The little man had sent his wife a lock of hair and a long fingernail clipping. This is the custom of Japanese who expect to die. Last week, under klieg lights that gleamed on his shaven head, Hideki Tojo smiled and nodded as sentence was passed upon him.
He had been the wartime Premier of Japan; before that he was commander of the Japanese army in Manchuria, then Vice Minister of War and Minister of War. His admiring colleagues had called him The Razor. In the hour of Japan’s defeat, he had tried, and ignominiously failed, to take his own life. During the trial he had shrewdly defended himself and his country. Last week, in his faded army jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles, he did not look like the toothy, maniacal symbol of Japanese frightfulness that U.S. cartoonists had made of him after Pearl Harbor.
The sentence was death—by hanging. Earlier, greeting his U.S. defense counsel, Tojo had said: “I am prepared to meet my Maker. If the verdict is against me, I shall not ask for my life, and I do not want you to ask MacArthur for my life.” When he had heard the sentence, he said it was a “victors’ trial”—meaning, what else could a sensible Japanese expect? Outside, under a tree, his wife and daughter wept.
Tons of Paper. The trial of Tojo and 27 other top war criminals began in Tokyo 2½ years ago in the black painted granite building which had been the Japanese War Ministry, on a hill behind the Emperor’s palace. Eleven nations were represented on the Allied tribunal. * The trial cost $9,000,000, used up 100 tons of paper. Shorthand writers took down nearly 10 million words of argument and testimony. During the trial two defendants died; one, who began acting queerly, was sent to a mental hospital.
Droning on steadily for seven days, Australia’s ruddy, silver-haired Sir William Webb, the tribunal’s chairman, read the verdict. One by one, the prisoners were called in for sentencing. For six others besides Tojo, it was death; for 16 more, life imprisonment.
None of the defendants quailed; one or two were so old and infirm that they hardly seemed to know what was happening. When quiet, grey ex-Premier Koki Hirota heard his death sentence, he closed his eyes, then turned to look at his weeping family in the gallery. It was the last time he would see them. Japanese newsmen, who had not expected death for Hirota, murmured: “Hidoi! Hidoi!” (harsh, harsh).
Merely a Label? India’s representative on the tribunal, Judge Radhabinode Pal, filed a minority opinion violently dissenting from the majority verdict. Repeating the criticisms made by the critics of Nurnberg, Judge Pal said that there was no satisfactory definition of “aggressive war” in international law, that “aggressors” was merely a label applied by conquerors to the conquered. This was echoed by Manhattan’s Daily News, which warned U.S. military leaders that they were already being labeled “aggressors” by Russia and that they had better win the next war if they wanted to avoid Tojo’s fate.
The Japanese press published poems written by 13 of the condemned men. Tojo wrote:
Oh look! See how the cherry blossoms fall mutely.
Former Finance Minister Okinobu Kaya was less lyrical, more explicit. Kaya’s poem:
My conscience is clear as the sun and moon.
Could the nations that had tried Tojo, Kaya & Co. say the same? There were signs of growing uneasiness over war-crimes cases that had dragged on for years. Tojo’s conviction might be a good place to stop and close the account.
* Australia, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, India, The Netherlands, the Philippines, New Zealand, the U.S.S.R., the U.S.
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