Second Sino-Japanese War

General Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime Prime Minister, at trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.  This followed an unsuccessful suicide attempt.   Tojo accepted responsibility for his actions (if not exactly blame).   He was found guilty of several really mind-boggling war crimes, and sentenced to death.  The sentence was executed, by hanging, on 23 December, 1948.

There has been a fair amount of revisionist history/comment surrounding Tojo, notably on the question of whether MacArthur and his Occupation régime deflected undue blame towards Tojo and his fellow ministers in order to exhonerate the Emperor for war responsibility.  Not sure I have much time for such arguments.  For more than 1,000 years, Japanese emperors have been under the effective control of military "bosses", whether Regents, Shoguns or, by the 1940s, the military/bureaucratic/noble cliqué that took control of government following the fall of the Tokagawa Shogunate in the mid-19th century.  On the rare occasions when emperors had tried to assert their autonomy, they tended to end up burned in their castles by irritated warlords.  This is not to say that Hirohito was without responsibility for the war and its outrages; however, the main responsibility still seems to lie with Tojo and his confederates.  Best regards, JR.