formed exit strategy is no longer possible. What can we come up with next? It took on a decidedly effectively, he became reactive to events on the battlefields in the Pacific and really wasn't able to define a way out of that war.
- [53:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, that's a massive problem for the entire country. Right. It makes sense that even in the context of wartime, who the Prime Minister is is something that obviously the cabinet cares about, the Emperor cares about, but also the general public cares about too. So that part seems sort of not hugely surprising to me. What I think is, however, worth a moment of discussion is about the interest the public had in him after he was Prime Minister and the persistent interest in him since. I mean, you mentioned at the beginning that your research project involved at the start reading a whole bunch of kind of not professional historian books about him. Not every historical figure gets that kind of interest. So can we talk a little bit about why you think he's been such a subject of public interest both immediately after no longer being prime minister, but also in the longer term?
- [54:14]
Dr. Peter Mok
Certainly, certainly. So, so he, what's his time atop the nation's decision making processes came to an end in July 1944. At that moment, he was deeply, deeply unpopular in Japan. And I think that can be reasonably readily explained. So it's not uncommon to tie this deep unpopularity back to. He released a military field Manual in January 1941. He did this in his capacity as army minister. And so in Japanese it's called the Senjinkun. And this in large part was actually designed to, again, to return to an earlier point, to reinstill discipline, in this case in the troops, particularly those in China who. Yeah, maybe we'll just leave that there. There was, however, in Sanjinkun a single line which effectively forbade soldiers from suffering the disgrace of becoming a prisoner. And so in essence, it didn't quite say it in so many words, but it said that it was better to fight to the death than. Than to be taken pow, and excuse me, during the course of the war in the Pacific. And again, listeners will be well aware of any number of instances in forlorn battles on islands in the Pacific. It began in the Aleutians, where ultimately, however, many defenders happened to be on an island and their position was hopeless. And ultimately the vast majority, over 99% of those defenders, did fight to the death rather than be taken prisoner. So when. So if we just keep that in mind as kind of background or a background thought, the moment that Torjo, that his time atop the decision making process is ended. There were very, very many in Japan who wondered why Tojo himself, or who believed that Tojo himself should commit suicide, at least partly to atone for the loss and the incredible losses that he had caused. Not so much. And in this sense, the focus perhaps was not on, shall we say, the loss of Japan's strategic position and so on and so forth. It was. The focus was very much on all of those lives that had been squandered out there in the Pacific. And so there was a. There were many in Japan arguing that he himself should commit ritual suicide. And of course, the fact that he did not, I would only suggest embittered people. Further, there's some wonderful anecdotes that arose in the course of my research. So, for example, his family was unable to. And of course, we're talking in a situation in wartime Japan where rationing became ever increasingly tighter, so his family would have to travel significant distances simply to buy groceries, et cetera, because if they went anywhere closer to home where they. Where their faces were recognizable, they were turned out of the store and were told that there was nothing to sell to Tojo's family. So again, a deeply, deeply unpopular figure. And that only became even more the case in the early aftermath of Japanese surrender. And of course, surrender followed very closely by foreign military occupation, primarily a US military occupation. And the moment that American military police arrived at Tojo's door, and I think many will know this story, Tojo set about committing suicide. He did so with a pistol and shot himself effectively through the heart. Of course, he survived this suicide attempt. And again, this just served to reinforce and deepen the contempt that most Japanese felt for him. And they, again, some wonderful stories emerged. There was, of course, he was not the only army officer to at least attempt suicide in these early days and weeks after surrender. And many in Japan compared him most unfavorably in particular to one of his contemporaries, General Sugiyama Hajime, who succeeded in his own suicide attempt. But not only that, but in fact Mrs. Sugiyama had followed him and had also herself committed suicide. And so there was again, the proverbial word on the street was basically holding Tojo to account and saying, Damn he, Mrs. Sugiyama could do it, but he could not. And this of course, led to people casting aspersions on his. His supposed status as an Army General, etc. Etc. And of course, people were again, of course, remembering that earlier injunction against being taken prisoner. And so they're saying, wow, again, this guy has sent so many young men to their deaths. And Here it's his time. And yet he was unable to avoid being taken prisoner. So again, this just deepened the contempt in which the Japanese held him. He was subsequently, again, in a tale which I'm sure everybody will be familiar, he was tried for war crimes, was ultimately found guilty. But I think it's kind of interesting because in those, it was a very long trial, it lasted for two and a half plus years and frankly, the Japanese people lost quite a lot of interest. I mean, it just dragged on so long that it lost a lot of steam along the way. There was one moment when the Japanese people's interest peaked or spiked and it was in fact when Tojo took the stand, he, on defense for his life as a war criminal. He made an absolute fool of the prosecutor. And for a brief moment there, for a brief moment his popularity surged because suddenly this, I think maybe it might be understood in this context, this is maybe quite possibly the only context in which Japan since, or any Japanese since surrender, had openly and actively stood up against the Americans. And so there's this brief moment of where his popularity spikes, but he's subsequently hanged. And once again that, that deep contempt, it was just impossible to displace. And so there are again any number of instances I could provide. But for example, the government in the 1950s proposed to raise the pensions which the widows, well, Tojo's widow and other class A war criminals widows were receiving. And this met with outcry in Japan. And the outcry basically followed these lines. The idea was that these class A war criminals, Tojo included, these are the ones responsible for the misery in which Japan as a whole finds itself, they certainly or their widows do not deserve these, these higher pensions. And that basic storyline, that basic idea that these war criminals had led the rest of Japan into a war that, that just maintains a very deep hold over the Japanese psyche right down through its post war period. And arguably I don't. I think you could suggest that that basic narrative holds quite true even today,
- [62:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
which is very interesting indeed and takes us right up to the present from the past, so leaving us only with the question of the future, specifically your future. Has someone else approached you with another topic for a book? What might you be working on now that this book is out in the world?
- [63:07]
Dr. Peter Mok
Yeah, this is such a great question. Yes. So I've been having any number of conversations with my editor at Harvard, her name's Emily Silk. We've had quite a few conversations around this and my view of things. So before writing this biography of Torjo, I, in fact, wrote a biography of a naval admiral. That one was published by the Harvard University Asia Center. And so the way I put it to Emily was, well, now I've done the Navy, I've done the army, and it really seems to me that there's only one way forward now, and that's to take a fresh look at the emperor himself and thereby in its own way, kind of completing the trifecta, as it were. Anyway, Emily received these. They were kind of unformed thoughts, frankly. She received them very well. And long story short, I have signed a contract with Harvard for a biography of the Emperor Hirohito. So that's some ways down the track, but that will occupy my time for the next couple of years.
- [64:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, that's certainly a lot to be delving into. So best of luck with the project. And while you're doing it, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Rise and Fall of Japan's Most controversial World War II General, published by Harvard University Press in 2026. Peter, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [64:38]
Dr. Peter Mok
Thank you very much, Miranda.