Masaharu Homma

Dominant Introverted Feeling is a self-referential moral compass — intensely held, rarely argued, and often invisible to everyone outside it. Homma’s was formed abroad. Sent to the British Army as a language officer, he served with the Indian Corps in France in 1918, won a Military Cross, and came home with an admiration for the Anglo-American world that he never fully concealed and that cost him steadily in a general staff moving the other way. He argued against the wider war with China and against war with the United States, and was regarded in Tokyo as soft — a suspicion that followed him into the Philippines command.

Fi also explains his conduct in occupation. He treated Filipino civil society with a conciliatory hand, released political prisoners, courted the local elite rather than terrorising them, and pressed a policy of accommodation that his own staff and Tokyo found insufficiently ruthless. It explains, too, the trial. Where other defendants denied everything, Homma took the stand, admitted that he had been the commander, declined to hide behind his subordinates, and accepted the finding with a composure that impressed even the prosecution. In his last letters he apologised to his wife for the disgrace and asked to be shot as a soldier rather than hanged; the request was granted.

None of this is exculpation, and the entry should not be read as offering any. A commander who holds a private moral standard while the men under him kill prisoners on the road has not been moral; he has been absent. Fi that never converts into enforcement is, in a man with seventy-six thousand lives in his charge, precisely the failure the doctrine of command responsibility was written to reach.

Auxiliary Extraverted Sensing shows in how Homma engaged the world: directly, physically, aesthetically. He painted. He wrote plays and had them staged. He was a working journalist’s correspondent for a time and wrote about what he had seen rather than what he had theorized. His years in London and with the British in the field were not a study assignment to him but a lived immersion, and the impressions stuck for the rest of his life.

In command, Se made him decisive at the point of contact and impatient with the plan behind it. The Lingayen landings and the drive on Manila were fast and effective; the city fell within a month. But when the American and Filipino forces withdrew into the Bataan peninsula rather than fighting for the capital, Homma’s war became a problem of logistics, sanitation, and administration on a scale he had not prepared for — and his attention stayed on the present tactical object, Corregidor, while the machinery behind him improvised. The evacuation plan for prisoners had been drawn for a fraction of the number who actually surrendered, and the men who inherited that gap solved it with clubs.

Tokyo, which had wanted Bataan in fifty days, took the delay as proof of the softness it had always suspected. Homma was relieved after Corregidor fell, sent home in August 1942, and spent the rest of the war in reserve, without a command, until Douglas MacArthur’s military commission called him to Manila.

Why ISFP Over INFP

That blindness is where the typing meets the history. Inferior Te in a man commanding an army is not a charming weakness; it is the missing faculty that should have produced inspections, accountability, and the demand to be told what was happening on the road north. Homma had the temperament of an artist and the responsibilities of a conqueror, and the gap between them was filled by other men who had neither his scruples nor his restraint. The tribunal called that gap a crime. The judgment remains contested — most sharply because the officer who convened the commission was the same one Homma had beaten in 1942 — and the deaths on the road out of Bataan remain a fact that no verdict, contested or not, has ever made lighter.