What did the United States do with the remains of Hideki Tojo, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack?

Until recently, the location of the remains of the Japanese prime minister executed during the war, Hideki Tojo, was one of the biggest mysteries of World War II in the country he once ruled.

Today, a Japanese university professor revealed declassified U.S. military documents that look like have the answer.

The documents show that the ashes of Tojo, one of the brains of the attack at Pearl Harbor, they were dispersed from a US Army plane over the Pacific Ocean, about 50 kilometers east of Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, south of Tokyo.

It was a mission full of tension and very secretive, in which US officials apparently went to extreme lengths to keep Tojo’s remains, and those of six others executed with him, away from ultra-nationalists who sought to glorify them as martyrs.

All seven were executed by war crimes just before Christmas 1948, three years after the defeat of Japan.

The discovery puts a partial shutdown at a painful chapter of Japanese history repeating itself to this day, as conservative Japanese politicians attempt to whitewash history, which causes friction with the victims of the war, especially with China and South Korea.

After years of checking and verifying the details, and assessing the significance of what was found, Nihon University professor Hiroaki Takazawa released the clues to the location of the remains to the public last week. . He found the declassified documents in 2018 in the National Archives from the United States to Washington.

It is believed to be the first time that official documents showing handle the remains of the seven criminals war, according to the National Institute of Defense Studies of Japan and the Japan Center for Asian Historical Archives.

Humiliation

Hidetoshi Tojo, the leader’s great-grandson, told The Associated Press the absence of the remains was long overdue. a humiliation for families in mourning, but is relieved that the information has been revealed.

“If his remains were at least scattered in Japanese territorial waters… I think he was lucky again,” Tojo said. “I want to invite my friends and lay flowers to pay tribute,” though more details are known on the location of the remains.

Hideki Tojo, prime minister during much of World War II, is a complicated figure, revered by some conservatives as a patriot, but hated by many in the West for prolonging the war, which only ended after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

About a month after August 15, 1945, when then-Emperor Hirohito announced the defeat of Japan For a stunned nation, Tojo committed suicide in a failed suicide attempt while on the verge of being arrested at his modest Tokyo home.

Takazawa, a Nihon University professor specializing in court martial issues, found the documents during an investigation into U.S. records of other war crimes trials.

The documents, he said, are valuable because they officially detail previously little-known facts about what happened and provide an approximate location from where the ashes were scattered.

“If his remains were at least scattered in Japanese territorial waters … I think he was lucky again.”

Hidetoshi Tojo

Great-grandson of the former prime minister

He plans to continue investigating further executions. More than 4,000 people have been convicted of war crimes by other international tribunals, and some 920 of them have been executed.

Tojo and the six others who they were hanged They were among 28 wartime Japanese leaders tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East from 1946 to 1948. Twenty-five were sentenced, including 16 to life imprisonment and two to life imprisonment. shorter sentences. Two other people died during the trial and one case was dismissed.

In one of the newly released documents – dated December 23, 1948 and stamped “secret” – US Army Major Luther Frierson wrote: “I certify that I received the remains, supervised the cremation and personally dispersed the remains. ashes of the following war criminals executed, at sea from an Eighth Army liaison aircraft.

The whole operation was strained, and U.S. officials were careful not to let not a single grain of ash, ostensibly to prevent them from being stolen by ultra-nationalist admirers of Tojo, Takazawa said.

“In addition to their attempt to prevent the remains from being glorified, I think the US military was determined not to allow the remains to return to Japanese territory … one last humiliation“, dijo Takazawa.

The documents indicate that after the cremation was completed, the ovens were “cleaned of remains in its entirety”.

“Special care was taken to prevent even the smallest particles of debris from being missed,” Frierson wrote.

The operator

The operation proceeded as follows.

At 2:10 a.m. on December 23, 1948, the coffins carrying the bodies of Tojo and the other six were loaded onto a 2.5 ton truck and they were released from prison After taking their fingerprints for verification, Frierson wrote in a document dated January 4, 1949.

About an hour and a half later, the procession, guarded by trucks loaded with armed soldiers to protect the bodies, arrived at a U.S. Army search squad in Yokohama to one last check.

The truck left the area at 7:25 a.m. and 30 minutes later arrived at a Yokohama crematorium. The coffins were unloaded from the truck and placed directly “in the ovens” within 10 minutes, while the military guarded the area.

The remains were then transported under surveillance to a nearby airstrip and loaded on a plane that Frierson took on board. “We are heading to a point about 30 miles above the Pacific Ocean, east of Yokohama, where I personally scattered the remains cremated in a large area. “

Today, even without the ashes, grieving families and conservative Japanese lawmakers, like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, regularly pay tribute at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where executed war criminals are enshrined with 2.5 million war dead, considered “holy spirits” in the Shinto religion. In Yasukuni, there are no mortal remains.

After the seven executed war criminals were enshrined there in 1978, Yasukuni became a point of conflict between Japan and its neighbors China and South Korea, who see the consecration as proof of the Japan’s lack of remorse for his aggression in wartime. Yasukuni also dedicates five other convicted warlords and hundreds of other war criminals.

Hidetoshi Tojo said his great-grandfather was constantly taboo in post-war Japan, never glorified.

“All about my great-grandfather was sealed, including his speeches. In view of this, I think it was part of the occupation policy not to preserve the remains, ”he said. “I hope to see more revelations about the unknown facts of the past. “

The author is a reporter for the Associated Press

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