HIDEKI TOJO

Urjeet Deshmukh and Praneel Rajkumar

Junior Division

Group Website

Word Count: 351

Thesis Statement: Hideki Tojo’s leadership helped gain military and economic advantage in World War II for Japan as well as the legacy that made Japan what it is today.

This topic appealed to us both through the history of World War II. We both knew much

about what had occurred during World War II, but we feel that there is always much more

knowledge to gain. As a result of our interest in this topic we took the advantage of History Day

to learn about some leaders who have dealt with this tragic war throughout history. One of the

leaders, who had participated in the war but was not very well known, was Hideki Tojo. We have

done background research on him and learned that he was a very skillful military general

following in the footsteps of his father.

In need of information, we first went turned to official websites where we found use

timelines about his life. We found this especially useful to aid us through his childhood and

military journey. Next we utilized books to help us learn the opinions of authors as well as the

facts of what had occurred. These books had gone into detail unlike the websites which had

provided us with brief summaries. Images did not effectively contribute to our project, but did

visualize how he had looked and what had happened during meetings.

We decided that websites were the easiest to work with and the best way to convey our

ideas and research. Websites are very convenient to work with as we can access them from many

places. We wanted to take the advantage of technology in this endeavor. Using nhd.weebly.com,

we had created our website and designed it to our best ability. We also think that websites have a

numerous amount of assets.

Hideki Tojo was a great leader with who had a drastic rise to power when he had first

joined the military. During his military reign his actions demonstrated his leadership qualities.

His legacy still carries with his granddaughter Yuko Tojo, who idolizes her grandfather for his

attributes. Even though he is recognized as a war criminal, he was an important person in the

world’s history. His strategies of war are remarkable and still used today.