Hideki Tojo became the Japanese Prime Minister on this day in 1941.
The appointment signaled Japan's slide towards war, and was understood in that fashion at the time.
Tojo was a career army officer of samurai ancestry. He harbored strong resentment against the United States for the terms of the treaty negotiated in the US by President Theodore Roosevelt that ended the Russo Japanese War. While TR acted as an honest broker in those negotiations, and one the Nobel Prize for his efforts, many in Japan felt that the treaty had unfairly been favorable to Imperial Russia.
German Richard Sorge, a super sleuth for the Soviet Union, was arrested in Tokyo on this day.
Sorge had provided an incredible amount of detailed information regarding Japan to the Soviet Union, although there is some question of whether or not the Soviets made use of all of the information that he supplied. Stationed in Japan starting in 1933, he had penetrated the German embassy in Japan and provided highly detailed information to the Soviets, including the near starting date for Operation Barbarossa, information that Stalin definitely ignored. He later informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union, which the USSR does seem to have accepted as accurate, allowing it to free up forces that would have had to remain in the East.
Sorge was a German national, but had been born in Azerbaijan where his father was a mining engineer. He became a communist while convalescing from wounds received as a soldier in World War One and after a time was recruited as a Soviet secret agent. His cover was that he was a reporter. In that capacity he'd supplied information from various locations all over the globe where he'd been posted, with his reports from Japan starting in 1940.
Sorge sent his messages to Moscow by short wave radio, using one time pads. While the messages couldn't be decrypted, their broadcasting couldn't be hidden, which is what lead to Sorge's arrest. As he was German and a member of the Nazi Party, the Japanese at first believed that he was a member of the Abwehr, but under torture he confessed to working for the Soviets. The Soviets of course denied this.
Sorge's second wife, who was in the Soviet Union, was arrested and died in the Gulags in 1943. Sorge's mistress Hanako Ishii survived the war in spite of her connection with him.
It should be noted that Sorge didn't work alone, and that he obtained information by various means, including through Japanese Communist spy Hotsumi Ozaki. He's an odd historical figure as he was a remarkably long-serving Soviet spy at a time when the Soviets recalled and executed many such figures. Like a lot of Soviet spies, he was loyal to the Soviet Union but not to his spouse. He was detested in West Germany following the war, but his reputation has been rehabilitated, perhaps undeservedly, as his service to the USSR can't really be regarded as an anti Nazi act so much as a dedicated Communist one.
Spies, it should be noted, were undoubtedly their own odd class. The Abwehr, which the Japanese had suspected Sorge of working for, did in fact have a spy on Japanese held territory, that being Ivar Lissner, who was, oddly enough, an ethnic German Jew. In fact, his ethnicity had been a factor in his working with the Abwehr as he had bargained with it to secure the release of his father from a concentration camp and his family members from Nazi harm. His spy network extended into Siberia, but he too was arrested by the Japanese, who then held him for the remainder of the war as, mistakenly, a Soviet spy. He survived the war, unlike Sorge who was executed in 1944.
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