He Was Married To The Job And He Was Fond Of Slapping People

He received his commission as a second lieutenant in the IJA infantry in March 1902 after graduating from the Japanese Military Academy in 10th place out of 363 students. As a member of the Japanese expeditionary army dispatched to engage in the Russian Civil War in 1918–19, Tojo served for a brief while in Siberia. Between 1919 and 1922, Tojo was the Japanese military attaché to Germany.

Tojo boasted that his only pastime was working on his own projects. He would bring work home with him and continue working late into the night with little regard for friends or family. Despite having three sons and four daughters, he never participated in their upbringing, since he saw them as a woman's responsibility and a distraction. Tojo was a harsh, humorless guy, known for his coldness, etiquette fixation, and abrupt demeanor.

Tojo, like nearly all other Japanese officers at the time, would frequently slap the faces of the men he was in charge of when giving orders, claiming that it was a “means of training” for those men whose families did not belong to the samurai caste and for whom Bushido was not ingrained in their nature.