Postings to the Army General Staff and the prestigious War College marked him as an officer with a future. He went on to the Military Academy in Tokyo, graduating at the top of his class.
Despite his humble origins, he won admission to a top military preparatory school, where he shone academically. His keen mind inhabited a five-foot-two, often sickly body. TSUJI WAS BORN at the turn of the 20th century to a poor family in rural Japan. Masanobu Tsuji is one of Japan’s most prominent-and notorious-wartime figures, yet few in the West know his name. Highly opinionated, he spoke up first in discussion and impressed his views on others by dint of personality, intellect, and supreme self-confidence. In a society that valued conformity and deference to authority, Tsuji was an outlier. He favored austere quarters and shunned alcohol and ceremonial dinners. Cultivating an aura of aestheticism, Tsuji famously burned down a geisha house-with a number of fellow officers inside-to protest moral decay in the army. Tsuji burned with a vision of Japan’s divinely ordained mission in Asia: a Pan-Asian movement-“Asia for the Asians”-that would expel foreign (white) colonialists and establish enlightened modernization, with Japan as the guiding force. Critics condemned him as a dangerous fanatic. Wherever he served, Tsuji attracted a circle of devoted admirers-and enemies. He served in Japan’s parliament for nine years. A violent racist and mass murderer, he escaped prosecution as a war criminal with the help of American authorities and went on to work for the CIA. Though lionized by supporters as the “God of Operations,” he craved battle as much as planning and was in the thick of the fighting from Manchuria to Guadalcanal to Burma. His conduct of the Malay-Singapore Campaign won him fame at home.
He had a hand in Japan’s decision for war with America. Tsuji forged an astonishing military and political career. Tsuji became the very embodiment of gekokujō. Suzuki and General Tomoyuki Yamashita, 25th Army Commander, officially ignored the incident, an example of gekokujō (“juniors dominating seniors”)-a peculiarly Japanese tradition of usurpation of authority by midlevel staff officers-that helped lead Japan and its army to ruin in the Pacific War. Your rejection means you no longer have confidence in me.” For more than an hour, the lieutenant colonel harangued the three-star general, then wrote a resignation letter and retired to his quarters, where he sulked for several days before resuming his duties. “I submitted my plan based on actual frontline conditions. “I’m the Chief Operations Staff Officer responsible for operations of the entire Army,” Tsuji continued, as recounted in John Toland’s classic history, The Rising Sun. General Suzuki dutifully donned his dress uniform and sword.
“What do you mean wearing a nightshirt when I’m reporting from the front?!” Tsuji shouted. on January 1, 1942, Tsuji-red-eyed and mud-splattered after racing more than 60 miles on shell-cratered roads-barged into the quarters of the army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sōsaku Suzuki. But superiors had just rejected his plan for a frontal assault on an enemy stronghold and ordered a flanking attack instead. Brilliant, charismatic, and impetuous, Tsuji had crafted a blueprint for conquering Malaya that was running like clockwork. On New Year’s Eve 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji of the Imperial Japanese Army fumed with indignation. The Fanatical Colonel Tsuji Stopped at Nothing to Secure Victory | HistoryNet Close
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