General Tojo Part 4: The Atom Bombs

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They're putting together a kind of home guard of high school students armed with sharpened bamboo spears.

And they're expected to take on the Americans and British when they land on the beaches, literally.

So you can imagine the bloodbath that the Allies would have faced.

The set around the emperor finally go to the emperor and say, you've just got to withdraw support from this man.

He's getting too powerful.

He did not regret the war.

He did not regret Pearl Harbor.

And he believed that he'd acted honourably.

Extreme nationalism and extreme racism ends up giving the permission to act in a bestial, dehumanized way.

It's late 1942, and General Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister, is right up against it.

Since losing the Battle of Midway at the hands of the U.S.

Navy, the momentum of World War II has shifted decisively.

America is closing in on Japanese territory.

The prospect of defeat looms.

But Tojo is unmoved.

Japan must not go quietly.

My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Kim Jong-il.

In this episode, we return to Japan for the final chapter in the story of General Hideki Tojo, the man who led Japan into the Second World War and oversaw one of the dirtiest conflicts ever witnessed.

From Noiser Podcasts, this is Real Dictators.

The strange thing is, I think, that he stayed in power as long as he did, because Japan already, by the end of 1942, was on the downward curve.

And you just thought that already by this point that Tojo would be, his position would be difficult because defeat and losing face is always problematic.

So in a sense, one is surprised that Tojo continued for another two years.

The only way to rescue the war, as the Prime Minister sees it, is to get even more stuck in.

He opts to take hands-on control of the army, even though he has minimal battlefield experience.

Francis Pike is a historian, an expert on Japan and author of Hirohito's War.

In this period, of course, he brings more and more power to himself.

He takes over the education ministry, takes over the munitions ministry under his own name.

The naval minister is also in his pocket.

He has more power to himself than any other prime minister one has seen in the post-major period.

And then finally, in February 1944, he actually gets rid of the General Suiyama, who's head of the army, and takes on that role as well as chief of the army so this is an extraordinary concentration of power which speaks a lot of i would say tojo's totalitarian abilities in the same way as a stalin or even a putin let's say

technically tojo reports to the emperor irohito but in practice it doesn't exactly work like that dr anthony best from the london school of economics is an expert in japanese history and politics What we've got to understand is the Emperor is head of the armed forces.

So the Army Chief of Staff, the Navy Chief of Staff report not to the cabinet, they report directly to the Emperor himself.

Theoretically, that means that the Emperor has a lot of power in directing military activity.

But the Emperor has been told that he must rule as a constitutional monarch.

And the advice from the court again and again is do not get involved in politics.

Well, obviously, military issues become extremely political.

So most of the time his attitude is very much hands-off.

Occasionally he will make rather abstract comments in an attempt to guide the army in the direction he wants to go, but he won't give direct orders.

There are very few occasions when he does.

Tojo may have succeeded in gathering power to himself, but his is a pyrrhic victory.

Now, it's all on him.

There's no way he can dock responsibility as and when things go wrong.

The situation Tojo faces would challenge even the most experienced military commander.

US forces are cutting off Japan's newly won oil fields throughout Southeast Asia.

The pressure is well and truly on to avoid not just a crushing military defeat, but also a catastrophic economic collapse.

Tojo is desperate, a wounded animal backed backed into a corner.

He's liable to do something drastic.

And so he endorses a bizarre scheme to invade the rich and heavily defended subcontinent of British India.

His plan is to knock the British out of the war.

With one of the key allies down, the others will surely be forced to take notice of Japan's demands.

Tojo's ignorance of how to fight a war of this sort is clear right from the start.

The army simply doesn't have the supplies or support systems to mount a successful invasion of an enormous, heavily fortified landmass like India.

Mark Felton is a military historian and author of books on Japan and World War II.

The Japanese sicken very rapidly because they don't have the medical facilities, so they're all dying of dysentery and malaria and everything else.

Their logistic train involves basically marching 30,000 cattle in with them, which are very soon used up, unfortunately, for the size of the army.

They expected to capture the Allied dumps, all our supply dumps, which they don't.

And then, of course, the wheels come off very quickly off their offensive.

In two key battles in northeast India, on the border with Burma, at Kohima and Impal, Tojo's underfed and exhausted troops are decimated.

But rather than let them retreat and regroup, he demands that they fight to the bitter end.

The ordinary Japanese soldier was expected to become some kind of superhuman warrior.

His job was quite simple, kill the enemy and die trying, if necessary, do not retreat and never surrender.

Simple as that.

There's a lot of in-fighting amongst the generals.

They can't really decide how to run this campaign properly.

So it ends up with the Japanese just expending their armed services in basically futile attacks.

The British comment, quite interestingly, at Imphal and other places, the Japanese will launch frontal attacks, which are then beaten back with huge losses.

The next day, they'll do exactly the same thing again in the same spot at the same time and again and again and again.

And to us, that seems extraordinary.

But of course, the officers on the ground, they're not being paid to think, they're being paid to take objectives and they will take the objective no matter what happens.

And it shows you again how little they care for the lives of their men as well.

You know, the ordinary Japanese soldier soldier is just simply a tool of the emperor.

He's something to be thrown away, if necessary, in the defense of those ideals.

General Slim, the British commander of the 14th Army, is now on the cusp of liberating Burma from the Japanese.

Finally, physically incapable of continuing the fight, Tojo's troops are forced into a retreat.

Cut off with no supplies, they lose more than a third of their men.

When they eventually decide to pull back, they pull back in disarray.

The divisions have been decimated in fighting.

The sickness levels are extraordinary.

I mean probably for every one person who's injured or killed in battle, 30 or 50 of them are sick.

And not having the proper logistical train, not having the aircraft to fly people out the field hospitals, this is a real problem.

Starvation sets in.

Japanese soldiers are literally wandering around the jungle, starving to death.

There are instances of cannibalism break out amongst Japanese troops.

And this happens in other places during Japanese defeats as well.

Command and control breaks down.

Japanese troops continue to fight, that's not a problem.

But they're so weakened and so badly supplied, by this stage, the new 14th Army under General Slim has a real chance now to push on and liberate Burma from the Japanese quite quickly, which is a very, very important point.

So we're talking 13,500 Japanese dead in battle, another 35,000, 40,000 sick and injured.

So really, what they've done is use up a vast amount of men who could have been used to hold Burma for a very, very long time.

They've expended their last reserves on an ill-thought-out campaign, and now they've basically opened the way for the British Commonwealth to come in with the Americans in the north and retake these very important colonies.

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It's a pattern playing out right across different theaters of conflict.

General Tojo's Tojo's cruelty to his enemies is matched by a total indifference to the suffering of the men under his command.

One has to remember that the Japanese army, really after 1943, couldn't really feed its own soldiers, let alone its prisoners of war.

If you look at the campaigns in the South Pacific, for every Japanese soldier killed by a bullet or by a mortar or by a bomb, 10 of them died of disease and starvation.

At least 10 to 1.

Their armies starved to death.

On Bougainville, as many as 40,000 soldiers starved to death.

After the Battle of Impal,

in the retreat from Impal, it's estimated that 36,000 Japanese soldiers died of starvation and disease on the retreat.

That's out of an army of 90,000 soldiers.

On the British side, you have hospitals set up immediately because they know the problem of tropical disease.

I mean, it's a really, really big issue.

The Japanese suffer just as badly from these tropical diseases, but the Japanese don't waste time and money on worrying about this because, I mean, for example, medics in the Japanese army carry weapons.

They're expected basically to stop treating the wounded and fight as ordinary soldiers when it comes down to it.

So they have this very, very badly organized logistical train and hospital train.

Now, the other problem is, obviously, you don't need all of this anyway, because these guys are expected to stand and fight and die.

As simple as that.

why bother?

I mean, it's not really an issue.

The generals also, I mean, they suffer just as badly as the men.

Many of them die of disease.

And if it all goes wrong, what do you do?

You take a sword and you insert it in your stomach.

And that's the end of that.

I mean, that's the honor code that's there.

So if the generals are prepared to commit suicide, the ordinary privates are expected to fight to the death or indeed die gloriously in battle, a bansai charge against the enemy, regardless of how badly injured they are.

I remember my own grandfather talking about

fighting at Imphal, for example, that even the wounded would try to attack you.

They often had hand grenades hidden amongst their bandages or clothing.

Even if they were treated, the moment they came round and they found themselves inside British or Indian field hospitals, they would immediately start tearing at their wounds, trying to open their wounds up so they would die.

Beggars belief from our own point of view.

Back in Tokyo, it's becoming increasingly clear that the war cannot be won.

Tojo and Japan have overstretched.

The Prime Minister is under mounting political pressure.

He's working overtime to stamp out dissent.

Rumors abound of assassination plots.

Simply things are getting beyond his control.

There's increasing carping about him from every element of the government.

He's a defeated political leader.

He's a defeated warlord if he's seen as in charge of the army.

Certainly by 1944, time is running out.

Well he's up against a systemic problem.

There is no way in which the Japanese economy can compete with the United States when it's clear that the United States morale is not going to break.

And after that it doesn't matter who's in charge.

It can be anyone.

It can be a military genius.

The simple fact is they've got a juggernaut heading at them and there is nothing they can do about it.

I mean the amount of material the Americans are able to produce in the war is astronomical.

But Tojo simply will not give in, neither to the Allies' military pressure in the field, nor to political pressure back home.

Instead of suing for peace, Tojo decides to up the ante.

As his Indian adventure crumbles, he turns his attention to the Pacific front.

And if he has to sacrifice civilians as well as soldiers, then so be it.

The people in Japan, by this stage, in the last year of the war, are being heavily indoctrinated into fighting the Americans and the British.

Also, we see the kamikaze phenomenon.

There's a glorification of this self-sacrifice, the divine wind being sent out to destroy the American invader.

These are kind of rock star heroes of World War II Japan.

These young guys, many of them not necessarily volunteers, often pressured into doing this, who are going off and driving their planes into American aircraft carriers.

So it's total war, and with total war, it means total and utter destruction.

People like Tojo and his friends are going to drag Japan absolutely into the abyss before they will surrender.

And the same thing happens in Germany.

Hitler's famous Goethe-Dammerung order that everything must perish, everything must be destroyed if National Socialism cannot continue.

So we see this similar thing happening in Japan.

In June 1944, the US fleet attacks the Pacific island of Saipan.

It's all set up to be a pivotal battle.

Located west of Hawaii and south of Japan itself, Saipan is extremely strategically important.

It's the gateway to Japan's home islands.

This is a fight that Tojo absolutely cannot afford to lose.

But Saipan does fall, along with the islands of Tinyan and Guam.

As American troops swarm ashore, they're met with resistance that while diminished is still surprising in its ferocity.

The general defending Saipan follows Tojo's orders and fights to the death, along with most of his men.

The numbers are staggering.

Out of a force of 31,000 Japanese troops, 24,000 are killed in battle and 5,000 commit suicide.

Only a handful are taken prisoner.

In Tokyo, the propaganda machine keeps the scale of the defeat a secret from the Japanese people.

But for the military high command, this cataclysmic setback triggers panic.

Nobody expected Saipan to fall so quickly.

Saipan and Tinian were critical because effectually they'd been colonized.

by the Japanese.

So they'd sent big population groups there and they'd really made them into culturally Japanese islands.

This was because of a huge loss of face.

One of their key home islands were falling and falling quite quickly.

So that was a big problem.

The second big issue, and maybe even more important, is that they realized that this is where America could base its B-29 Boeing Superfortress bombers.

And from there, they knew that the Americans would bomb the hell out of Japan, which is exactly what happened.

And this was

an appalling fate that they now had to expect.

There had been some attacks from the Super Fortress based in southern China, and actually Operation Ichigo had wiped out those airfields.

They'd actually pushed out the Americans from those airfields in southern China.

So they'd got rid of that threat.

But having lost Saipan and Tinyin and Guam, there was no way out of that.

They knew that they would now face unremitting airplane attack.

As the news leaks out into the broader populace, the emperor himself, Hirohito, even offers to abdicate.

That's how detrimental this defeat is to Japan's standing, to its self-respect.

The talk in Tokyo begins to shift towards negotiating some kind of settlement with the U.S.

But in terms of the day-to-day running of the country and the military, General Tojo is still in charge, and he is having none of it.

Far worse is in store for the people of Saipan

By July 1944, Japan's war is virtually over.

The U.S.

is on the brink of clinching victory.

General Hideki Tojo knows it.

In desperation, Tojo issues an order that takes the horrors of the Pacific Theater to a whole new level.

Japanese government propaganda convinces the residents of Saipan that they will be subjected to unimaginable horrors by the invading Americans.

To avoid this unspeakable fate, the only thing to do is to take the honorable way out.

Near the northern tip of Saipan, a tall spear of land juts into the ocean.

Today it's known simply as Suicide Cliff.

As the Americans advance across the island, Hundreds of Japanese civilians and soldiers leap 600 feet to their deaths off this grassy knoll and onto the rocks and churning white foam below.

The American soldiers are astonished as wave after wave of people commit suicide.

Teams of GIs in dinghies circle the island, navigating the bays and inlets to drag the corpses to shore.

Dr.

Michael Lynch, historian and author.

Saipan, rather like Midway, is the great formative determining experience for Japan in the Second World World War because once Saipan was lost, the war clearly was lost.

What's remarkable about the taking of the island is the response of Japanese civilians on the island who, to a man and woman, chose to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner.

And we have stories of hundreds literally leaping off cliffs, disemboweling as well within the caves.

The American troops found this extraordinary.

They offered them quarter.

They broadcast for days through loudspeakers that you can surrender.

Nobody that we know actually responded positively to that.

They'd been taught, brainwashed, really from the late 30s, that America was the great evil, and that if you were taken prisoner, the Americans would not show mercy.

They weren't aware, the ordinary Japanese, of course, of what their own troops were doing.

But they feared that rape, bestiality, savagery, cruelty would follow if they fell prisoner.

And so in their thousands in Saipan, they preferred to jump to their death rather than submit.

Now this is an extraordinary revelation about the character of Japanese thinking by that time.

It's become so extreme, the war effort, that death is preferable to a dishonorable surrender.

Again, in a sense, it explains the prisoner of war question, but in terms of civilians, they too have been trained in that way of thinking.

And they give that terrifying expression of that in their response to the fall of Saipan.

The precise detail of the decision-making process is unclear, but it's suspected that Toja may have persuaded the emperor to order the suicides, or at least sanction them.

So, Hirohito, and we know this from some archival sources, Hirohito sent a personal message to the civilians in Saipan.

He said, kill yourselves rather than submit to American occupation.

If you kill yourselves, I will grant you the same recognition as soldiers who die in battle.

So you will be honored at the Yasukuni Shrine, along with all the soldiers who've died.

Now, of course, these people were heavily indoctrinated.

They believe this.

And over a thousand people did indeed commit terrible suicide, threw themselves off cliffs and cut their children's throats and blew themselves up with the soldiers and everything like this.

So it's a tragedy, a terrible tragedy on a terrible scale.

And it shows, one, how close the Imperial family are to these events, and it shows how callous and heartless the Japanese military actually was in extending these kind of policies, not just from soldiers, but to civilians.

The perverse reasoning goes that if the people were to surrender, they'll actually be pretty well looked after by the Allies.

And the only thing worse than Saipan falling would be for the Japanese captives to discover that Americans are not as evil as the propaganda has claimed.

Now, there was a great fear amongst the higher echelons of the Japanese command, particularly Tojo and Hirohito, that the Americans would treat Japanese civilians well.

And they did.

That was the point.

So they knew that if large numbers of Japanese civilians fall into American hands, and instead of being raped and murdered, as the Japanese told the civilians, this is what's going to happen to you, the Americans are going to treat you the same as we treated the Chinese in Nanjing or whatever.

Imagine they put these people onto newsreels and onto the radio and transmit this information into Japan.

Don't worry, we will treat you like human beings.

We will treat you well, give you medical care and feed the children and all these sorts of things.

That could potentially cause some kind of revolutionary activity in Japan.

Because obviously by this stage, many Japanese cities are starting to be bombed.

Japan is short of food because of the Allied submarine campaign is very, very successful.

You know, people are not necessarily pro-war anymore.

They're beginning to suffer personally now.

So you've got people who've been indoctrinated with the idea that the American arrival is going to be awful.

In addition, they've been brainwashed to follow the emperor.

But there are cases where it's indicated that in fact these people are not jumping voluntarily.

They are being in essence coerced into jumping by the army.

Through Japanese history, those who find themselves in a position where they have been dishonoured and they have brought dishonor on their families will commit suicide.

And the authorities are playing on that and manipulating it for their own ends.

But these needless deaths on Saipan will not save the general known as the Razor.

His emperor is finally losing patience.

The rumor starts to spread that Emperor Hirohito no longer has faith in Tojo or his administration.

For the man who holds the offices of Prime Minister, Army Minister, Army Chief of Staff and many others, it's an extraordinary reversal of fortune.

There's nowhere left to turn.

He's out.

Tojo has never been the head of state.

He's just the head of government.

For much of his rule, this has been mere semantics.

But now, right at the last, the one man who sits above him in the pyramid is pulling the plug.

Tojo's last act as prime minister is to broadcast the news of the fall of Saipan to a shocked and frightened nation.

His popularity was so high when the war was going well, and it's almost a complete inverse.

When the war goes badly, and Saipan is the key one we mentioned, it swings totally against him.

Well, I think as the news got worse, Hirohito, by the accounts that we do have, becomes increasingly snippety in terms of getting cross with Tojo and his generals for not performing.

He's pretty unrealistic in terms of what he expects.

Hirohito, and I don't think he has any real sense of the impossible problems, particularly in logistics facing the Japanese army.

So Tojo's position becomes more difficult, but he has such a grip on the administration of government that he's not that easy to remove.

And I think finally what happens is the set around the emperor finally go to the emperor and say, you've just got to withdraw support from this this man.

He's getting too powerful.

He's the top guy.

He's taken on more and more power, but things are getting worse and worse.

He has to go.

I think Hirohito's advisors essentially eventually managed to persuade him that Tojo had to go.

And as soon as Tojo finds out that the Emperor has withdrawn his support, he's got nowhere to go.

He has to resign.

On July the 18th, 1944, Hideki Tojo steps down as Prime Minister of Japan.

His career may be finished, but he's built a war machine that cannot simply be switched off.

Things will get far worse for the Japanese people, worse even than the mass civilian suicides on Saipan.

Now, although he's no longer leading Japan after July 44, his legacy, the military legacy which he was a great spokesman for, is that we end in this way.

We don't surrender, which is why they taught the children, you will die in the cause of the Emperor and the Empire.

So although he's very unpopular personally, what he's left after four years of leadership is this notion that's become part of the culture of Japan, that the samurai end, the honorable end, is the only way that we as Japanese can face the unbearable, as Hirohita called it.

We have no other choice.

Toto's legacy finds form in the Bansai charges, the kamikaze pilots hurtling to their deaths.

and the senseless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians for another year to come.

By 1945, a development in military technology has produced a new way to potentially bring the Japanese war machine to a halt.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

No, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

America is in possession of a powerful new weapon, the likes of which the world has never seen.

But to deploy this weapon would be an act that cannot be undone.

To launch it would be to break terrifying new ground.

Now at the same time in Japan, they're putting together a kind of home guard of high school students armed with sharpened bamboo spears.

And they're expected to take on the Americans and British when they land on the beaches, literally.

So you can imagine the bloodbath that the Allies would have faced.

Imagine if we get into mainland Japan and we have to face out an entire armed civilian population, millions and millions of Japanese whose only goal is to kill us.

This could have been casualties beyond anything yet seen.

On August the 6th, 1945, Japan fails to respond to a warning and a demand for unconditional surrender.

The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

It kills between 66,000 and 130,000 people.

Then, three days later, on August the 9th, the U.S.

drops a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.

After this second devastating blow, an utterly defeated Japan accepts it must surrender.

Such is the sheer scale of civilian casualties and the trauma felt by the survivors.

Debate will rage amongst historians the world over as to America's actions in this final chapter of the Pacific War.

The fighting may be over, but Pandora's box has been opened.

The world is now nuclear and will never be the same again.

It's September 1945, and the Second World War is over.

The task that remains is to round up Japan's war criminals and put them on trial.

It's this mission which brings a team of American soldiers to a suburban house in Tokyo, right where our story began.

As the GIs storm the property, they're confronted by the sight of their nemesis, the disgraced former Prime Minister of Japan, Ideki Tojo, slumped in an armchair, blood pouring pouring from his gut.

Desperate to escape the Allies' court and the hangman's noose, he's attempted to take his own life.

It's not gone exactly to plan.

Whether intentionally or by accident, he's missed the X marked in charcoal over his heart and instead fired his pistol straight into his stomach.

He's seriously wounded, but alive.

The soldiers rush him to the 98th Evacuation evacuation hospital.

An American infantryman, Sergeant John Arkinal of Allentown, Pennsylvania, lies bare-chested on a bed.

He's volunteered to provide the blood for an emergency transfusion.

The transfusion is successful.

Tojo comes into a recovery room, surrounded by soldiers, nurses, and reporters.

Turns out he will live to answer the charges against him.

Tojo's dental hygiene is so poor, his teeth are decaying and crumbling out of his gums.

His speech is impaired, and he needs to be able to answer questions in court.

A 22-year-old U.S.

Navy officer called Jack Mallory is given the unique task of inspecting the general's mouth and prescribing a solution.

Mallory is summoned to Sugamo prison, where Tojo is now being held.

He finds the general propped up in bed, blankets covering his legs, with a bandage wrapped around his abdomen and a head full of rotting teeth.

Mallory's professional recommendation is for a full set of dentures.

The Navy's dentist can't resist the opportunity to get one over on Japan's fallen warlord and to commemorate comrades lost in battle, so he inscribes something on the false teeth.

When Tojo puts them on, A secret message sits right above the tip of his tongue.

It's in Morse code, so no one one notices.

The series of dots and dashes reads, Remember Pearl Harbor.

Back on his feet, teeth fixed up, Tojo is put on trial for war crimes.

The general is led into the hearing, flanked by guards.

He takes a seat on a bench and awaits his fate.

Behind him sits another Japanese defendant, Shumai Okawa.

Okawa is known as the Japanese Japanese Goebbels.

He's a nationalist writer, the only man indicted as a Class A war criminal who is not an official member of the army or government.

As the clerk begins to read the indictments, Okawa squirms in his seat.

He starts talking gibberish, much to the bafflement of the soldiers guarding him.

Then, with a cheeky grin, he extends an arm forward and slaps the bald head of General Tojo.

In previous days, such mockery would have earned Okawa a severe beating at the very least, if not a death sentence.

Now, it gets him a psychiatric assessment.

The doctors find Akawa is suffering from advanced syphilis.

Slapped on the head in full view of the watching international media, Tojo's humiliation is complete.

And as the trial resumes, things go from bad to worse for the former general.

He's found guilty of seven war crimes.

He's put on trial, acquits himself as a soldier at the trial, does not apologize for the war, says that the war was an honorable war, it was dedicated to Japan's survival as a nation, and that although things may have happened in the war which he might now regret, which he didn't specify, he did not regret the war, he did not regret Pearl Harbor, and he believed that he'd acted honourably.

But he accepted that since all had been lost, he was at the mercy of the victims.

He doesn't attempt suicide again, as far as we know.

He accepts hanging eventually.

Tojo's trial mirrors those of the leading Nazis taking place in Europe, just as in many ways, his regime mirrored that of Hitler's.

It does mirror the Holocaust and the brutalities of Nazi Germany, which is where the connection between the fascism in Germany and the supposed fascism in Japan seemed to come together.

Extreme nationalism and extreme racism ends up giving the permission to act in a bestial, dehumanized way.

In the closing stages of the trial, before sentencing, Tojo does offer some apology to the court for the atrocities committed by the army under his name.

But it's too little.

Far too late.

Tojo is hanged on December the 23rd, 1948.

At the last, he's dressed in plain prisoner garb, with no military insignia to designate his rank.

Tojo dies abandoned by the emperor he lived to serve, and whose power he wielded to terrible effect.

Controversially, the Allies consent to Hirohito remaining Japan's head of state.

He will stay in office right up until his death in 1989.

Could he have done more to rein in his prime minister?

Or was the emperor pretty powerless to stop Tojo?

Hirohito's legacy will hotly be contested for years to come.

It will prove complex to navigate.

Tojo, by contrast, is largely expunged from the collective memory.

Today, he's largely absent from Japanese textbooks, and in the West, he remains unknown to many.

In the decades following World War II, Japan rebuilds as a strong and stable democracy, as well as an economic powerhouse.

In this new country, the legacy of General Hideki Tojo has little place.

The years of suicidal militarism are over.

Compared to Hitler or Mussolini, there was no great cult of personality around Hideki Tojo.

He wasn't some kind of charismatic messiah for the far right.

He didn't seize power in a coup.

Ruling under the emperor, Tojo was not formally a dictator.

His was the story of a minister who outgrew his master.

He was a workaholic who climbed the greasy pole, slowly but surely building a power base from the shadows.

He ruled with cold, ruthless efficiency, and often from behind a desk.

He was a bureaucrat.

In this way, without fanfare, Tojo wielded terrible power.

He led a nation into an all-consuming war, from which it emerged profoundly scarred and traumatized.

Thankfully, today, in modern Japan, Ideki Tojo belongs resolutely in the past.

Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGahn.

The show was created by Pascal Hughes.

Produced by Joel Diddell, edited by Katrina Hughes.

The music was composed and assembled assembled by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade.

The strings were recorded by Dori McCauley.

The sound mixer is Tom Pink.

Real Dictators is a noiser and world media rights co-production.

If you haven't already, we'd love you to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows, or check us out at RealDictators.com.

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