Hideki Tojo’s sworn testimony reveals how Japan was driven into a strategic dead end by oil embargoes, exposing the core security dilemma ignored by the Tokyo Trial narrative and indispensable for any fair account of modern Japanese history.

2017-06-16.
This special July supplement of WiLL: Rekishi Tsū is a publication that every Japanese citizen should go to a bookstore to purchase.
The same applies to people around the world, and I will do my best to convey that fact.
The battle against the “Tokyo Trial historical view.”
Hideki Tojo’s sworn testimony is a top-tier primary source of modern history.
Shoichi Watanabe, Professor Emeritus, Sophia University.
Strangled by layers of cotton.
After the war, public opinion of Hideki Tojo among the Japanese people was by no means favorable.
He was constantly accompanied by the image of a “villain.”
At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Tojo was unable to secure defense counsel until the very end, and ultimately Ichiro Kiyose himself had to assume the role.
I still remember a veteran teacher at my middle school who had served for forty years.
Upon hearing of Tojo’s attempted suicide, he exclaimed angrily, “If he was going to shoot himself, why didn’t Tojo put the gun to his temple. What a pathetic man.”
At the time, I myself thought the same.
Later, according to Attorney Kiyose, Tojo feared that shooting himself in the temple would cause severe damage to his head, and that photographs of such a state would be shameful to posterity.
Therefore, he marked his heart and shot himself there.
This Sworn Testimony of Hideki Tojo is an account in which Tojo, as the person bearing ultimate responsibility for Japan, spoke candidly at the witness stand of the Tokyo Trial about the political developments and course of the war during the four years from his appointment as Army Minister in July 1940 under the Second Konoe Cabinet until the cabinet’s resignation in July 1944.
A single reading reveals, between the lines, his determined effort to tell the truth.
There is not the slightest trace of vanity or intent to disparage others.
It is also significant that this testimony was a banned document in occupied Japan.
The same was true of the Pal Judgment.
The reason the occupation forces could not make these documents public must surely be that they revealed the truth: that the Allied powers themselves were the cause of the war, and that the indictments of the Tokyo Trial were fabrications or fantasies.
Upon rereading this testimony, I felt that it expressed exactly the same sentiment I had sensed as a boy.
In a word, it was the feeling that Japan was being slowly strangled, wrapped in layers of cotton.
When negotiations with the Dutch authorities in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) collapsed, I felt my vision go dark even as a child.
I thought, “So, this means war at last.”
Why did I think so.
Because it meant that oil would no longer come to Japan.
As one reads the testimony, it becomes clear that securing oil resources was the foremost issue and concern for Japan and for Tojo at the time.
What is written here is a frank account of Japan’s position by the person who bore ultimate responsibility and possessed the most complete information.
Moreover, since it was given under cross-examination, it was testimony in which lies could not be told.
There is not a single point in this testimony that has been successfully refuted as false.
Therefore, regardless of agreement or disagreement with Tojo’s views, anyone who writes the history of the Showa era must refer to this testimony.
Unless one understands the circumstances under which Japan’s prime minister examined the situation, the Diet approved it, the Privy Council approved it, and the Emperor was compelled to approve it, Japan will appear to have been a purely evil nation.
That would not be a fair attitude toward history.
To be continued.