The most familiar image in the West of the Japanese general Tojo Hideki (1884–1948) is that of a bloodstained patient, surrounded by medical staff trying to save his life after a suicide attempt in September 1945. Tojo survived, was tried as a war criminal and later executed – the end the Allies wanted. Little else is widely known about the enigmatic soldier who directed Japan’s total war effort between 1941 and 1944.

All the more reason to welcome Peter Mauch’s pioneering new biography, which takes the story far beyond the botched suicide. The author insists, however, that this is a military biography, with the result that there is regrettably little about Tojo’s personal life and the private influences on his public activity. Instead, Mauch has reconstructed the story of Tojo’s long career in both the army and Japanese politics. Since he was at the centre of much of what happened, from the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the Tokyo postwar trials, this is also a history of Japan’s failed imperialism.

The Japanese army that Tojo entered in the early 1900s was a central institution of the rapidly modernising Meiji state. The relationship with the emperor was privileged, the high command largely independent of civilian control. The officer corps was brought up on the central principle of the offensive, with the