Gary J. Bass begins his massive, magisterial account of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials with American military police arriving to arrest former Japanese prime minister Tojo Hideki at his home on September 11, 1945, a week after Japan formally surrendered to the Allies. During the war, especially in the early days after the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Tojo was widely regarded to be as wicked as Hitler. The Japanese war leader was grotesquely caricatured in American newspapers and magazines as an evil rodent.
As the soldiers burst into his home, Tojo shot himself with a pistol. He missed; the bullet only grazed his heart. Japanese and American doctors stitched him up and gave him blood in order to make him stand trial. “Pulling through,” writes Bass, Tojo “grew strong enough to lament that death was taking so long; he had meant to finish himself off with a single shot, he explained, rather than risking the delay of ritual disembowelment.” Tojo was condemned by the war-crimes trial and hanged three years later.
