page_title: Kenji Doihara
section_title: Prosecution and conviction
hierarchical_section_title: Kenji Doihara / Prosecution and conviction
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 極東国際軍事裁判市ヶ谷法廷大法廷被告席 English: The defendants at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East Ichigaya Court: Accused Japanese war criminals in the prisoners' box. Front row of defendants from left to right: General Kenji Doihara; Field Marshal Shunroku Hata; Koki Hirota, former prime minister of Japan; General Jiro Minami; General Hideki Tojo, former prime minister of Japan; Takasumi Oka; General Yoshijiro Umezu; General Sadao Araki; General Akira Muto; Naoki Hoshino; Okinori Kaga; Marquis Koichi Kido. Back row: Colonel Kingiro Hashimoto; General Kuniaki Koiso; Admiral Osami Nagano; General Hiroshi Oshima; General Iwane Matsui; Shumei Okawa; Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma; Shigenori Togo; Yosuke Matsuoka; Mamoru Shigemitsu; General Kenryo Sato; Admiral Shigetaro Shimada; Toshio Shiratori; Teiichi Suzuki.
context_page_description: Kenji Doihara was a Japanese army officer. As a general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, he was instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria for which he earned the nickname "Lawrence of Manchuria," a reference to Lawrence of Arabia. However, according to Jamie Bisher, the flattering sobriquet was rather misapplied, as that Colonel T.E. Lawrence had fought to liberate, not to oppress people.
  As a leading intelligence officer, he played a key role to the Japanese machinations that led to the occupation of large parts of China, the destabilization of the country, and the disintegration of the traditional structure of Chinese society to diminish reaction to the Japanese plans by using highly-unconventional methods. He became the mastermind of the Manchurian drug trade and the real boss and sponsor behind every kind of gang and underworld activity in China.
  After the end of World War II, he was prosecuted for war crimes in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and hanged in December 1948.
context_section_description: After the surrender of Japan, he was arrested by the Allied occupation authorities and tried before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East as a Class A war criminal together with other members of the Manchurian administration responsible for the Japanese policies there. He was found guilty on counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, and 54 and was sentenced to death, while his close colleague Naoki Hoshino, financial expert and director of the Japanese State Opium Monopoly Bureau in Manchuria, was sentenced to life imprisonment. According to the indictment, as tools of successive Japanese governments they: "... pursued a systematic policy of weakening the native inhabitants' will to resist (...) by directly and indirectly encouraging the increased production and importation of opium and other narcotics and by promoting the sale and consumption of such drugs among such people." He was hanged on 23 December 1948 at Sugamo Prison.
caption: During his trial before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. First in the front row from left to right
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