national

Scholar learns remains of Tojo, other war criminals scattered in Pacific

50 Comments

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

© KYODO

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

50 Comments
Login to comment

I don't think anyone should be putting energy into this. what is done is done, past is past.

-2 ( +11 / -13 )

As it should be. We don't need another Yasukuni.

18 ( +27 / -9 )

"If the remains were returned to nature, that is better than being abandoned somewhere else," said Hidetoshi Tojo, 48, great-grandchild of the executed former prime minister.""

Yes, unlike many of the people that were killed and left to rotten during the war.

14 ( +20 / -6 )

Yes, unlike many of the people that were killed and left to rotten during the war.

25 million people killed by the Japanese compared to 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

All that research so he can add “and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific.”

1 ( +12 / -11 )

We don't need any locations that creates martyr celebrations in Japan.

18 ( +23 / -5 )

Good, scattered like waste in the ocean, a fitting grave I reckon.

9 ( +17 / -8 )

This reminds me of the way the Bolsheviks disposed of the remains of the tsar and his family after the Russian revolution. They have no respect for the dead.

-24 ( +1 / -25 )

A Japanese researcher has found official U.S. documents detailing how the American military scattered the cremated remains of Japan's wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and six other executed Class-A war criminals in the Pacific Ocean, shedding light on decades of mystery over their whereabouts.

Shades of what the US Navy did to another fanatic, Bin Laden.

7 ( +8 / -1 )

What’s done is done. But the truth about history should be taught in Japanese schools

21 ( +22 / -1 )

Interesting discovery and kudos to Professor Takazawa for the work leading to this, I think this help understanding the situation in Japan just after the war was finished.

One extra detail for the history books.

-1 ( +5 / -6 )

This researcher may have found a first hand account of the disposal but the means and rough whereabouts has been mentioned in many accounts of the end of WWII in Japan. It is not really new information. The US didn't graves that could become the focus of some future revanchist Japanese nationalism. It is the same reason the US ensured the one Japanese battleship to survive WWII, HIJMS Nagato a ship that was part of the Pearl Harbor raid, was sunk as a target after the war.

0 ( +5 / -5 )

Shades of what the US Navy did to another fanatic, Bin Laden.

Exactly right. The US didn't want a grave that could become the focus of or rallying point for its enemies. Bin Laden is gone and there isn't even a grave as a physical manifestation of his deeds.

11 ( +14 / -3 )

This reminds me of the way the Bolsheviks disposed of the remains of the tsar and his family after the Russian revolution. They have no respect for the dead.

While Americans continued the tradition of the "Tojo treatment" by deep-sixing Bin Laden, but have always side-stepped their own dirty linen and treated gingerly their own leaders who have never been charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity to an extent that sometimes has bordered nigh on "deification". If more people subscribed to the philosophy of "don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters", it would result in a world happier without "super-heroes" and idol-worship.

0 ( +6 / -6 )

Just like with Osama bin Laden, except the U.S. military dumped UBL's remains in the Indian Ocean.

Tojo was like a Japanese version of Hitler, so it was good not to leave any body or bones behind. No body, no tomb.

As for education, years ago there was a Japanese right-wing movie, "Pride", about Tojo and the war crime's trials in Tokyo which portrayed Tojo in a positive light. This is dangerous and I remember Japanese who had seen it telling me that they thought Tojo was a decent man who loved his country. This is what happens when you don't teach history and you learn it from films and entertainment which can portray history any which way.

9 ( +13 / -4 )

...I remember Japanese... telling me that they thought Tojo was a decent man who loved his country.

And yet "decent" men who "loved their country" like Tojo and the last Tsar of Russia, like all of their ilk, had the blood of millions on their hands.

1 ( +8 / -7 )

The US freed and reinstated to power Kishi Nobusuke who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands who were worked to death in Manchurian factories-

[ American historian Mark Driscoll described Kishi's system as a "necropolitical" system where the Chinese workers were literally treated as dehumanized cogs within a vast industrial machine.[27]

The Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labour to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs, and slavery would have to be used as the money to pay the workers was not there.[32] The American historian Mark Driscoll wrote that just as African slaves were taken to the New World on the "Middle Passage", it would be right to speak of the "Manchurian Passage" as vast numbers of Chinese peasants were rounded up to be taken as slaves to Manchukuo.[33] Starting in 1938 and continuing to 1945, about one million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo.[34] The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.[31]

Alongside the exploitation of men as slave workers went the exploitation of women as sex slaves, as women were forced into becoming "comfort women" as sexual slavery in the Imperial Army and Navy was called.[36] Kishi's racist and sexist views of Chinese and Korean women as simply "disposable bodies" to be used by Japanese men meant he had no qualms about rounding up women and girls to serve in the "comfort women corps".[37]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi#Economic_Manager_of_Manchukuo

5 ( +11 / -6 )

I am surprised this wasnt know by Japan.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Boy, some of these amateurish knee-jerk hot takes...wow! Even a Wikipedia cut-and-paste job thrown in? lol.

This is a huge find for the historian. More important, but less interesting than, the story about Tojo's false teeth that had "Remember Pearl Harbor" etched into them in Morse Code! Tojo wore them around the prison for a while, unknowing, until the perpetrator righted things and replaced them with a clean set again. Bet you don't learn this historical anecdote in school, kids!

Name a country that has been more munificent to its vanquished foe in postwar peacetime than the US has been to Japan or Germany. You can't. It's historically unprecedented.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

With the cruelty demonstrated by the Japanese military in WWII, I am surprised more Japanese officials were not tried and executed. What happened in Nanking, the Philippines, and throughout Asia was a crime against humanity. How the Japanese treated their captives was criminal in itself. To P. Smith who commented on Hiroshima and Nagasaki realize this. As terrible as the bombs were, they saved up to a million American lives and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs ended the war. Had an invasion been necessary the carnage of Iwo Jima and Okinawa would pale in comparison. Remember Japan started the war. It was up to the US to end it.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

While their deeds need never be forgotten as to learn from them, nothing else about these monsters is of any importance. Who cares where their remains went. Similar to bin Laden, it simply doesn't matter once they're gone.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

After the cremation, the remains were placed in separate urns and transported to the Eighth Army Liaison Air Strip and put aboard a liaison plane piloted by one of the Eighth Army pilots, with Frierson as a passenger.

"We proceeded to a point approximately 30 miles over the Pacific Ocean east of Yokohama where I personally scattered the cremated remains over a wide area," Frierson wrote in the document.

Sounds like a lot of effort to go to considering all the devastation Tojo and co. caused by being useless, blundering idiots. Weren't there any drains or toilets handy?

3 ( +6 / -3 )

A total of 75 million were killed in WW2. The Nazis killed 25 million Soviets. 61 million were killed by the Nazis. 12 million from the Axis countries were killed.

Your numbers are completely dodgy. I would’ve thought that after being pulled up on your 2/3 of marriages end in divorce claim, you’d have learnt to be more careful to fact check first.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

, shedding light on decades of mystery over their whereabouts.

The declassified documents, discovered by Hiroaki Takazawa, associate professor at Nihon University College of Industrial Technology, at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration,

No mystery has been solved, if the documents are declassified, then it is open information to anybody who is interested.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

....we don't want another Yasukuni

So who is it that is enhrined in Yasukuni that causes all the kerfuffle?? I was under the impression it was Tojo and the others....

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Were Hideki Tojo and his cohorts what the Allies, spearheaded by the U.S., called "war criminals"? 

Hitler may be called a war criminal because he instigated to systematically decimate the Jews. Auschwitz is a clear reminder of what went on in the Third Reich. But Tojo didn't conceive of such a criminal scheme. He was responsible for starting the war by attacking Pearl Harbor and the resultant crushing defeat.

Can a defeated general be dubbed a war criminal and executed by hanging, his cremated remains being thrown into the sea? Immediately after their execution, the U.S. tried hard to make Japan rearm to the teeth, making it a vanguard against the communist bloc, which was no different from what Tojo had conceived – a militarist nation.

-4 ( +2 / -6 )

Shades of what the US Navy did to another fanatic, Bin Laden.

Done for the same reason, to remove any fanaticism.

Next is Yasukuni itself, as it's just a list. Get rid of the listing of Class A war criminals, and the shrine can go back to its original purpose of commemorating the national war dead. Something it was up until 1978.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

P. Smith,

The war was fought in the name of the emperor on the part of the Japanese people, not in the name of Tojo. What conclusion do you draw from this fact then?

 Some pundits say the Tokyo tribunal was merely a retaliatory measure.

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

Some pundits say the Tokyo tribunal was merely a retaliatory measure.

Pal, the Indian judge, is lauded to this day by our amiable hosts for daring to label the war crimes trials as winner’s justice.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Hitler may be called a war criminal because he instigated to systematically decimate the Jews. Auschwitz is a clear reminder of what went on in the Third Reich. But Tojo didn't conceive of such a criminal scheme. He was responsible for starting the war by attacking Pearl Harbor and the resultant crushing defeat.

Fully 90%of Allied POWs held by the Nazis survived the war. Less than 50% of Allied POWs held by the Japanese survived the war. Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese employed Allied POWs as slave labor under harsh conditions, causing the deaths of around half of all POWs held by the Japanese. The Japanese may not have had formal death camps but their use of POWs for forced labor was for all practical purposes the same thing.

Btw, Japan's WWII war crimes considerably pre-date the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan had been at war on mainland Asia since the mid to late 1930s. The US was a latecomer to the war and perhaps suffered less than any of the other combatant nations involved in that war but arguably devoted the most resources to ending it.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Desert Tortoise,

Toward the end of the Pacific War, Robert MacNamara and Leut. Gen. Curtis LeMay masterminded to carpet bomb Japanese cities with incendiary bombs, and execute the plan they did, reducing cities to ashes. Both men jokingly talked with each other that, if the U.S. were to lose the war, they would certainly be prosecuted as war criminals. In an air raid known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid on the night of 9/10 March 1945, 83,993 civilians were killed in one night. Compare this figure with the Nagasaki atomic bomb deaths numbering 73,884.

Aren't the U.S. war strategists that executed this atrocity war criminals regardless of the consequence of the war?

There's no evidence that Tojo ordered his field commanders to do the same.

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

Imperial Japan's war machine was completely dismantled by the GHQ so that Japan would never go to war against the U.S. The new constitution stipulated that Japan would never resort to arms to solve international disputes. It was under this vein that Tojo was executed as a war criminal, for he represented bad imperialism that was Japan until 1945.

Soon after the execution by hanging of Tojo and other Class-A war criminals, however, the U.S. changed its mind to use remnants of imperialists to its advantage. In spite of the peace constitution, the U.S. urged Japan to rearm itself like it used to be. It's said that LeMay, a mastermind of the Great Tokyo Air Raid, contributed to creating ASDF, for which he was later awarded the Japanese government's medal of honor, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun.

The U.S. government and the Japanese government are thus all part of the same gang, whereby one cannot regard Tojo alone as a war criminal.

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

Dr. Shiro Ishii, Army Surgeon, of the 731 Unit that conducted vivisections on prisoners of war was exonerated from his criminality in exchange of handing over all documents recording the vivisections to the U.S. side. Isn’t the U.S. part of this vicious war crime then?

1 ( +3 / -2 )

What I want to point out here is that wartime Japanese leaders were not alone to blame for the war and hence war crime. U.S. leaders were also to blame all the same.

Not to mention, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war. We know there were some glitches in the transmission gear. But could it have been alright if there had been a declaration of war made in time?  

A film footage of President Franklin Roosevelt and his staff in the Oval Office of the White House to declare war against Japan shows an intense air during Roosevelt's live broadcast explaining why the U. S. must enter the war and crush Japan. But when the radio broadcast was over, he threw his legs out on the table, relaxed with a sigh of relief and all smiles.

What does it mean? Wasn't Japan caught in a trap prepared by Roosevelt, who had been looking for an excuse to enter the war and convince the thitherto antiwar nation to support him? Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was a windfall for Roosevelt, no doubt.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Agree with you, Zichi, yet, Japan, China and Korea are all rewriting history. That is because the “ leaders” still come from the same families in Japan and Korea and China has dreams of world dominance.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

Zichi,

The can be no apologies or whitewash revisionism of what Imperial Japan did in China leading up to the war and then in the greater area of Asia. So much brutality of citizens and military POW's. Extreme torture of prisoners and beheadings.

As you say. But hasn't a similar atrocity taken place on the part of U.S. forces in that war as well as in the Vietnam War? Why is the U.S. trying to force Japan to rearm to the teeth and fight a war along with it when all wars must be avoided?

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

If you could speak and read Japanese, get access to the following blogs:

https://xtreeem.com/I0002095

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uYswMJQ5Cw

Of course, you may counter that, compared with the crime the IJA committed, they may pale. But it’s not the degree of atrocity that is at issue here; it is the fact that atrocity can take place with any military of any country that should be at issue.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Login to leave a comment

Facebook users

Use your Facebook account to login or register with JapanToday. By doing so, you will also receive an email inviting you to receive our news alerts.

Facebook Connect

Login with your JapanToday account

User registration

Articles, Offers & Useful Resources

A mix of what's trending on our other sites