Yuko Tojo

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West-Front
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Yuko Tojo

Post by West-Front »

The granddaughter of Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime PM, says he was a hero and Japan only acted in self-defence, writes Deborah Cameron.

Yuko Tojo was six when her grandfather was hanged. She keeps his uniform at her home. The ash from his last cigarette, his hair and fingernail clippings are stored in a small box. In her heart she holds 60 years of accumulated anger.Her grandfather, Hideki Tojo, was Japan's prime minister in World War II and ordered the attack on Pearl Harbour. Arrested after Japan's surrender, he was put on trial for war crimes by the Allies and executed.

Yuko Tojo, 66, insists that her grandfather was not a villain, but a hero. The greatest battle of her own life has been over his soul. The calls for his and 13 other Class-A criminals' souls to be banished from Japan's most controversial war memorial, the Yasukuni Shrine, to a new one is being advanced as one way to make visits there by Japanese political leaders acceptable to China and South Korea, who suffered at the hands of Japan during wartime and colonial occupations.

Tojo is appalled. In her version of history, Japan was defending itself, there were no war crimes, the war was unfair, Japan was the victim and her grandfather was a martyr who died protecting Emperor Hirohito. "There is not enough pride in Japan," she says. "In his last letter my grandfather said that his family must never apologise or make excuses for him. If we do, all that he did to protect the emperor will have been for nothing and he will have died in vain.""Gutless," is the word she reserves for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and other business and political leaders who do not stand up to critics, particularly China and South Korea.

She may never get over the day in June when Emperor Akihito, son of the wartime ruler, paid homage at war memorials including one for 10,000 Korean dead during a visit to the Pacific island of Saipan. What irks her the most is that he has never paid his respects at the Yasukuni Shrine.

Tojo says that the Emperor is being prevailed on by the Government to stay away from the shrine because of political sensitivities. She claims that he wrote a poem in the 1980s alluding to his disappointment about it. For her part, she goes to the Yasukuni Shrine about 10 times a year.Incredibly, she says that when she visits she prays for everyone else memorialised there but not her grandfather, whose spirit she honours at the family plot elsewhere.

She does not trust recent public opinion surveys showing that most people no longer support the Yasukuni Shrine visits by Japan's prime minister. She puts the results down to "survey magic", as though they are somehow rigged.Nonetheless, she knows first hand how hard it is to motivate ordinary people. It is, after all, 60 years after the end of an inglorious war defeat and the great mass of people are now more interested in economic recovery than upsetting China, a crucial trading partner.

She takes a sidelong glance at the young people around her, eating extravagant pieces of cream cake with strawberries and listening to the jazz soundtrack that is playing. "No, they are not really interested," she says with a crusading "not yet anyway" look on her face.

Though she denies being a political activist, Tojo organises and leads expeditions to old battlefields where she searches for the remains of dead Japanese soldiers and repatriates them. She is indefatigable, organising young people to go with her and always available for speaking visits to clubs and youth groups. For inspiration, she often lays out for her audience the relics of her grandfather's life.

Last year, during an expedition to Palau in the Pacific, she recovered the remains of 110 fallen soldiers and brought them back to Japan. She will go again in a few months looking for more. Her grandfather, she thinks, would be proud.

Mr.Chris
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Re: Yuko Tojo

Post by Mr.Chris »

Has anyone asked her who was responsible for the massacre at Nanking, and as head of the Army why Tojo didn't punish the officers and soldiers responsible?

Chris

Alfred
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Re: Yuko Tojo

Post by Alfred »

Well, Tojo was not Prime Minister when Nanking happened. The Emperor s uncle, a Lieut.Gen. was there and ordered the massacre. Tojo became Premier in 1941.

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