Diary reveals Japan war leader wanted to keep fighting

JAPAN’S fanatical Second World War leader Hideki Tojo wanted to keep on fighting even after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, documents released show.

Tojo, hanged as a war criminal after the country surrendered, accused opponents of being “frightened”.

Excerpts from around 20 diary pages written by Tojo in the final days of the war and held by the National Archives of Japan were published for the first time.

“The notes show Tojo kept his died-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end,” said Kazufumi Takayama, the archives curator, who confirmed the accuracy of the published excerpts.

Tojo, executed in 1948, was prime minister during much of the war. The notes support other evidence that he was fiercely opposed to surrender despite the hopelessness of Japan’s war effort.

“We now have to see our country surrender to the enemy without demonstrating our power up to 120%,” Tojo wrote on August 13, 1945, just two days before Japan gave up. “We are now on a course for a humiliating peace, or rather a humiliating surrender.”

Tojo also criticised his colleagues, accusing government leaders of “being scared of enemy threats and easily throwing their hands up.” Surrender proponents were “frightened by ‘the new type of bomb’ and terrified by the Soviet Union’s entry into the war,” he wrote.

The stridency of the writings is remarkable considering they came just days after US atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 200,000 people and posed the threat of Japan’s complete destruction.

At the time Japan had been reduced to arming children, women and the elderly with bamboo spears to defend the country from a ground invasion.

The diary shows Tojo remained convinced of the justice and necessity of Japan’s brutal march through Asia and its decision to draw the US into the war by bombing Pearl Harbour. He wrote that the purpose of the war was to “maintain stability in East Asia and defend our country”.

Still, Tojo — who apparently wrote the diary for himself rather than as an argument to contemporaries — said he would accept in silence the decision to surrender, made by government leaders in the presence of Emperor Hirohito.

“Now that the diplomatic steps have been taken after the emperor’s judgment, I have decided to refrain from making any comments about it, though I have a separate view,” Tojo wrote.

On August 14, 1945, the day before Japan surrendered, Tojo wrote that he took “moral responsibility for causing useless deaths, even though they were meant to be sacrifice for a great cause”.