December 31, 2025
Hideki Tojo’s sworn affidavit is a historical document of the highest order, revealing in the words of one of the principal figures how Japan was gradually driven into a corner by the oil embargo.
It demonstrates the urgent reality of Japan’s national security situation—something never explained by the historical narrative imposed by the Tokyo Trials.
This special issue, the July supplementary edition of WiLL, Rekishitsu, is a publication that every Japanese citizen should go to a bookstore and purchase.
The same is true for people throughout the world, and I will do everything I can to convey its contents to them.
The Battle Against the “Tokyo Trial View of History”
Hideki Tojo’s Sworn Affidavit Is a Historical Source of the Highest Order for Modern and Contemporary History
Shoichi Watanabe
Professor Emeritus, Sophia University
Slowly Strangled
After the war, Hideki Tojo never enjoyed a favorable reputation among the Japanese people.
The image of him as a “villain” always followed him.
At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo Trials—a defense attorney for Tojo could not be selected until the very end, and ultimately Ichiro Kiyose himself had to take charge of his defense.
I still remember a renowned teacher at the junior high school I attended who had served there for forty years.
When news arrived of Tojo’s attempted suicide, the teacher exclaimed indignantly, “If Tojo intended to kill himself with a pistol, why did he not place the muzzle against his temple?
What a pathetic man.”
When I heard this, I too thought that the teacher was absolutely right.
Later, however, defense attorney Kiyose explained that Tojo had believed that shooting himself in the temple would cause severe damage to his head and that, if photographs of his disfigured body were taken, it would bring shame upon him in posterity.
That was why he marked the location of his heart and shot himself there.
This Sworn Affidavit of Hideki Tojo covers the four years from July 1940, when Tojo entered the second Konoe Cabinet as Minister of War, to July 1944, when his cabinet resigned en masse.
In preparing to take the witness stand at the Tokyo Trials, Tojo, as the person who bore responsibility for Japan, spoke candidly and without reservation about the course of Japanese politics and the war during those four years.
Anyone who reads it can discern between the lines that Tojo had resolved to tell the truth and was devoting his utmost effort to doing so.
There is not the slightest trace of embellishment or any desire to demean others.
It must also be emphasized that this affidavit was a banned document in occupied Japan.
The same was true of Justice Radhabinod Pal’s judgment.
The occupation authorities could not make these documents public because they contained the truth.
They must have feared that it would become clear for all to see that the Allied powers themselves had caused the war and that the charges presented at the Tokyo Trials were fabrications or fantasies.
Reading this affidavit through once again, I was deeply struck by the fact that it expressed exactly what I had felt as a boy.
In a word, it was a suffocating sense that Japan was gradually being strangled.
When negotiations with the Dutch administration in the Netherlands East Indies—the present-day Republic of Indonesia—broke down, everything before me seemed to go dark, even though I was only a child.
I thought, “So war has finally become inevitable.”
Why did I think that?
Because the breakdown meant that no oil would reach Japan.
As one reads the affidavit, it becomes clear that the greatest problem and concern facing Japan and Tojo at the time was how to secure oil resources.
What is written here is a completely candid account of Japan’s position at that time, given by the person who bore the highest responsibility for the Japanese state and possessed more information than anyone else.
Moreover, because his testimony was subjected to cross-examination, he could not tell lies.
Nothing has ever been presented to disprove any part of this testimony.
Therefore, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Tojo’s testimony and views, anyone who writes a history of the Showa era must consult this affidavit.
Unless we understand that the circumstances facing Japan at the time were considered by the Japanese prime minister, approved by the Diet and the Privy Council, and were such that His Majesty the Emperor also had no choice but to give his approval, Japan will appear to have been an entirely evil nation.
That is not a fair attitude toward history.
This essay will continue.