October 16, 1941. In Tokyo, the moderate prime minister resigns in despair, and the man who replaces him is General Hideki Tojo, the hard-faced leader of the army's war faction. With Tojo in power, the last restraint on Japan's slide toward war with the United States falls away. Pearl Harbor is now less than two months off.
Japan in the autumn of 1941 stood at a crossroads and knew it. It was bogged down in its endless war in China, and its move into Indochina, which I told you about back in September, had triggered a crushing American oil embargo. Japan imported almost all its oil, and now the tap was being closed. Its leaders faced a stark choice: back down, pull out of China and Indochina to get the oil flowing again, and accept a humiliating climb-down, or seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies and the rest of Southeast Asia by force, which meant war with the United States and the British Empire.
The outgoing prime minister, Prince Konoye, had spent his last months desperately seeking a diplomatic way out, trying to negotiate with Washington, even hoping for a personal summit with Roosevelt, to avoid a war he feared Japan could not win. But he could not control his own military, above all the army, which was adamant that Japan must not retreat from China and increasingly convinced that war with America was inevitable and should come sooner rather than later, while Japan still had its stockpiles. Caught between an America that would not lift the embargo without a Japanese withdrawal and an army that would not withdraw, Konoye gave up and resigned.
The man who took his place was Tojo, who had been the army minister and was the embodiment of the militarist hard line. Nicknamed "the Razor" for his sharp, uncompromising manner, Tojo was a product of the army clique that had driven Japanese expansion for a decade, a believer in military solutions and national will. His appointment as prime minister, while he also kept the army ministry and other powers, meant that the faction most willing to fight the United States now ran the government.
There was a brief, cynical window in which the diplomats kept talking, but the decision was effectively made. Under Tojo, Japan set a deadline: if negotiations with America did not produce a breakthrough on Japanese terms by late November, the country would go to war. The talks, predictably, went nowhere, because neither side would give on the fundamental issue of China. And behind the diplomatic screen, the Japanese navy was already training and planning for the operation that Admiral Yamamoto had conceived, a surprise carrier strike across the Pacific against the American fleet at its Hawaiian base.
So the 16th of October is one of the quiet hinge days of the war, a change of government in Tokyo that looks like ordinary politics but is really the moment the war party took full control and the countdown to Pearl Harbor began in earnest. When the bombs fell on the American fleet on the 7th of December, it was Tojo who was prime minister, and his name would become, to Americans, the face of Japanese militarism, the eastern counterpart of the dictators in Europe. His rise to power on this day was the point of no return on Japan's road to war with the United States.