Japanese leader thought his country "weak" for surrendering after Hiroshima
Japan's wartime leader felt betrayed by a weak-willed public and a frightened government, according to newly discovered private diaries.
General Hideki Tojo lashed out at his countrymen in his journal even after atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The journal, found in the National Archives of Japan, covers the two-week period from Aug 10, 1945, a day after the second atomic bomb had struck Nagasaki.
"The Japanese government has accepted the notion that Japan is the loser and it appears to be going to accept unconditional surrender," Tojo wrote. "Such a position frustrates the officers and soldiers of the imperial armed forces.
"Without fully employing its abilities even at the final moment, the imperial nation is surrendering to the enemies' propaganda," he wrote. "I never imagined such torpor in the nation's leaders and its people."
Tojo ordered the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into the Second World War. But he was forced out as premier in 1944 as the tide of the conflict turned.
He was hanged in December 1948 as a Class-A war criminal after being found guilty at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal.
The journal, published in the Nikkei newspaper in the run-up to Friday's 63rd anniversary of Japan's surrender, provoked a strong reaction in Japan. Professor Tsuyoshi Amemiya, a military historian, said that Tojo's bitterness at the people and leaders aware that there was no hope of withstanding the Allies' onslaught was misplaced.
"His feelings towards the Japanese people were completely wrong," said Prof Amemiya, 73. "I was a militaristic 10-year-old when I heard the emperor announce the surrender and I cried and cried because I never thought Japan would be defeated.
"But Japanese people, in their real hearts, were exhausted by the war," he said. "We had no guts left to fight. We were poor, hungry, tired from working so hard, the cities were burned to ashes and every day we were attacked from the air."
In the diaries, Tojo is critical of Japanese leaders' acceptance of the 1945 Potsdam Declaration, which called for Tokyo to surrender unconditionally, lambasting them as being "frightened by new types of bombs and scared of the Soviet Union entering the war" in the Pacific theatre.
Tojo anticipated a "humiliating surrender" but refused to criticise the emperor when the capitulation was announced over the radio.
"Now that the government has decided to proceed to diplomatic processes after gaining the emperor's judgment, I have decided to refrain from making any comments about it, although I have maintained a separate view," he wrote.
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