
Shunroku Hata (26 July 1879 – 10 May 1962) was the commander of the China Expeditionary Army of Japan from 1 March 1941 to 23 November 1944, succeeding Toshizo Nishio and preceding Yasuji Okamura.
Biography[]
Shunroku Hata was born on 26 July 1879 in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, and he graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1901, serving as a lieutenant in the artillery during the Russo-Japanese War just a few years later. In 1919, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, he was among the Japanese delegation to the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended World War II. In 1936, as a Lieutenant-General, he was given command of the Taiwan Army of Japan before assuming command of the China Expeditionary Army on 1 March 1941 and fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the war's end, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, but he was paroled in 1954 and died in 1962 in Tokyo after forming a charitable organization for IJA war veterans.