Background
Kanji Ishiwara was born on 18 January 1889 in Tsuruoka in Yamagata Prefecture.
石原 莞爾
Kanji Ishiwara was born on 18 January 1889 in Tsuruoka in Yamagata Prefecture.
He graduated from the Military Academy and Military Staff College and served as an instructor at the latter.
From 1922 to 1924 he was stationed in Germany, but on his return to Japan, resumed his teaching duties. In 1928 he was made a lieutenant colonel and became a staff officer in the Kwantung Army, which was stationed in Manchuria. The Kwantung Army was working to extend military control over the area and in 1931 created the so-called Manchurian Incident, which led to the spread of Japanese power and the establishment of the new state of Manchukuo. In 1932 Ishihara was a member of the Japanese delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1933 he became commander of the Sendai infantry regiment, and in 1935 head of the tactical section of the General Staff Office, making certain that Japan would be prepared in the eventuality of a conflict with the Soviet Union. In 1937 he succeeded in blocking the formation of the Ugaki Kazushige cabinet, and shortly after was promoted to the rank of major general.
With the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and China in July of the same year, he advocated measures to prevent any widening of the conflict, arguing that Japan’s defense against the Soviet Union would be endangered. In September he was made assistant chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, but found himself in conflict with the chief of staff Tojo Hideki. In 1938 Ishihara was transferred to the relatively unimportant post of commander of the Maizuru garrison and ceased to have a voice in important military decisions, and after serving as a divisional commander in Kyoto, he entered the reserve in 1941. He spent the year 1941-42 as a professor of Ritsumeikan College in Kyoto, but by this time General Tojo had become war minister and prime minister and applied severe pressure on the Toa-remmei, a civilian ideological group headed by Ishihara.
After the war, he was summoned to give testimony at a special court session in Sakata in Yamagata held by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
Ishihara was a man of great self-confidence and talent and developed a unique theory of warfare that combined elements of Nichiren Buddhism with the study of European military history.