Takushiro Hattori

Takushiro Hattori (服部 卓四郎, Hattori Takushirō, January 2, 1901 – April 30, 1960) was an Imperial Japanese Army officer and government official. During World War II, he alternately served as the chief of the Army General Staff's Operations Section and secretary to Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. Following the war's end, he served as an adviser on military matters to the postwar Japanese government.

Takushiro Hattori
Born	January 2, 1901 Tsuruoka, Yamagata, Japan
Died	April 30, 1960
Allegiance	Empire of Japan
Service/branch	Imperial Japanese Army
Years of service	1922–1945
Rank	Colonel
Battles/wars	World War II (Pacific War)

Takushiro Hattori was born on January 2, 1901 in Tsuruoka, a city in the Japanese prefecture of Yamagata. Upon completing his education at the Imperial Military Academy in 1922,[1] he enrolled in the Japanese Army War College where he graduated in 1930. In 1935, he traveled to Africa where he acted as the Japanese military's observer during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.[2][3] After returning to Japan, he joined the Army General Staff Office and was placed in charge of mobilization.[4]

By the end of the 1930s, Hattori was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and became head of the Kwantung Army's Operations Section. In this capacity, he served as one of the driving forces behind the events that triggered the battle of Khalkin Gol.

Upon his promotion to colonel and chief of the operations section of the Army General Staff in 1941, Takushiro Hattori played a key role in planning the Japanese conquest of Western territories during the early years of World War II's Asia-Pacific Theater. In December 1942, he briefly resigned from this position and became Tojo's private secretary.[5] After Tojo's fall from power in July 1944, Hattori returned to the Army General Staff to reassume his prior position as chief of operations.[6] He subsequently remained in this position until a conflict with the Army's Military Affairs Bureau resulted in his transfer to a regimental command in China.[7]

In occupied Japan, Hattori was associated with the G2 Division, which was responsible for demobilization and for writing the war history of Douglas MacArthur under Major General Charles A. Willoughby.[8]

After the foundation of the National Police Reserve, the first post-Second World War military institution in Japan, Hattori became the leading former officer of the so-called "Hattori Group" that attempted to become the general staff of the new force. Hattori was never commissioned into the NPR or its successor the Japan Self-Defense Force, but some of his associates, such as Colonel Kumao Imoto, served in it.[9]

In the years following the war, his name was mentioned in CIA documents as a plotter in a 1952 plan to kill the Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida.[10] In 1953, he wrote Dai Toa Senso Zenshi (The Complete History of the Great East Asia War), a large-scale military history of the Pacific War.