page_title: Hideki Tojo
section_title: Early service as officer
hierarchical_section_title: Hideki Tojo / Military career / Early service as officer
caption_attribution_description: Young Hideki Tojo.
context_page_description: Hideki Tojo was a Japanese politician and general of the Imperial Japanese Army who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association for most of World War II. Tojo began his career in the Army in 1905 and steadily rose through the ranks to become a general by 1934. In March 1937, he was promoted to Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army whereby he led military operations against the Chinese in Inner Mongolia and the Chahar-Suiyan provinces. On 22 July 1940, he was appointed Minister of War in Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe’s cabinet. On the eve of conflict with the West, he was an outspoken advocate for preemptively attacking the United States and its allies. After being named Prime Minister in October 1941, he oversaw Japan’s decision to go to war and its ensuing conquest of much of Asia and the Pacific. During his years in power, he expanded his control over Japan’s ministries and military to the point of dominating national policy comparably to that of the genrō. He also presided over numerous war crimes including the systematic massacre and starvation of civilians and prisoners of war.
context_section_description: Upon graduating from the Japanese Military Academy (ranked 10th of 363 cadets) in March 1905, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the IJA. In 1918–19, Tojo briefly served in Siberia as part of the Japanese expeditionary force sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. Tojo served as Japanese military attache to Germany between 1919-1922. As the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, the Japanese Army was always very strongly influenced by intellectual developments in the German Army, and Tojo was no exception. In the 1920s, the German military favored preparing for the next war by creating a totalitarian Wehrstaat (Defense State), an idea that was taken up by the Japanese military as the "national defense state". In 1922, on his way home to Japan, Tojo took a train ride across the United States, his first and only visit to America, which left him with the impression that the Americans were a materialistic "soft" people devoted only to making money and to hedonistic pursuits like sex, partying and (despite Prohibition) drinking.
  Tojo boasted that his only hobby was his work, and he customarily brought home his paperwork to work late into the night, and he refused to have any part in raising his children, which he viewed both as a distraction from his work and a woman's work, having his wife do all the work of taking care of his children. A stern, humorless man, Tojo was known for his brusque manner, his obsession with etiquette, and for his coldness. Like almost all Japanese officers at the time, Tojo routinely slapped the faces of the men under his command when giving orders, saying that face-slapping was a "means of training" men who came from families that were not part of the samurai caste, and for whom bushido was not second nature.
  In 1924, Tojo was greatly offended by the Immigration Control Act passed by the American Congress banning all Asian immigration into the United States with many Congressmen and Senators openly saying the act was necessary because the Asians worked harder than whites. Tojo wrote with bitterness at the time that American whites would never accept Asians as equals and "It [the Immigration Control Act] shows how the strong will always put their own interests first. Japan, too, has to be strong to survive in the world".
  By 1928, he was bureau chief of the Japanese Army and was shortly thereafter promoted to colonel. He began to take an interest in militarist politics during his command of the 8th Infantry Regiment. Reflecting the imagery often used in Japan to describe people in power, Tojo told his officers that they were to be both a "father" and a "mother" to the men under their command. Tojo often visited the homes of the men under his command, assisted his men with personal problems and made loans to officers short of money. Like many other Japanese officers, Tojo disliked Western cultural influence in Japan, which was often disparaged as resulting in the ero-guro-nansensu ("eroticism, grotesquerie and nonsense") movement as he complained about such forms of "Western decadence" like young couples holding hands and kissing in public, which were undermining traditional values necessary to uphold the kokutai.
caption: Young Hideki Tojo
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