As the Second World War began to reach its conclusion, the victorious allies turned their thoughts towards the peace that would follow. The Potsdam Declaration, in calling for Japan’s surrender, had declared that “stern justice [would] be meted out to all war criminals.” Gary J Bass’s Judgement At Tokyo is an engrossing study of the main trial which resulted: the International Military Tribunal in the Far East. Across some 800 plus pages, he charts the establishment, conduct, and aftermath of the Tokyo Trial, looking at the judges’ internal deliberations, the court proceedings, and their reception in Japan and beyond. In doing so, he seeks to understand the trial’s implications for post-war East Asia, even into the 21st century.
The first of Judgement at Tokyo’s three parts, “Genesis”, documents how the allies wrestled with some fundamental questions: who to charge, what to charge them with, and how exactly to structure the trial. The second section, “Catharsis“, is a record of the trial of the twenty eight defendants in Tokyo. Those accused included General Tojo Hideki, the war-time Prime Minister, Kido Koichi, the Japanese Emperor’s key political liaison, and a range of other military and political leaders. The final section, “Nemesis“, traces the implementation of the verdicts, and their reception. All of the defendants who survived to the end of the trial were found guilty of at least one charge—Japanese leaders tried, and convicted, in line with the Potsdam Declaration and the Nuremberg Trials—one might conclude that the Tokyo Trial was a straightforward success. However, the central sections of the book are dedicated to showing that reality was much more complex, and indeed flawed.
The central question faced by all participants at the Tokyo Trial was what crimes, precisely, had been committed… Few, if any, of the participants emerge well in Bass’s account.
The central question faced by all participants at the Tokyo Trial was what crimes, precisely, had been committed. Violations of the established norms of war—the murder of non-combatants, or the maltreatment of POWs, for example—were well established as crimes through a series of treaties (many signed and ratified by the Japanese). As a result, thousands of individual soldiers were indeed being tried in situ across Asia. However, the defendants at Tokyo were charged not only for their various roles in permitting the patterns of these “conventional” war crimes, they were all also charged for their parts in bringing about the war itself. The American public cried out for the architects of the attack at Pearl Harbor to be brought to justice, but in deciding to hold a trial the authorities set themselves the task of showing that this was a crime in international law, and more specifically one for which the defendants could be held liable. The prosecution argued that a series of international agreements—most notably the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928—had established a new paradigm of international law, in which launching a war of aggression was recognized as a crime. They argued that, as a result Prime Minister Tojo, and members of his cabinet, were guilty of a criminal conspiracy that culminated in the attack at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of China, and Singapore, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
This was, to say the least, an unorthodox interpretation of international law (one made all the more dubious by the decision to exempt the Japanese Emperor from prosecution). However, when the lawyers for the defense sought to challenge it, William Webb, the Australian Chief Justice, ruled the argument out of court. He promised to provide justification for this ruling, but the judges themselves could not agree on a simple explanation for the court’s basis; indeed some of them, the Dutch judge Bert Röling and the Indian Radhabinod Pal, eventually concluded that the charge of “crimes against peace”—that is, launching a war of aggression—was not well-founded at all.
At the end of two years, far longer than the trial had initially been expected to run, the eleven judges drew up no fewer than six opinions between them: the main judgment, together with three dissenting views and two largely supporting ones. Exhausted by the length of the trial, and the rancor and disagreements that had gone on behind the scenes, plans for a second wave of prosecutions were quietly abandoned, and a collection of other wartime leaders, who had been waiting in Sugamo prison all the time, were released without charge.
Few, if any, of the participants emerge well in Bass’s account: not Webb—grouchy and unable to control his peers—not the American prosecutor (drunk); nor the participants from Britain, New Zealand and Canada, scheming behind the scenes; not even Pal, whose powerful dissenting opinion was undermined by traces of denialism in the post-war period. And, of course, most assuredly not the Japanese leaders who, despite the shaky basis for their prosecution, were demonstrated to have presided over a litany of atrocities throughout the war, and provided implausible defenses and denials.
For all that has changed in the 80 years since the trials were planned, Bass’s rich account of the Tokyo Trial remains relevant.
In documenting the trial and all of its flaws, Bass’s objective is to understand the ongoing shadow that the Second World War casts over contemporary East Asia. The trial was, he argues, “a crucial lost opportunity… to [set] East Asia’s future on a more hopeful track.” The contrast between Europe and East Asia in this regard is striking, but how much of the difference can be laid at the feet of the Tokyo Trial is debatable. It is worth noting that while some of the issues of key controversy today were sidestepped by the trial (Unit 731’s chemical and biological weapons testing, the systematic sexual trafficking of women and girls), another, the Nanjing Massacre, was documented in detail. This cuts against the idea that the trial might have provided a forum in which the presenting of evidence could settle the historical record.
Moreover, while Japan’s relations with China and the two Koreas are still troubled by issues leading back to the Second World War, other participants (most notably the United States of America) were able to forge more stable, less fraught relationships with Japan in the postwar period. Indeed, Second World War revisionism and a firm embrace of the US security alliance often go hand in hand in Japan. Again, this complicates the suggestion that the trial’s failures were responsible for the ongoing controversies in East Asia surrounding the Second World War. In short, it is far from clear whether a more coherent, well-managed trial would have had a dramatic impact on the legacies of the war, given the complex of moving parts that was Cold War East Asia.
That said, Bass’s rich account of the Tokyo Trial remains relevant. For all that has changed in the 80 years since the trials were planned, wars of aggression remain an international concern, and so there is much to be learned about the difficulties involved in forging and sustaining international coalitions, as well as the challenge faced in attempts to establish the conduct of international law in a way that can resist the charge of “victor’s justice”.