Teiichi Suzuki

was a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army, a minister of state, and member of the House of Peers. A close associate of Hideki Tojo, he helped to plan Japan's wartime economy.

Military career The eldest son of a landowner in Chiba Prefecture, Suzuki had aspired to participate in the forestry development of Manchuria based on stories told by his uncle, who was a colonel in the Imperial Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War.

He applied for Tokyo Imperial University's Faculty of Agriculture but passed the examinations for the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and upon the recommendations of his uncle, began a military career instead. He graduated from the 22nd class in 1910 and from the 29th class of the Army War College in 1917. After his commission, he studied economics for a year and was briefly assigned to the Ministry of Finance.

After the Nikolayevsk incident, he was dispatched from April to October 1920 to Siberia. he served as a military attache to Shanghai from November 1920 to February 1922. As he was fluent in both English and Chinese, he was assigned to the China Bureau within the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff and was sent to Beijing from August 1925 to December 1925 and to various locations in China from December 1926 to May 1927. he accompanied General Yamanashi Hanzo on a meeting with the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in June 1927.

In 1927, Suzuki started to become increasingly involved in internal political factions within the Army. In 1929, he joined the Isseki-kai, a clique that included Tetsuzan Nagata, Hideki Tojo, Kanji Ishiwara and Seishirō Itagaki. He then began to advocate a more aggressive policy in Manchuria and was one of the most vocal advocates for Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations. He was promoted to colonel in December 1933.

From 1934 to 1935, Suzuki served as an instructor at the Army Staff College and was assigned to the Cabinet Research Bureau from 1935 to 1936. He meanwhile co-authored a pamphlet outlining his theory for a "national defense state" to prepare for total war, based on utopian and Marxist theories on the state control of industries and agrarian reform. Continuing to serve in the Hideki Tojo administration, he strongly pushed for the creation of the Ministry of Greater East Asia, of which he expected to become the cabinet minister.

However, Tojo selected the career bureaucrat Kazuo Aoki instead, and Suzuki resigned as Minister of State and became a member of the Upper House of the Diet of Japan in October 1943.

Postwar After the surrender of Japan, Suzuki was arrested by the American occupation authorities and was charged with Class A war crimes in December 1945 for his advocation of war at the October 1941 Gozen Kaigi. Found guilty at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "planning to wage a war of aggression", he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948. He was released from Sugamo Prison in September 1955 after the end of the American occupation and was pardoned by the Japanese government in 1958. He was requested to serve as an advisor by several industrialists, and was asked by Nobusuke Kishi to run for the post-war Diet of Japan, but Suzuki refused all offers to return to public life. However, he continued to be consulted on a private basis by conservative politicians, including Eisaku Sato.

Suzuki died at his home in Shibayama, Chiba of heart failure on 15 July 1989, at 100 years old. He was the last surviving defendant of the main Tokyo/Nuremberg trials, outliving Rudolf Hess, who had committed suicide two years earlier.

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