Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama (review)

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the victorious Allies believed there was strong evidence that Japanese forces, during their invasion and occupation of territories in Asia and the Pacific, had committed serious war crimes. Led by the United States, the Allies began an ambitious program to bring to justice senior Japanese leaders who had been key in taking Japan to war and other perpetrators of war crimes. Eventually, 28 military and political figures were indicted at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo (1946–48), otherwise known as the Tokyo trial, and many thousands of Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians were prosecuted in military tribunals around Asia and the Pacific (1945–51). Political figures and legal thinkers on the Allied side claimed the prosecutions were to be a marker in international law which would establish that governments and individuals who wage aggressive war and commit other war crimes should be brought to justice in courts. The Allies also pursued Japan through a military occupation (1945–52) that initially included a plan to reform Japanese politics and industry, through punitive measures such as the payment of war reparations and through international agreements that defined Japan’s role in both the war and postwar regional affairs. Lisa Yoneyama argues in Cold War Ruins that the pursuit of Japanese war criminals and other Allied moves to reckon with Japan after the war became hopelessly entwined with the politics of the cold war and with the legacy of colonialism in the region, which ultimately led to the failure of Allied justice. Yoneyama examines how the Tokyo trial and the postwar political and diplomatic settlements (the San Francisco Peace Treaty [1951], the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty [1951], the Treaty of Basic Relations between Japan and Korea [1965], and other agreements) between Japan and its former enemies “performatively define the war’s meaning for the post-belligerence world” (p. 4). Yoneyama claims these agreements and the Tokyo trial have collectively produced an “Americanized view” of the war, marginalized many of the victims of Japanese crimes, and helped establish U.S. hegemony in the Pacific after the war. Moreover, the impact of the postwar settlements continues to be felt in post– cold war attempts at redress for Japanese war crimes.

Scholarship on Japanese war crimes and the Allied process to bring Japan to account for those crimes has been booming in recent years. For a long time, Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice, published in 1971, was the seminal work in English dedicated to the prosecution of Japanese war criminals. It is a largely critical interpretation of the Tokyo trial.¹ Since then, however, and in particular over the last ten years, scholars have addressed the question of the fairness of Allied justice from more nuanced perspectives and have produced more complex explanations of the relationship between politics and justice in the trial.² The field is populated by as many historians as legal scholars, who seek to place the trials in their historical context and to understand what role the Allied pursuit of justice played in the early post-surrender years and what Japanese war crimes tell us about the conduct of the war.³ Cold War Ruins takes a similar approach in that it goes beyond the postwar courtrooms to examine the way the Allies—the United States in particular—attempted to control the language of justice after the war and shows how the voices of many of the victims of Japanese crimes were overwhelmed by power politics. Yoneyama views the war, its aftermath, and the cold war through an impressive multidisciplinary lens. The book is an important contribution to literature on postwar justice and on how we assess the cold war in Asia.

Cold War Ruins is a series of essays loosely linked by the idea that the postwar courts and the political settlements produced an unsatisfactory level of...