When a fresh-faced Navy dentist named Jack Mallory walked down the corridors of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison one day in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, he knew he was about to have an experience he would remember for the rest of his life. After all, he was about to meet the very man who had started the war in the Pacific, in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians had died, by ordering the bombing of Pearl Harbor five years before.

Mallory’s assignment: to make a set of dentures for General Hideki Tojo, then being held in the prison awaiting trial for war crimes—the notorious Tojo, whose very name stood for everything that was evil about the imperialistic Japanese military machine that had wrought so much destruction.

At the time he had a roommate named George Foster, also a dentist. One night, Foster was called out to the prison to examine the decaying teeth of General Hideki Tojo.

Foster knew exactly who sat before him in the dentist chair. As the war was being fought, American newspapers and magazines often caricatured Tojo, portraying him wearing large, horn-rimmed glasses and having squinty eyes and buck teeth.

Once word got out that the young naval officer was in charge of the task, hospital staffers began urging him to pull a prank on the general.

The military procedure for dental appliances was to engrave the name, rank, and serial number of the individual on the dentures themselves, Mallory explains. His colleagues pressured him instead to put the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor�?on the dentures.

TEETH MARKS Dr. George Foster, left, examines General Tojo. The man at right is unidentified.

After thinking it over, Mallory decided to go through with the prank, but to do it in a way that was less obvious and thereby safer—by using Morse code to write the message. He carefully drilled the dots and dashes into the dentures, engraving them with an unforgettable slogan forever ingrained in the American people’s minds. Only his roommate, Foster, knew what he had done, however.

“You could see it clearly when it was dried, but 99 percent of the time you couldn’t tell,�?Mallory said.

In the final week of Mallory’s stay in Japan he attended the war crime trials and watched Tojo as he sat, just 30 feet away, in the center of a lineup of defeated Japanese generals. As Tojo’s eyes wandered around the courtroom, Mallory noted the moment they fell on him sitting in the reporters�?box.

“He looked at me with a quizzical look, as if to say, ‘That man doesn’t appear here every day,'�?Mallory says.

Tojo’s wrinkled face broke into a smile as he pointed to his teeth and bowed toward him in thanks.

Tojo was convicted of committing war crimes in 1948 and hanged on Dec. 22. He’d been right about not needing his false teeth for long.