US Army papers show Hideki Tojo's ashes were scattered over the Pacific in 1948

Hideki Tojo and six other Class A war criminals were hanged at Sugamo Prison on 23 December 1948. Their caskets left the prison by truck for the Kuboyama crematorium in Yokohama. In November 1951 a man acting for Tojo's widow, Katsuko, asked occupation headquarters for the ashes. Headquarters answered that they had been "irretrievably destroyed." In 2018 Nihon University professor Hiroaki Takazawa found declassified papers at the US National Archives. A secret report dated 23 December 1948 by US Army Maj. Luther Frierson certifies that he scattered the ashes from an Eighth Army liaison plane over the Pacific, about 30 miles east of Yokohama. Takazawa made the papers public in June 2021. A rival account says some ash was taken from the crematorium and hidden at the Koa Kannon temple in Atami until a grave for the seven was finished on Mt. Sangane in 1960. Yasukuni Shrine enshrined the seven in 1978 and holds no remains. His granddaughter Yuko Tojo ran for the upper house in 2007 and died in February 2013. In 2021 his great-grandson Hidetoshi Tojo told AP that the missing remains had long been a humiliation for the families. Supporters still meet at the Sangane grave every 29 April.