Science & Tech Quote by Hideki Tojo

Tojo’s sentence is a bureaucrat’s alibi built into wartime prose: a long, careful corridor of clauses designed to smuggle moral responsibility out the back door. The intent is not to describe planning so much as to pre-justify it. By stressing “preparations for action” alongside a standing readiness to “cancel operations,” he frames aggression as reluctant, conditional, even procedural. War becomes a default setting that could have been switched off, if only diplomacy or technology had cooperated.

The subtext is sharper. “We laid our plans” signals control and forethought; “should there be progress through diplomatic negotiation” shifts agency to an abstract process that can be blamed for failing. He’s offering a narrative where Japan was rational and flexible, boxed in by timing and communications, not ideology or ambition. The phrase “at the latest moment that communication technology would have permitted” is the tell: it turns a political decision into a logistical constraint. If catastrophe followed, the culprit is latency, not leadership.

Context matters: Tojo is speaking from the shadow of the Pacific War’s escalation, with Japan already committed to a path where diplomacy functioned less as an alternative than as a clock to run out. The line’s rhetorical power is its technocratic calm. It invites the listener to picture responsible managers hovering over a stop button, when the historical reality was that the machinery of war had been intentionally set in motion, and “cancel” was never meant to be pressed.