Arendt in Asia: Responsibility and Judgment in Nanjing and Hiroshima

Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) wrote little on Asia, but her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil suggests how she might have evaluated responsibility for and judgment of war crimes in East Asia. I speculate first about how she might have regarded the 1946–1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and I argue that she would have approved of the executions of those ruled culpable for the Rape of Nanjing while contesting much of the moral and legal thinking that led to them. Second, Arendt’s endorsement of the literary imagination as a tool for judgment allows us to read Hotta Yoshie’s 1963 A-bomb novel Judgment to explore how justice might have been served in the wake of the wartime use of nuclear weapons.

摘要:

ナチス·ドイツによるユダヤ人虐殺の犯罪責任を再考察した「イエルサレム のアイヒマン」著者のハンナ·アーレント氏ならば、南京虐殺及び原爆投下をいか に裁いたであろう？東京裁判の記録や堀田善衛の小説「審判」にアーレント思想 を適用し、その法律的、倫理的な諸問題を解いてみる。