JAPAN: Tojo, War Criminal, ‘Rehabilitated’ in New Film

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, May 26 1998 (IPS) - A new Japanese movie is creating a row at home and abroad for glorifying Gen Hideki Tojo, the wartime leader who was hanged by Allied powers as a war criminal 50 years ago.

The two-hour and 40-minute film, which features the 1946-48 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly called the Tokyo Trial, portrays Tojo not as the feared general he was documented to have been — but as a noble samurai who sacrificed himself for the sake of Japan.

The film ‘Pride – the Fatal Moment’, premiered here on May 23 to packed audiences, amid calls from pacifist groups and critics that it be prevented from public screening.

One of the most powerful figures associated with Japan’s aggression during World War II, Tojo was commander of the Imperial Army and prime minister from 1941-43. That period includes the lightning attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941.

The film ‘Pride – the Fatal Moment’, which comes six years after Tojo’s granddaughter wrote a sympathetic book on the general, has also been condemned by South and North Korea, and China as an attempt to whitewash Japan’s aggression in Asia.

But director Sunya Ito and Japanese actors find nothing wrong with the film, which argues that Tojo’s trial and execution on Dec. 23, 1948 was the result of revenge by Allied powers that wanted it cloaked in the legality of a Nuremberg-type war crimes trial.

“I have attempted to put forward the Japanese point of view of the Tokyo Trial,” Ito says. “For many of us the Trial was a sham and it is wrong to let the world believe that the verdict of the Trial is the ultimate version of Japan’s role in World War II.”

In the movie, the character who plays Tojo, Masahiko Tsugawa, maintains till the end he is not guilty of war crimes he was being tried for. “I have done my duty” are Tojo’s last words to the American prosecutor in the film. “I have no guilt,” he says.

He is then led along with his 27-member Cabinet to await his hanging.

The film portrays Tojo as a lonely man, misunderstood even by his own people and used as a scapegoat by the Allied powers who wanted an speedy end to World War II by conveniently using Japan’s surrender to force the nation to accept all blame.

In contrast, the film strives to put forward the view held by Japanese who believe that the country fought the Pacific War to help Asia gain independence from white colonisation, and are tired of seeing Tokyo apologise to its neighbours for the war.

“There is no doubt that many countries under western domination gained independence because Japan fought the colonial powers,” explains Hideaki Kase, an author and critic who was in the film’s advisory board.

In the Trial, Tojo argues that he was responding to U.S. expansion in Asia — such as its of building airfields in the Philippines — when he ordered Japanese soldiers into Manchuria in 1931.

To a question by the prosecutor who asks him if U.S expansion was enough of an excuse to send millions of Japanese soldiers into Manchuria, Tojo is shown as saying “that is a different matter”.

Historical accounts say Tojo claimed he had no personal, direct knowledge of the supposed abusive treatment of prisoners of war, but during the trial assumed responsibility for his country’s actions.

Along with Tojo, the film lionises justice Radhabinod Pal, who represented India among the 11 nations that had officials sitting on the international military tribunal. Pal found all 28 defendants innocent, the only judge to do so.

The film has Pal arguing that it is wrong for the victors, who are also guilty of killing, to judge the victims. The defense counsel supported this argument, constantly reminding the judges about the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are also scenes which show Indian fighter Chandra Bose standing next to Tojo in Singapore, when he formed a Provisional Government for Free India. A month later, Bose joined puppet leaders of five nations of the Co-prosperity Sphere at a Greater East Asia Conference hosted by Tojo in the Diet building in Tokyo.

The concept of a “co-prosperity sphere” embodied Japan’s supposed plans for expelling western colonisers out of Asia and creating an ‘Asia for the Asians’.

India’s independence is closely connected to Japan’s defeat, comments Pal in the movie, as he goes on to lament the absence of Bose in India’s independence celebrations. In the latter half of the film, a former Japanese soldier is shown dancing joyously with India’s former freedom fighters, who are rapturous after the British leave India.

To the audience, the scene is one of the more powerful symbolic promotions of the revisionist view that Japan’s role in World War II was to be protector of Asia.

To many, it is easy to see the film as the work of influential rightists who have been responsible for paralysing Japan’s attempt to apologise for and pay compensation to Asian countries.

But the film is not easily ignored, not least because it has a star-studded cast and a well-respected director. It provides a glimpse into the lingering unhappiness in Japan as a result of its traumatic defeat at the hands of western powers.

“While I do not believe that Tojo was a righteous man, the film stirred deep feelings in me,” says Kyoko Nakayama, a 55-year- old librarian. “For many older Japanese there is the understanding that the Americans have taken advantage of our defeat and did not accept their own responsibility in World War Two.”

Nakayama is not the only one who thinks this way. Most of the people watching the film are elderly, a generation that remembers the ashes that remained of their humbled country and the 7-year American occupation of Japan.

Millions of Japanese like them lost their loved ones in a war they were told was aimed at defeating western colonialists. Today, many feel cheated because the world has not acknowledged their suffering.

The views of the actor Tsugawa, who plays Tojo, show the rethinking — some say revisionism — of Japan’s past. In a press conference, he said the film aimed to correct the distorted account of Japanese history taught in schools.

“The Japanese have been told they are losers and invaders and have lost their Japanese spirit as a result of this inferiority complex. I hope the movie helps restore a healthy balance,” he says.

Such opinions may salve wounded pride. But for critics of Japan’s failure to face its wartime past, they do little to lay to rest the ghosts of millions of Asians killed when the Japanese army invaded Pacific Asia more than half a century ago.