The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Twelve days later, on September 11, 1945, American officials in Tokyo arrived outside a modest one-story house on the edge of intensively cultivated fields. The house belonged to the Razor—General Hideki Tojo, the wartime premier. Tojo appeared at an open window, to be told that he was under arrest, and that he should immediately get ready to go with the Americans. He agreed and shut the window. A shot rang out. The Americans burst into the house and found Tojo sitting in an oversized chair, bleeding from a self-inflicted bullet wound just below his heart. Four years earlier, in 1941, as War Minister and then Premier, Tojo had forced Japan’s decision to go to war against the United States, arguing that the fate of Imperial Japan hung in the balance because of its shortage of oil. The cost of what Tojo and his collaborators had launched was enormous. The Pacific War in its entirety claimed upwards of 20 million lives, including about two-and-a-half million Japanese. Now, in 1945, Tojo’s own life hung in the balance, not because his self-inflicted wound was inevitably fatal, which it was not, but because of the difficulty, first, in locating a suitable doctor, and then in finding an ambulance that had any gasoline in its tank. So widespread was the fuel shortage that it proved easier to find an American doctor than an ambulance with gasoline. But finally a vehicle with sufficient fuel was located, and it arrived at Tojo’s house two hours after he had shot himself. Tojo was c...