Naoki Hoshino

Naoki Hoshino
星野 直樹
Hoshino Naoki at time of Tokyo Tribunal
Chief Cabinet Secretary
In office 18 October 1941 – 22 July 1944
Prime Minister	Hideki Tojo
Preceded by	Kenji Tomita
Succeeded by	Kunio Miura
Personal details
Born	10 April 1892 Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
Died	16 January 1978(1978-01-16) (aged 85) Tokyo, Japan

Naoki Hoshino (星野 直樹, Hoshino Naoki, 10 April 1892 – 26 January 1978) was a bureaucrat and politician who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Hideki Tojo from 1941 to 1944. He was an official in the Ministry of Finance during the Taishō and early Shōwa period, and a senior official in the Empire of Manchukuo.

After World War II he was prosecuted for war crimes in Manchukuo by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he was released in 1958.

Biography

Hoshino was born in Yokohama, where his father was involved in the textile industry. His paternal aunt was principal of the Tsuda College, a noted women's university. Hoshino graduated from the law school of Tokyo Imperial University, and on graduation he was employed by the Ministry of Finance. He rose through the ranks in various capacities, ranging from bank regulation to taxation, and in 1932, became chief of the state property section in the Ministry.

Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo he led a team of bureaucrats from the Ministry of Finance to provide an infrastructure for finances for the new territory in July 1932, first serving as chief of the General Affair Department in the Manchurian Ministry of Finance. In 1936 he was promoted to Vice Minister of Finance in Manchukuo. Hoshino oversaw the creation and personally directed the State Opium Monopoly Bureau that spread the mass use of the narcotic firstly in Manchuria and then in China as a way to soften public resistance to the Japanese occupation and expansion while generating huge profits. Under his authority tens of thousands of hectares were taken over by the Japanese underworld and put under poppy production, while dozens of laboratories were built to convert opium tars into various grades of morphine and heroin; thus the economy of Manchuria became inextricably bound to hard drugs. His administrating success there, made Japan by 1935 the biggest narcotics' producer accounted for approximately three tons or 10% of the world's total supply of morphine and 37% of total heroin production. According to the testimony of General Ryukichi Tanaka before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East during his post in Manchuria the revenue derived from the opium and other narcotics traffic became the chief source of revenue income for the Manchukuo government. Part of the narcotics was exported to Japan where they were used by a subsidiary tobacco industry of Mitsui of Mitsui zaibatsu in the production of special marketed cigarettes for the Chinese market bearing the then popular in the Far East trademark "Golden Bat". Including small doses of opium on their mouthpiece, apart from generating millions of addicted victims increasing the breakdown of Chinese society it also generated colossal profits for the Japanese economy that (according to testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes trials of 1948), Japanese military calculated to 300 million prewar dollars annually.

In December 1936, Hoshino was made chief of the General Affairs Office in Manchukuo (総務庁), the de facto senior civilian official in the country.

Hoshino in 1941

Considered successful in his mission to establish a profitable economy for the Japanese Empire in Manchuria, he was recalled to Japan in July 1940 to serve in the second Konoe Cabinet as minister of state and chief of the Planning Board, the central policy planning organ under the Prime Minister. In this position he was in charge of formulating a plan for economic reorganization in line with the New Order Movement. The plan formulated by Hoshino would've taken economic power from the zaibatsu and concentrated it in the government. However, due to strong opposition from the Keidanren the plan was scrapped and Hoshino was forced to resign from cabinet in April 1941, as were several other officials associated with the plan. Upon his resignation, Hoshino was appointed to the House of Peers. When General Hideki Tojo was appointed Prime Minister in October 1941, he appointed Hoshino as his Chief Cabinet Secretary. He left this position at when Tojo resigned in July 1944.

After the surrender of Japan, he was arrested by the American occupation authorities and tried before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East as a Class A war criminal on counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32 together with other members of the Manchurian administration responsible for the Japanese policies there. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo while his close colleague general Kenji Doihara responsible for the smuggling of narcotics in the occupied and non-occupied areas was sentenced to death and hanged. According to the indictment, as tools of successive Japanese governments they "... pursued a systematic policy of weakening the native inhabitants' will to resist ... by directly and indirectly encouraging the increased production and importation of opium and other narcotics and by promoting the sale and consumption of such drugs among such people."

He was released from jail in 1958 and served as president or chairman of a number of companies, including the Tokyu Corporation. He published his memoirs in 1963, which created somewhat of a sensation for his undiminished admiration of Japanese accomplishments in Manchukuo, and his unexpected lack of respect for wartime leader Hideki Tojo. He died in Tokyo in 1978.

Bibliography

• Browne, Courtney (1998). Tojo, the Last Banzai. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. ASIN: B000K5TTV6.
• Maga, Timothy P. (2001). Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2177-9.
• Sherman, Christine (2001). War Crimes: International Military Tribunal. Turner Publishing Company. ISBN 1-56311-728-2.
• Sims, Richard (2001). Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Renovation 1868-2000. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-23915-7.
• Toland, John (1970). The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945. Random House. ISBN 0-8129-6858-1.