A French magazine, L'Illustration, published in 1905, a photograph of a Japanese general taken a trench opened on the outskirts of Mukden, during the Russo-Japanese War. A photo that has not stopped surprising since it, and contrary to what the idea was in vogue at the time, appeared wearing a military uniform, European-style, smoking and equipped with a very modern binoculars.
An image that alerted the world to the fact that the Japanese have an army equipped with modern equipment and with which it would be necessary in a more or less near future after a possible conflict. General Hideki Tojo - the man who as a soldier and statesman dragged Japan into the war in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor - is a product of the renewal of the Nipponese Army.
Military attaché in Germany
Hideki Tojo was born in Tokyo on December 30, 1884, son of a family well established in life. He graduated from the Imperial Military Academy with the rank of lieutenant. At age 35, in 1919, Tojo was appointed military attache of the Embassy of Japan in Germany. A destination that one last year about the end of World War II, was not the most appropriate place for a young soldier. Still, Tojo learned, with the remnants of a defeated army and nearly dismantled, many lessons that would serve him for the future. For her and for their country.
In 1928 he was appointed commander in chief of the First Infantry Regiment who, eight years later, he took active part in the mutiny of February 26. It was in these troubled years, in which an ultra-conservative and distinctly authoritarian government tried by all means slowing the left and the pre-peace movements, that Tojo assumed the leading role and cemented his career, taking an active part in almost all missions of repression.
The following year, in 1937, is appointed commander of the Headquarters of the Police and shortly thereafter assumed the leadership of the Army Staff of Kuangtang, integrated Chinese province in Manchuria occupied by Japan during the Russo-Nipponese conflict of 1904 - 1905 and abandoned at the end of World War II.
President of the Government
In July 1940, Prince Konoye offers the folder in the government's War led by you. Fuminaro Konoye, a descendant of an influential feudal family, was seen in the West as an individual with expansionist ideas whose objectives were achieved at the expense of China. Dissolved political parties, instituted what he called a new order for East Asia.
He lacked, however, an agreement with the United States, failure that cost him the place. On 16 October 1941 Konoye is replaced by General Tojo at the head of the executive that immediately calls itself the objectives of the new order and begins the approach to the principles espoused by the member countries of the Axis. Konoye, who came to occupy the vice presidency of the Japanese government's first post-War, ended up committing suicide to be included in the list of war criminals.