However, it was only a matter of time before the Americans and their allies organised themselves in the Pacific. As the Americans advanced throughout the many islands in the Pacific, Japan came into range of American bombers. With bombing raids reducing a lot of Japan to rubble, the emperor, Hirohito, believed that Tojo had lost control of events and Tojo offered his resignation on July 9th, In November , Tojo was put on trial as a war criminal.
He was found guilty and hanged. His father was turned from samurai to army officer while his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making the family respectable, but poor. This message was relentlessly drilled into Japanese students. They made the generation believe that war was the most beautiful thing, that the Emperor was a living god and that the greatest honour was to die for him.
The girls were taught that the highest honour for a woman was to have many sons so that they could die for the Emperor. The schools in the Meiji era were very competitive, and there was no tradition of sympathy for failure. Failure was not tolerated and even the teachers would bully those who failed.
The Treaty of Portsmouth can be considered the start of anti-American sentiments among the Japanese though they did not know that this war almost bankrupt their country. In , Tojo married and had three sons and went to serve in Siberia as part of the Japanese expeditionary force to intervene in the Russian Civil War.
The Japanese were very influenced by the intellectual developments of Germany and often imitated them in a sense. Also in , Tojo took a train ride across the United States, his first and last visit. From his travels he deduced that the Americans were very materialistic, soft and devoted to money-making and other hedonistic pursuits.
The reason for this was that Asians worked harder than whites, a statement issued openly by Congressmen and Senators. This was very offensive to the Japanese and Tojo wrote that American whites would never accept Asians as equals and that the act showed that they put their own interests first.
Ascension By , Tojo was already bureau chief of the Japanese Army and shortly after, colonel. By he was promoted to major general and served as Chief of the Personnel Department within the army ministry. He called for Japan to become totalitarian in order to prepare for the next war. Tesions The relations between Japan and China reached a crisis point.
Japan successfully captured the Chinese capital Nanking. The army proceeded to systematically rape and kills its people for six weeks in what is known as the Rape of Nanking. Economic sanctions were imposed on Japan by the United States in order to cripple it, but it had a different effect.
The sanctions emboldened Japan to align against the US. Prince Konoe had chosen Tojo to secure his armies backing with foreign policy. Konoe favoured Germany in mediating an end to the Sino-Japanese War.
Tojo was a supporter of the Tripartite Pact and continued to expand the war with China. He declared that any withdrawal from Indochina would make them seem weak.
They were, however, unsure whether to wage war or pursue diplomatic negotiations in order to regain gasoline supplies. In October, Konoe was politically isolated and resigned, with Tojo later assuming the command. In November, Emperor Hirohito received the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later approved the war with the West.
The Hull note was proposed to the Japanese by the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in which he proposed to Japan to withdraw all military forces from China and Indochina in exchange for the lifting of the oil embargo. In November , all the accused were found guilty. There were misgivings at the time about whether all the right people had been tried. Some thought that Emperor Hirohito should have been in the dock, but MacArthur considered it essential to protect him so that the changes the Americans were introducing in Japan would enjoy the imperial blessing.
With hindsight he was surely right, but the decision was distinctly controversial. There were other notorious figures who were not prosecuted. 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.
0コメント