Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

242 • TO – JO – , HIDEKI
Recalled from the Soviet Union by Foreign Minister Yōsuke
Matsuoka in August 1940, Tōgō in October 1941 was appointed
foreign minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō. His
primary task upon assumption of the foreign minister’s post was unraveling
the deadlocked Japanese–American negotiations, to
which end he contributed little, sending the so-called Plans A and B
to ambassadors Kichisaburō Nomura and Kurusu Saburō in November
1941.
After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
Tōgō directed his subordinates in the Foreign Ministry to direct all
their energies toward an early negotiated peace. A negotiated peace,
however, rested on the assumption that the United States was willing
to negotiate, which it patently was not. Tōgō resigned his post later
in 1942 to protest the creation of the Greater East Asian Ministry.
Again appointed foreign minister in April 1945 in the cabinet of
Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, Tōgō masterminded an approach to
the Soviet Union in an effort to secure a favorable peace settlement
from the United States. The Soviets remained noncommittal, and on
26 July the United States, Great Britain, and China issued the Potsdam
Declaration. Tōgō only came into his own after the American
atomic bomb attack against Hiroshima on 6 August, when he moved
decisively to bring an end to the war.
TŌJŌ, HIDEKI (1884–1948). Japan’s prime minister at the time of
Japan’s attack against Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Hideki Tōjō
was an incisive, quick-tempered army general who in the postwar era
was executed as a Class-A war criminal. The son of a lieutenantgeneral,
Tōjō graduated from the army’s War College in 1915. He
spent several years in Switzerland and Germany from the late 1910s
to the early 1920s, and subsequently held various important posts in
Manchuria (including chief of staff of Japan’s forces stationed there).
He returned to Japan in 1938 to serve as vice war minister, and in July
1940 was appointed war minister in the second cabinet of Prime Minister
Fumimaro Konoe. In October 1941, Tōjō precipitated the collapse
of Konoe’s third cabinet by arguing against the possibility of
conciliation with the United States. Insofar as he refused to consent
to the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China, Tōjō was consistent
in his arguments.