Earlier this month, Tokyo police arrested a Chinese national and issued warrants for two others for acts of vandalism at the Yasukuni Shrine.
Vandal attacks Yasukuni Shrine.
The latter two sprayed the English word ‘toilet’ on a stone pillar after urinating on it. They departed soon after for Shanghai, not forgetting to film their actions and post them on X, which is not available in China.
Yasukuni continues to attract attention because it honours the kami (divine spirits) of the 2.5 million Japanese war dead from the late 19th century. This includes war criminals convicted at the Tokyo version of the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
The trial of Nazi leaders responsible for military aggression and atrocities such as the Holocaust was the gold standard for attempts to make ‘crimes against peace’ a punishable offence under international law. It was a major aim of the Allies after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany to restore principles for a safer world by outlawing aggression and atrocity.
“It sought to re-establish the battered authority of the old international laws of armed combat, the illegality of killing innocent civilians, or abusing prisoners of war,” writes Gary J Bass in Judgement at Tokyo. Furthermore, “It insisted that powerful persons had to face individual judgment for war crimes committed under their command, rather than claim immunity …”
Gary J Bass.
Bass, a Princeton University professor and former journalist, has produced a mammoth story of the Tokyo trials that, at 900 pages, must challenge how big you can make a paperback (a hardback edition is also available).
It has taken him seven years of interviews, archival research, and knowledge of the already extensive literature on the topic. The notes and sources take up some 200 pages, which makes this a valuable scholarly text while written in a narrative form for the general reader.
Slow start
The Tokyo trials of the ‘big fish’ military and political leaders were slower to get off the ground than Nuremberg, ran into more problems, and eventually became irrelevant in the context of emerging geo-political events, such as the Cold War.
Many agreed with the verdict of Telford Taylor (1992), a leading prosecutor at Nuremberg, that the German trials retained their reputation as “an international legal force to reckon with” in subsequent decades.
But Tokyo’s, in this judgment, was soon forgotten except in the context of Japanese domestic politics and East Asian international relations.
NZ Supreme Court Justice Erima Harvey Northcroft in Tokyo.
Bass challenges these conclusions by injecting drama into all levels of his narrative: a court of 11 international judges with widely differing views; arguments over the choice of the original 28 defendants (reduced to 25 due to mental illness and death); the failure to put Emperor Hirohito on trial; and the rival aims of the countries providing the judges as well as a half a dozen Asian countries emerging from the colonial era.
New Zealand was involved, represented by Erima Harvey Northcroft, a Supreme Court judge and former judge advocate general of the New Zealand Army. Bass depicts him, along with a Canadian jurist and Scotland’s Lord Patrick, as the court’s “tight trio” that held the unwieldy bench to a single purpose.
Driving force
The chair, Australia’s Sir William Webb, was the driving force but often disagreed with those whom he considered his intellectual inferiors. Bass calls one chapter ‘Eleven Angry Men’ after the American jury drama 12 Angry Men. All are profiled in depth, but a few stand out.
Mei Ju-ao was well-schooled in Western as well as imperial Chinese jurisprudence. His main aim was to ensure Japan paid for its atrocities in Manchuria (Manchukuo under Japan) and other parts of invaded China, notably the ‘Rape of Nanjing’. However, as a Nationalist, he was on the losing side of history. Mao’s China had no use for the Tokyo trials except as a means of stirring the anti-Japanese pot, as it still does.
Tribunal chair Sir William Webb.
Law professor Bert Röling was appointed on behalf of Dutch interests in Indonesia. He followed his own agenda over jurisprudence, which divided the court and centred on “victors’ justice” that ignored war crimes committed by the winning side.
Court chamber of the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo.
Böling was one of three who wrote dissenting judgments. France’s Henri Bernard, representing Indochina, did by arguing for the prosecution of Hirohito. But the most notorious, at least for the victorious Allies, was Radhabinod Pal, a Calcutta judge appointed as part of the British Commonwealth group.
Dissenting opinion
His dissenting opinion was a condemnation of colonialism, an issue that greatly complicated the Tokyo trials but was not a factor at Nuremberg. Lal is still highly regarded in Japan, along with another anti-colonial Indian, Subhas Chandra Bose, who supported the Japanese invaders of Burma and India as liberators.
Halfway through the trial, the wheels started to fall off. Frustration ran high, presenting much of the colour in Bass’s account. Even the mild-mannered Northcroft requested Prime Minister Peter Fraser to call him back home. Northcroft complained to Fraser about the “time wasting technicalities” of the American prosecutors while describing the Japanese defence lawyers as “absolutely hopeless”.
The case against Japan started with the invasion of China in the 1930s and the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: the surprise attack on the neutral US at Pearl Harbour in 1941; and the treatment of prisoners of war in Bataan (Philippines) and the Death Railway in Burma.
At its peak, in 1942, the Japanese sphere spread halfway across the Pacific and included Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Indochina, Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, and Philippines) and much of northeast Asia, including Hong Kong Formosa and Korea.
USS Arizona bombed during the attack on Pearl Harbour, 1941.
Surviving victims
After 192 days of the prosecution case, which included harrowing appearances by hundreds of surviving victims, the defence opened in January 1947. Evidence came from the likes of former prime minister Hideki Tojo, foreign minister Shigenori Togo, and the emperor’s closest aide, Koichi Kido.
According to Bass, Tojo got the better of prosecutor Joseph Keenan over several days on the stand, arguing that Japan was forced into fighting out of self-defence and that its intentions were to liberate Asian nations from Western colonialism. Tojo added that the Americans who incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in no position to judge the action of other wartime leaders.
Eventually, on December 12, 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, set up by General Douglas MacArthur on January 19, 1946, wrapped up. It had created a paper mountain twice as high as Nuremberg’s and was branded by its instigator, MacArthur, as “cumbersome, slow, costly, and generally unsatisfactory”.
All the surviving 25 defendants were found guilty but enthusiasm for the death penalty had faded since Nuremberg; only seven, including Tojo, were executed. The rest received lifetime sentences. Further ‘big fish’ trials were cancelled as the Berlin blockade and the Cold War were already under way.
Japanese army chief Hideki Tojo on the stand.
Anti-communist conflicts
This changed everything. The decolonising Allies plunged into anti-communist conflicts, with the Americans wanting to ensure Japan would be its Asian bulwark.
This ended any chances of war crime punishment contributing to world peace. The Japanese, from their elite to the common citizen, seized their opportunities. Despite the country’s destruction and loss of empire, the people rapidly restored its industrial base and rebuilt its economy into that of the world.
While many Japanese were happy with curbing the power of the military, they found it harder to show remorse, as shown at the Yasukuni Shrine. In his conclusions, Bass widens the narrative framework to events in modern times, including a concise account of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view of history and the debate over nuclear weapons raised in last year’s blockbuster movie Oppenheimer.
This is a demanding but rewarding read because its human dramas are enacted in the theatre of world history. Its size is a deserved monument to the author’s effort, and his prose a tribute to the journalistic flair he learned as a former writer for The Economist, the New York Times, and major American magazines.
Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on trial and the making of modern Asia, by Gary J Bass (Picador).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor-at-large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not paid for by NBR.
