Politics & Power Quote by Hideki Tojo

Tojo’s language is the bureaucratic velvet glove over a clenched fist: “peaceful commercial relations” recasts imperial Japan as a normal trading nation being unfairly strangled, not an expansionist power colliding with the limits of global tolerance. The key word is “survival.” It’s not an economic descriptor so much as a moral permission slip. If the nation is “threatened” at the level of existence, almost any response can be sold as defensive, even preemptive war.

The sentence is engineered to relocate agency. “Were successively obstructed” uses the passive voice to blur Japan’s own provocations - the invasion of China, the occupation of French Indochina - while sharpening the idea of external persecution. “Primarily by the American rupture” is a deliberate narrowing of causality. It gestures toward the U.S. oil embargo and asset freezes of 1941, measures imposed precisely because Japan’s military project was no longer a regional dispute but a destabilizing, violent bid for empire. Tojo flips that moral ledger: sanctions become aggression, and aggression becomes necessity.

There’s also a domestic audience embedded in the diction. Commercial “relations” sounds technocratic, almost apolitical, which helps transform militarism into household arithmetic: factories need oil, families need stability, the state needs resources. In that framing, conquest isn’t ideology; it’s logistics.

As a soldier-statesman, Tojo isn’t trying to confess motives. He’s building a courtroom narrative - for history, for postwar judgment - where Japan is cornered, America is the initiator, and “grave threat” becomes the alibi that makes escalation feel inevitable rather than chosen.