The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (review)

American and European historians studying the Tokyo war crimes trials have always had a more difficult time with them in comparison to the international military tribunal that deliberated in Nuremberg. Part of the difficulty is linguistic and cultural, in that men and women who have grown up in the United States and Europe rarely are able to develop Japanese language skills or truly understand Japanese culture. This makes it difficult for them to do primary research in Japanese archives, much less appreciate the cultural context in which the Japanese defendants lived and worked in the 1930s and 1940s. By contrast, Western historians studying German war crimes have a comparatively easy time of reading German-language documents and understanding the cultural milieu of Nazi Germany.

But this is only part of the problem. When compared with Nuremberg, the Tokyo tribunals were too long, since they lasted 2 ½ years in contrast to the 11 months it took to try the German defendants. Tokyo arguably had second rate participants. For example, the American judge at Nuremberg was former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle and the chief prosecutor was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (who was on leave from the court). At Tokyo, however, the U.S. judge was Maj. Gen. Myron C. Cramer, the former Army Judge Advocate General who was called out of retirement to fill a last minute vacancy, and the chief counsel was American Joseph B. Kennan, whose in-court drunkenness and general incompetency cast a pall on the entire prosecution. Finally, while the American, British, French and Soviet judges at Nuremberg reached unanimous or virtually unanimous conclusions about the guilt of the Nazi defendants, only 8 of the 11 judges at Tokyo concurred fully in the findings. Most damaging was the vigorous dissent of Indian judge Radhabinad Pal. His insistence that the Japanese accused-one and all-were not guilty of any crime had the immediate effect of undercutting the moral and legal validity of the verdict.

The result was that, while the Germans also complained about fairness at Nuremberg, the verdicts nonetheless were the beginning of a long and painful process in which the German people examined their own culpability for Germany's waging of aggressive war and genocide. On the other hand, a majority of Japanese society rejected the Tokyo war crimes tribunals as nothing more than "victors' justice" and began to cast themselves as victims.

With this as background, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials explores the historical significance of the trial as an arbiter of Japanese war crimes and war guilt. Author Yuma Totani, a Japanese historian and professor at the University of Hawaii, examines the Tokyo trials in the context of international law and concludes that the proceedings were not a "pseudo-legal event" (p. 246). On the contrary, Tokyo inherited various legal principles from Nuremberg and consequently provided part of the foundation for international humanitarian law that exists today. The decision in Hirota is illustrative. Japanese Foreign Minister Horita Koki was a civilian and a professional bureaucrat and a member of the Cabinet. The Tokyo Tribunal held that his inaction when informed about Japanese war crimes perpetrated against Chinese civilians in the rape of Nanking meant he "was personally accountable for the continuation of the atrocities" (p. 139). This was an important legal result because it established that a civilian may be accountable for war crimes even though he was not in the military chain of command. Hirota mirrors the Nuremberg decision in the matter of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who likewise went to the gallows for his failures as a civilian diplomat. As Totani shows, the import of Hirota has been lasting: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) cited the Hirota decision in issuing its judgment against a former Rwandan mayor, Jean-Paul Akayesu. In...