The changing face of the Tokyo tribunal
JUDGEMENT AT TOKYO
World War II on trial and the making of modern Asia
GARY J. BASS
912pp. Picador. £30.
“I WAS ENTHUSIASTIC and grateful for this miraculous success”, declared the defendant. The courtroom was in Tokyo, and the words were spoken on December 26, 1947, by the former wartime prime minister of Japan, Hideki Tōjō, as he took the stand in his own defence, dressed in a plain military uniform. The “success” he spoke of was the lethal surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor some six years previously, and he made no secret of his belief that the war Japan had waged against the US and its allies in Asia was a glorious and worthwhile enterprise.
His testimony took the Allies who had put him on trial by surprise: they had not expected him to be either so feisty or so unwilling to concede any fault in Japan’s strategy or reasoning in its decision to go to war. In that mismatch lay the complexities of a trial that used the instrument of the law to decide a question of geopolitics and ethics: who was to blame for the war that had ravaged Asia between the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, then the rest of China in 1937, and the end of the conflict of Asia in August 1945?
Tōjō was giving his defence at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, often referred to simply as the “Tokyo trial”, as an analogue to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals that preceded and overlapped with it. Judges gathered in Tokyo to preside over the trial of twenty-eight Japanese politicians and military officers who were accused of waging aggressive war in Asia. The judges were chosen from eleven countries, a selection designed to ensure that Japanese atrocities would be judged by a range of nations representing the victims, not just the US. Although the major European powers were represented, including France, the Netherlands and Britain – all of which had colonies in the region – Asian representation was minimal at first. China was the only Asian sovereign state represented (in 1946 there were few other such states aside from Thailand), but India was added, as much as a gesture towards the British Empire as an acknowledgement of the need to include other Asian actors. The US added pressure for a judge from the Philippines; like India, the country achieved independence during the course of the trial. No judge represented other Asian peoples who had suffered during the Japanese occupation, such as the Koreans, Indonesians, Vietnamese or Malayans. The trial lasted some two years. In court, day after day of evidence was produced about some of the worst atrocities committed by Japanese troops: the Rape of Nanking (1937–8) and the Bataan Death March in the Philippines (1942). In the
