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Reviewed by:
  • The Tokyo International Military Tribunal: A Reappraisal, and: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II
  • John O. Haley (bio)
The Tokyo International Military Tribunal: A Reappraisal. By Neil Boister and Robert Cryer. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008. 376 pages. £60.00.
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. By Yuma Totani. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2008. xiv, 335 pages. $39.95.

History has not been kind to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial—the criminal prosecution of Japanese wartime leaders by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East from April 29, 1946, through November 12, 1948. Mimicking the Nuremberg indictments, the Tokyo Tribunal charged the 25 defendants with having committed crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity.1 All were convicted, all but one of at least one count of criminally waging war. The one, General Matsui Iwane, commander in chief of military forces in central China, 1937–38, was found guilty solely of failing to secure observance and prevention of violations of the law of war. Seven, including Matsui, were sentenced to death and were hung on the day before Christmas Eve, 1948.

Overshadowed before and after by the proceedings at Nuremberg, the Tokyo Trial has been largely ignored outside Japan. A complete mimeographed transcript of the proceedings was distributed to a half dozen libraries,2 but neither the proceedings nor even the judgments were officially published. Not until three decades later did a full documentary account with all of the opinions become available in print—published in Amsterdam [End Page 445] and coedited by one of the dissenting judges (Professor Dr. B. V. A. Röling of the Netherlands).3 Regretfully, even today the Tokyo Trial continues to be snubbed. The rebirth of international criminal tribunals culminating in the establishment of the International Criminal Court has produced a cottage industry in academic international criminal law for which Nuremberg provides the lodestar. On both sides of the Atlantic, celebratory symposia and conferences continue to commemorate Nuremberg and its legacy. Academic research institutes and educational centers bear the names of Nuremberg prosecutors.4 References to Tokyo are rarely made and then only in passing. Like a dissolute relative, the Tokyo Trial is best uninvited to the family celebrations, unmentioned, and, in all events, ignored. What might be gained from closer scrutiny are lessons unlearned.

Fortunately, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Tokyo judgments, two notable books on the Tokyo Trial have been published. We now have three significant studies of the Tokyo Trial in English. The first, which requires mention, was authored by a U.S. historian, Richard Minear, and published in the context of the Vietnam War.5 The second, one of the two subjects of this review, is an analysis and appraisal by Neil Boister and Robert Cryer, both British academic lawyers. The third, also reviewed here, was composed initially as a doctoral dissertation by Yuma Totani, a Japanese historian who studied and teaches in the United States. Only Boister and Cryer purport to offer a comprehensive evaluation.6 None attempts to provide a comparative analysis of the trials at Tokyo and Nuremberg and their separate legacies. All three reflect the very different environments in which they were written and published.

For Minear, the Vietnam War mattered a lot.7 He found in the “ideals and preconditions that lay behind the Tokyo trial” assumptions “that played a contributing role in the more recent mistakes that the United States has made and continues to make in Asia.” By exposing the trial as “Victor’s Justice,” Minear sought, in his words, “to contribute to rethinking our [American] more recent assumptions” (pp. 177–78). In contrast, Boister, Cryer, and Totani write against the current backdrop of the post–cold war era, the reemergence [End Page 446] of China as a major economic and aspiring military power, political and legal demands that Japan make current reparations for past atrocities, Japanese military participation in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, above all, the proliferation of international criminal tribunals and the establishment of the International Criminal Court. They thus bring...

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