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

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial suffers from too much memory and too little history. Yuma Totani attempts to remedy this imbalance and set the record straight on some persistent myths about the trial, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which lasted from 1946 to 1948. Incredibly, this is only the second academic book in English on the trial based on the official records themselves, and it critically revises the first, Richard Minear's influential 1971 treatise, Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press). The more journalistic treatments by Philip Piccigallo (1979), Arnold Brackman (1987), and Tim Maga (2001), while listed in the bibliography, receive no attention from Totani. For intellectual company she has chosen instead Japanese scholars, in particular Awaya Kentarō, Fujita Hisakazu, and Yoshida Yutaka, who have undertaken the most rigorous academic reevaluations of the trial to date as part of the broader debate on war responsibility that has taken place in Japan since the late 1980s.

Current global concern with international war crimes tribunals and humanitarian law presents a further context for Totani's study, one that she shares with another recently published book on the Tokyo Trial, Madoka Futamura's War Crimes Tribunals and Transitional Justice: The Tokyo Trial and the Nuremberg Legacy (Routledge, 2008). Whereas Futamura's sociological study tries to understand the reasons for the Tokyo Trial's low profile in postwar legal discourse relative to the Nuremberg trials, Totani ultimately contends that the Tokyo Tribunal's legal opinions have become "an integral part of the historical development of the international justice system" (p. 4), as evidenced by its citation in the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. If the trial records are allowed to speak for themselves, instead of postwar critics speaking for them, they have in fact much more to offer than conventionally recognized.

With this important first book, Totani establishes herself as an archival historian distinguished by thorough research, nuanced textual analysis, and clear writing. Her book claims neither to be comprehensive nor to advance an original interpretation of the trial as a whole. Indeed, she sees her work as a first step in mining a vast and largely untapped body of documents that can "expand our understanding of the Japanese war, war crimes, and war guilt as well as concepts of law, justice, and individual responsibility" (p. 261). To this end, the book is organized around those aspects of the tribunal that have drawn the fiercest and most enduring criticism, from the exoneration of Emperor Hirohito to the charge of conspiracy in waging an aggressive war and on to the failure to prosecute sexual slavery as a state-organized crime. The aim is not primarily to understand these postwar controversies, but to interrogate the trial records in order to discover the range of historical evidence and legal thinking available then, even if not all of this evidence was reflected in the final verdicts (for reasons that were procedural, political, or both). The result is a richly illuminating and engaging text within clearly drawn methodological parameters that students will find persuasive and experts will itch to explode.

In order to assess the Tokyo Trial's contribution to historical knowledge of Japan's war crimes and the evolution of the international justice system, Totani seeks to lift the trial out of the interpretive framework that has unduly politicized and thereby clouded its significance in various ways since the 1950s—namely, an overreliance on contextualizing it as yet another Occupation policy serving the interests of the United States at the framing stages of the Cold War. Totani shows that from a procedural standpoint (the focus of the first three chapters), the trial was not even predominantly an American show: General Douglas MacArthur's forceful personality and considerable power in postsurrender Japan in fact had a very limited impact on...