Judgment at Tokyo

Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass is an authoritative account of the post–World War II Tokyo war-crimes trial which was both inadequate in resolution and crucial to building the future of Asia.

The global leaders who convened the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials sought to bring to justice the perpetrators of the war and achieve a reckoning for the victims. Yet unlike the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which attained a “near-universal national repentance and grief that are at the core of German politics and society,” the Tokyo trial was marred by politics and the haunting spectre of the end-of-war American firebombing of Japanese cities and atomic bomb devastation.

As the author amply demonstrates in this monumental history, the trial allowed “patriotic quarrels” to fester for decades across the Asia Pacific region. The prosecutors and judges, drawn from 11 Allied nations and three Asian countries, attempted to enshrine international law to combat atrocities against prisoners of war and civilians.

The guilt of Emperor Hirohito was hotly debated, though the Americans excused him in order to ease the post-war occupation. While the Americans were gunning for justice for Pearl Harbour, there was vivid witness testimony about the war crimes committed against the Chinese in Manchuria and Nanjing, as well as the “use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.” The author argues convincingly that the failure to prosecute Shirō Ishii, the chief of Unit 731, “Japan’s secret biological weapons operation,” remains “one of the gravest stains of the Tokyo trial.”

The author painstakingly delineates the daily toll on the judges and defendants, laying out the strategies of Tojo Hideki, general of the Imperial Japanese Army; Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who vociferously denounced European imperialism in his dissent and numerous others. The author consistently demonstrates how the trial reflected the tenor of the post-war geopolitical theatre, from the imminent victory of communists in China, to the entrenchment of Cold War thinking.