Hideki Tojo

Early Life

The Beginnings of Tojo

Hideki Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on December 30, 1884, as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army. Under the bakufu, Japanese society was divided rigidly into four castes; the merchants, artisans, peasants, and the samurai. After the Meiji Restoration, the caste system was abolished in 1871, but the former caste distinctions in many ways persisted afterwards, which ensured that those from the former samurai caste continued to enjoy their traditional prestige. The Tojo family came from the samurai caste though the Tojos were relatively lowly warrior retainers for the great daimyō (lords) that they had served for generations. Tojo's father was a samurai turned Army officer and his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making his family very respectable but poor.

Tojo had an education typical of Japanese youth in the Meiji era. The purpose of the Meiji educational system was to train the boys to be soldiers as adults, and the message was relentlessly drilled into Japanese students that war was the most beautiful thing in the entire world, the emperor was a living god, and the greatest honor for a Japanese man was to die for the emperor. Japanese girls were taught that the highest honor for a woman was to have as many sons as possible who could die for the emperor in war. As a boy, Tojo was known for his stubbornness, lack of a sense of humor, being an opinionated and combative youth who was fond of getting into fights with the other boys, and tenacious way of pursuing what he wanted. Japanese schools in the Meiji era were very competitive, and there was no tradition of sympathy for those who failed, who were often bullied by the teachers. Those who knew him during his formative years deemed him to be of only average intelligence. However, he was known to compensate for his observed lack of intellect with a willingness to work extremely hard. Tojo's boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who issued the injunction: "Avoid the things you like, turn your attention to unpleasant duties." Tojo liked to say, "I am just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents. Anything I have achieved I owe to my capacity for hard work and never giving up". In 1899, Tojo enrolled in the Army Cadet School.

In 1905, Tojo shared in the general outrage in Japan at the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war with Russia and was seen by the Japanese people as a betrayal, as the war did not end with Japan annexing Siberia, which popular opinion had demanded. The Treaty of Portsmouth was so unpopular that it set off anti-American riots known as the Hibiya incendiary incident, as many Japanese were enraged at the way the Americans had apparently cheated Japan as the Japanese gains in the treaty were far less than what public opinion had expected. Very few Japanese at the time had understood that the war against Russia had pushed their nation to the verge of bankruptcy, and most people in Japan believed that the American president Theodore Roosevelt who had mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth had cheated Japan out of its rightful gains. Tojo's anger at the Treaty of Portsmouth left him with an abiding dislike of Americans. In 1909, he married Katsuko Ito, with whom he had three sons (Hidetake, Teruo, and Toshio) and four daughters (Mitsue, Makie, Sachie, and Kimie).