Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Most Controversial World War II General, Peter Mauch, The Belknap Press, £27.95

‘“He is a pathetic human being”, spat a junior high school teacher in tones that resonated throughout Japan.’ That sentence stopped me cold the first time I read it. It’s harsh, furious even, and the American academic Peter Mauch uses it early in this remarkable new book to show how profoundly Tojo Hideki was despised in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

As an author and historian of Japan in this conflict myself, I’ve interviewed survivors in their nineties in cities across the Home Islands and read my share of condemnations of the Japanese wartime regime. But this lack of deference was striking and hard to ignore. I found myself turning the pages of Mauch’s work with an unusual degree of personal curiosity (I obviously have a card in the game). Could any biography meaningfully illuminate the life of a man so demonised by the West but written off so emphatically by his own people, too? In the back of my mind as I continued reading was the thought: what does such a life tell us about Japan, then and now?

Mauch’s book, thankfully as it turns out, goes far beyond the caricatures. From the beginning, Tojo emerges not merely as an ideological hardliner but, like many of his contemporaries, a product of a military culture steeped in hierarchy, factionalism and inherited grudges. I researched a lot of men like him over the past three years. Tojo’s family history – with a father embittered by the dominance of the Choshu clique (the elite samurai who had helped establish the westward-leaning Meiji dynasty) – shaped him early on, instilling both a sense of duty and a simmering resentment that would echo throughout his career. He internalised the doctrines of the military schools his parents sent him to, especially their focus on offensive spirit and loyalty to the emperor. It would prove a toxic mixture for the man destined to occupy a pivotal position in Japan’s doomed struggle across the vastness of both the Pacific and the Chinese mainland.

As his early career played out, I was struck by how much of Tojo’s story is actually a story about Japanese bureaucracy: the committees, the personnel decisions, the silently decisive conversations in the Army Ministry corridors. Mauch paints him as the ‘apex political predator’ of his time – an unforgettable phrase – and one can’t help but admire his ability to master the system. Not because of what he ultimately did with that power, but because so few leaders in Japan at the time seemed able to wield that machinery effectively at all. Tojo did – ruthlessly at times, narrowly at others, but undeniably with skill and, to some degree, vision.

Tojo’s ruthlessness becomes especially apparent in the chapters dealing with the 1930s as Japan slid towards totalitarianism: the factional civil wars within the Imperial Army, the continual coups (he despised the military plotters), the clandestine officers’ societies and shocking political assassinations. It is here that Tojo’s contradictions surface. He could denounce domestic insurrection while simultaneously supporting radicalised military adventures in Manchuria. He preached discipline at home yet tolerated, even encouraged, the Kwantung Army’s insubordination abroad. Mauch offers vivid examples of this double standard – Tokyo was to be kept orderly, while newly acquired Manchuria could be won by the bold and the reckless as a brutal occupation was normalised, even encouraged.

Mauch’s handling of Tojo’s relationship with Emperor Hirohito is fascinating, too. The former exhibited an ‘emperor-centric’ approach to all his policy-making. The latter, as the narrative makes clear, saw both the strengths and dangers in Tojo: his diligence, yes, but also his ‘tyrant’ tendencies and his ‘overuse’ of the Imperial Army’s personal secret police force, the Kempeitai. I found these sections oddly poignant. Here were two men caught in a constitutional framework that gave enormous authority to the military while obscuring responsibility. Neither seemed equipped to break the deadlock; perhaps both feared what would happen if the illusion of imperial unity cracked. Tojo, as Mauch points out, did exercise a central role in shaping Hirohito’s will in all aspects of government, such as the decision to launch a war against the United States by attacking their Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. His last service to him, as we shall see, would ultimately cost him his life.

When Japan enters the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, the book becomes almost claustrophobic with detail – but in a good way. Tojo is now depicted not as an all-powerful dictator but as a ferociously committed administrator caught between the pessimism shown by the leaderships of the imperial armed forces, wishful thinking, diplomatic cul-de-sacs, and Hirohito’s ever-present desire for internal consensus.

Mauch’s description of Tojo demanding that the navy clarify its confidence in victory rings especially true. Here was a man who needed firm decision-making and a unified front from the forces tasked with securing victory, or at worst, successfully defending the Home Islands. When he couldn’t get them, he simply acquired the position to fill the vacuum himself. As I read on, I kept thinking: what must it have felt like to be that man? The weight of a looming war, the pressure of an expectant military, the limits of fuel reserves literally ticked down to months, not years. None of this exonerates him, far from it. But Mauch’s biography allows the reader to enter Tojo’s world without endorsing it. That’s a rare achievement.

And then we reach the inevitable conclusion from such a ruinous conflict: the defeats, the recriminations, the loss of confidence in the emperor’s eyes, the war cabinet collapse. All the while, the enemy is gaining ground to approach the sanctity of Japanese sovereign territory. The pages portray Tojo after the loss of the crucial garrison on Saipan in July 1944 – exhausted, chastened, but still clinging to a belief, as did the Japanese military leadership, in a decisive, cataclysmic battle. The position of Hirohito had to be secured at all costs. It feels almost Shakespearian in its tragedy. And, after the ruinous firebombing raids across mainland Japan, the brutal capture by the Americans of Okinawa, and the shock of the twin atomic attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, Hirohito was compelled to announce the country’s sudden surrender.

Japan turned swiftly and harshly against Tojo: the bungled suicide attempt, his capture by the Americans, the subsequent ostracism of his family, the hate mail, the public scorn. Mauch sees him as neither hero, nor villain but as an embodiment of Japanese militarism which had brought catastrophe upon the country. This is not hard to agree with. Tojo accepted full responsibility, ferociously defending his conduct and that of the emperor at the Tokyo trials of 1947 to the extent that even though he stood alongside 26 other defendants, the hearings earned the sobriquet of the ‘Tojo trial’. The disgraced prime minister would go to the gallows convinced that history would one day vindicate him. I disagree obviously, but reading this book I can now see why this belief was held so fiercely to the bitter end.

Postwar Japan may have dismissed him as ‘pathetic’, yet through Mauch’s meticulous and somewhat humane biography, Tojo’s legacy isn’t rehabilitated, but instead re-examined, seen in the context of a world that shaped him and the catastrophe he helped shape in return. I understood not just the judgment, but the history behind it. And that, for me, is the mark of an exceptional biography.