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TOKYO (AP) - Gen. Hideki Tojo, Japan's war-making Premier who launched the attack on Pearl Harbor, declared in an exclusive interview that the American visitors noew could fix the responsibility for starting the war, but that history might disagree. The shaven-headed one-time terror of Asia, now living quietly at his comfortable farm outside Tokyo, flatly refused to discuss such questions as whether he expected to be tried as a war criminal of what defense he was preparing. But he was willing to talk of many other things, in moods ranging from steely-eyed passivity to hearty laughter. A little earlier a highly-placed Japanese politician tols us that Tojo expected to be tried as a war criminal, hoped to accuse the late Pres. Roosevelt as being the world's top war criminal, and then commit hari-kiri. Of this Tojo himself sharply refused to speak. Tojo's whole attitude was expressed in this statement: "Real soldiers fight to a finish in the field. War ends when peace is declared. Each respects an enemy who fights hard and cleanly, and so MacArthur has the respect of myself as well as the Japanese people." Tojo said that we were the first Americans he had seen since Japan's surrender. Asked who was responsible for starting the war, Tojo replied: "You are the victors and you are able to name him now. But historians 500 or 1,000 years from now may judge differently." Changing the subject, Tojo said he himself narrowly escaped death on June 25 when a Superfortress fire raid ringed his house with flames. When we first saw Tojo, a solitary laborer was working under his direction. "You burned my three best pine trees," complained the man whose armies destroyed most of Asia. We were taken to Tojo's farm - about an hour's drive from the Imperial palace - through police-guarded narrow lanes leading to his house. Our political informant earlier had told us that Tojo was roundly hated by the Japanese public because he failed to commit suicide. Other sources reported that Tojo amassed a fortune of millions of yen during his premiership, most of it from the ilicit opium trade in China where high generals acted as couriers to take the drug from North China to Shanghai markets. |
JUBILANT PRISONERS, first to be freed on Jap soil, wave flags of the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands after they were released
from the Omori camp. (AP Wirephoto from U.S. Navy via Navy radio from USS Iowa in Tokyo Bay).
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