Location of Japanese wartime PM Hideki Tojo’s remains finally revealed by declassified documents
- Tojo, one of the masterminds of the attack on Pearl Harbour, was convicted of war crimes and executed in 1948
- He is still revered by some Japanese conservatives as a patriot but loathed by many in the West for prolonging the war
Until recently, the location of executed wartime Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo’s remains was one of World War II’s biggest mysteries in the nation he once led.
Now, a Japanese university professor has revealed declassified US military documents that appear to hold the answer.
The documents show the cremated ashes of Tojo, one of the masterminds of the Pearl Harbour attack, were scattered from a US Army aircraft over the Pacific Ocean about 50km east of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, south of Tokyo.
It was a tension-filled, highly secretive mission, with US officials apparently taking extreme steps meant to keep Tojo’s remains, and those of six others executed with him, away from ultranationalists looking to glorify them as martyrs. The seven were hanged for war crimes just before Christmas in 1948, three years after Japan’s defeat.
The discovery brings partial closure to a painful chapter of Japanese history that still plays out today, as conservative Japanese politicians attempt to whitewash history, leading to friction with wartime victims, especially China and South Korea.
After years spent verifying and checking details and evaluating the significance of what he’d found, Nihon University Professor Hiroaki Takazawa publicly released the clues to the remains’ location last week. He came across the declassified documents in 2018 at the US National Archives in Washington.
