Akira Muto (15 December 1892 – 23 December 1948) was the Chief-of-Staff of Tomoyuki Yamashita's Japanese 14th Area Army in the Philippines during World War II. He was executed in 1948 for war crimes during the war.
Biography[]
Akira Muto was born on 15 December 1892 in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan and graduated from the Army Staff College in 1920. From 1923 to 1926 he was a military attache to the Weimar Republic, and he became chief of intelligence of the Kwantung Army at the time of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, being one of the planners of the Second Sino-Japanese War. He led troops during the worst excesses of the 1938 Rape of Nanking, and in 1939 he was promoted to Major-General. In April 1942, he was given command of the 2nd Imperial Guards Division in Singapore, and in June 1944 he was given command of the Japanese forces on Sumatra in the occupied Dutch East Indies. In October 1944, Muto was transferred to the Philippines to serve as the Chief-of-Staff of the Japanese 14th Area Army, and he conducted a campaign of slaughter against Filipino civilians and prisoners-of-war. After the end of World War II, he was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1948, two years after General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the 14th Area Army's commander.