The Tokyo Trial: Japan as America’s alien ally and child

How Uncle Sam browbeat the Japanese

Why read about a trial of fewer than 30 senior Japanese admirals, generals and officials held 75 years ago? Well: the Tokyo Trial, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and formally as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), has more contemporary relevance than one might think – relevance to people in the West, not just the East.

Just recently, on 21 April 2021, Japanese premier Yoshihide Suga flaunted his disagreement with the guilty verdicts and seven hangings dictated by the IMTFE. He sent a ceremonial offering in his name to the Yasukuni Shrine, Chiyoda, Tokyo. There, a number of ‘Class A’ Japanese war criminals, so designated by the verdicts of the IMTFE, are buried. Barely noticed in the West, Suga’s advertisement ‘predictably angered’ Beijing and Seoul, since Chinese and Koreans retain bitter memories of Japanese occupation before and during the Second World War.

In Asia the long arm of history is as dextrous, deceptive and strong as anywhere on this planet, maybe more.

The Tokyo Trial lasted from 3 May 1946 right through to 12 November 1948. It generated a 48,000-word transcript and a 1200-page majority judgment made by seven of the 11 judges, who were drawn from 11 nations. Floodlit for filming, hot, humid until air conditioning was brought in, the Trial was never a purely legal affair. Rather, it was a political event of great duration, complexity and controversy, and one that directly affects Japan to this day.

Of the 55 counts brought against the defendants, no fewer than 45 were dismissed. The majority judgment of the seven was presented as a fait accompli to the other four judges, who published various kinds of disagreement. This was all very different from the unanimity registered among the Allies at the Nuremberg Trials.

Compared with Nuremberg, the Tokyo Trial looks obscure. Its anniversary has had almost no media coverage, even if it was earlier the subject of an excellent Netflix docudrama, Tokyo Trial (2016). Just as the Japanese military destroyed many documents in their surrender to America, Tokyo has never published the full proceedings of the Trial. Yet, given its lasting impact, the very obscurity of the IMTFE should only increase our interest in it.

Five theses on the IMTFE

East Asia and the Western Pacific, the region’s wars, the region’s past – these deserve everyone’s attention in the 2020s. With China expanding role in world growth and innovation, and intensifying military manoeuvres from all sides in the East and South China Seas, we need to understand the status and the clout of Beijing’s 20th-century adversary, Japan, just as much as we do Joe Biden’s 21st-century posture toward Xi Jinping. For in Asia, history counts. Remembering this, here are five theses on the IMTFE.

1. Despite the mixed results it brought the Allies, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, first and foremost, sealed the political subordination of Japanese imperialism to the American sort, by formalising the doctrine of Japanese war guilt. The IMTFE implicitly exonerated America and Britain for their colonial and racial exploits before and during the war – and for their use of atomic weapons at the end of it. The judgments made at Tokyo broadly achieved these feats, indeed, for three-quarters of a century. For all its formidable modernisation, Japan remains a junior, non-nuclear partner to America today.
2. The IMTFE took place in all but the last of the years spanning US victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and the two serious blows dealt against the US in 1949, which saw the first Soviet atomic test (August) succeeded by the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (October). In other words, the two-and-a-half years of the Tribunal marked the zenith of American power in the East. With the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki behind it, the Nuremberg Trials brought to a successful conclusion on 1 October 1946, and the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the Tokyo Trial acted as the inception and short-lived highpoint of American hegemony over Asia and indeed the world. Politically, the IMTFE ratified and legitimated Washington’s rule over post-war Japan, and went a little way to back up its claim to be a friend of Asia’s oppressed.
3. Surrounded by rubble that had previously been a city, the Tokyo Trial was also surrounded, before, during and after it was in process, by damaging defeats for working-class politics in Japan. In fact, the IMTFE itself played a part in the defeat of the left in Japan. By decanting off a tiny fraction of the Japanese elite for special treatment, the Tokyo Trial compounded a confusion that had long dogged the left – namely, a confusion about the nature of class rule in Japan.
4. The IMTFE couldn’t quite prevent the West’s behaviour in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere from being questioned – at the time, and more since. In particular, racial aspects of the Second World War, already highlighted at Nuremberg, surfaced again, but in reverse: although stomach-churning interwar and wartime Japanese attacks on the Chinese and others were recounted, another critique at the IMTFE was of double standards on the part of the white West, which a growing anti-colonial movement in Asia was not prepared to tolerate.
5. Unlike at Nuremberg, both Japanese and American lawyers for the defence directly and publicly denounced the charges as unlawful. So did other critics – in both Japan and America. Most of Japan, after all, lay in complete ruins. With those facts on the ground, the West’s racial hypocrisy could not escape exposure at the IMTFE. As a result, the Tokyo Trial emboldened the post-war Japanese right, and proved to be a political blow from which, in Asia, America has never entirely recovered. Indeed, Frank Furedi argues that in the tempering of the excesses of Western racism so as to deal with anti-Nazi feeling after 1945, the most significant influence was Japan’s ‘success in transforming race into an international issue’ (1).

Again and again the West tried to skate over things. But the fact remains that, for all the torture and devastation that Japanese imperialism inflicted on its victims in the 1930s and early 1940s, Japanese Pan-Asianism was regarded as an inspiration to millions of Asians – and to not a few American blacks, too (2). Of course the Tokyo Trial was unfair and arbitrary: as the ‘vigilantly conservative’ head of US intelligence in Japan privately but later quite famously told the Dutch judge, Bert Röling, it was ‘the worst hypocrisy in recorded history’ (3). But at the same time the Trial got the victors’ justice for which it was criticised by the defence, by the 1235-page minority judgment of the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, and, in 1971, by the liberal American historian Richard Minear in his revisionist landmark Victors’ Justice: the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (4). No; for the Americans, the Tokyo Trial was in fact a Pyrrhic victory, if it was a victory at all. In its lengthy and disputatious efforts to unmask Japanese villains as pro-feudal fanatics, the IMTFE also let slip the veil that Washington wanted to draw over its racial record in the Far East.

Significant absences

Symbolically, the IMRFE convened in the auditorium of the elite Imperial Army Officers’ School, Japan’s West Point, in Ichigaya, which was located on a fairly high hill near the centre of Tokyo. Both the physical courtroom and the list of crimes were modelled on the Nuremberg Trials.

Hideki Tojo, head of the Japanese army, and 27 other Japanese men were indicted for a trio of awful crimes familiar from Nuremberg: crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unlike Nuremberg, though, the villains at Tokyo gained little of the media spotlight or popular recognition that had greeted Goering, Speer and Hess on the first, brand new outing for war crimes trials. With the exception of Tojo, whose attempted suicide in September 1945 came complete with photographs, their names are now forgotten in the West.

There were big, unmissable problems. Mysteriously and somewhat notoriously at the time, but again largely forgotten now, Japan’s Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito was not present at the IMTFE. Long revered as a god and, exercising his constitutional prerogatives, in personal supreme command of Japan’s military offensives from 1937 onward, Hirohito was, as Herbert Bix has shown, directly involved in the planning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (5). Nevertheless, Washington knew that it was through preserving him that America would best be able to wield authority in Japan. Indeed, on the night death sentences were pronounced, Hirohito gave a dinner for the Trial’s American chief prosecutor.

Apart from the Emperor, there were other important absences. Before the war, the zaibatsu, the giant finance-to-industry super-monopolies – Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda, Mitsui and others – had backed a series of repressive regimes. At the IMTFE, however, the leaders of these conglomerates were, like the Emperor, nowhere to be seen.

Again, only China’s Nationalists, not its Communists, were represented among the judges. Importantly, too, Korea, which had been ruled by Tokyo since 1905, had no position at the Trial. Similarly, while the role played by Korean ‘comfort women’, or prostitutes at the service of Japan’s Imperial Army, remains a live issue today, it was treated with ‘almost complete neglect’ by the IMTFE. This was despite the significant fact that, unlike Nuremberg, the Tokyo Trial did recognise rape as a war crime – one committed in China, Manila, the East Indies, and especially in Nanjing, where Japanese troops raped about 20,000 women in the first month of occupation (6).

Though the Soviet Union, clearly an East Asian power, was there in an official capacity, India and the Philippines, both of which Japan had invaded, were only granted judges at the last minute. None of Japan’s other wartime victims – Burma, Cambodia, the Dutch East Indies, Laos, Malaya, Singapore and more – got a look-in. Of course, none of these subject nations had the kind of independent existence, back then, that they and their successors have today. But that was just the point. Across seven and a half decades, their absence from the IMTFE, for decades not flagged up in commentaries on it, in fact speaks volumes.

On 13 February 1946, little more than two months before the IMTFE convened, the victorious Supreme Allied Commander of 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, stunned foreign secretary and soon-to-be prime minister Yoshida Shigeru by rejecting his draft Constitution for post-war Japan and, instead, imposing America’s own draft. To ram the point home, MacArthur’s intermediary, General Courtney Whitney, chose a garden break in negotiations to ridicule a Japanese aide by telling him: ‘We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine’ (7). Then, through the IMTFE’s death sentences and the untouchability it conferred upon the absent Emperor and zaibatsu, MacArthur was able to set both the political narrative and the martial tone for the US occupation of Japan (8).

Tokyo vs Nuremberg

These things are today mostly forgotten. However, US power in Japan, which the Constitution and then the IMTFE consolidated, is still very much with us. In its military aspects, it will play a full part in any future conflict over Taiwan (9).

In the IMTFE highpoint, and still today, Japan enjoyed a strategic but vulnerable position in the Asian-Pacific arena. However, for the Allies defeating Japan had not had the priority over defeating Hitler; their wartime policy was ‘Germany first’. As a result, America, Britain and France concluded legal action at Nuremberg just five months after the IMTFE met in Tokyo. That, and the legal precedents Nuremberg had already set, probably made the Allies overconfident in Japan.

At Nuremberg, the West successfully turned the distinct phenomenon that was Nazism into an excuse for a general moral crusade against evil and the individual psychology of evil. The West thus managed to quell the populist and radical worldwide atmosphere of anti-fascism immediately after the war. It portrayed the Nazi leaders as criminals able to dupe a pliant German population, psychopaths with a blind group loyalty to Hitler. At Tokyo, though, things went differently.

As at Nuremberg, the class character of pre-war capitalism in the defeated state, that state’s severe repression of the Left, and the way it forced workers into outrageous industrial conditions and battlefield carnage – these the IMTFE omitted, just as it could only omit the terrible privations suffered by bombed-out Japanese workers after 1945. Yet unlike Nuremberg, the IMTFE didn’t target the Russians for anything as odious as the massacre of Polish officers that they perpetrated in Katyn wood, near Smolensk, about 200 miles west of Moscow. More important, and despite all the political, legal and administrative resources poured into it, the Tribunal failed to establish Western rule as a clearly respectable route to progress in China, Korea, Malaya, what became Indonesia, and also Vietnam. As it turned out, and in different ways, Stalinism was to take on that mantle, with the usual tawdry and regressive results.

Above all, however, the IMTFE portrayed the Tokyo defendants in a manner rather different from the way in which it cast the Nazis at Nuremberg. Yes, they too had misled the gullible masses, had displayed a mad group loyalty to their leader, and had had nothing to do with capitalism and its giant firms. But unlike the Nuremberg defendants, those at Tokyo were not taken as symbols of a universal human weakness for inhuman acts. Instead, ‘as the Allied prosecutors stressed repeatedly, it was not the Japanese people who were on trial, it was their leaders – in particular, the militarists who took over the government’ (10).

Given the pronounced racial dimensions of the Pacific War (11), America could only regard the defendants at Tokyo as the worst side of an alien race apart. However, given also that Washington wanted Japan as a stable base in Asia, it was anxious to pacify the Japanese population and treat them separately from the defendants. That is why MacArthur later notoriously compared Japanese to Anglo-Saxon levels of civilisation by contrasting the development of a 12-year-old boy with that of a 45-year-old adult. The Japanese, MacArthur announced in his usual sensitive manner, ‘were in a very tuitionary condition’.

After Nuremberg, the West portrayed the German nation as collectively guilty. By contrast, MacArthur took a view of the Japanese masses that was more patronising than condemnatory (12). And that was not the only difference between the aftermath of Nuremberg and that of Tokyo. There was much less discussion of the psychology of evil; but there turned out to be, separately but alongside the Tokyo Trial, a great deal about the psychology of ‘the Japanese’. Indeed, in a graceful switch from the disgusting slurs against the Japanese that had characterised American postures during the war, the West now discovered in the Japanese not the deep racial deficiencies it had played up in the past, but rather a deep, universal and immutable cultural preference for group loyalty – especially loyalty to the Emperor.

Ruth Benedict’s cultural version of anti-Japanese racism

First published in 1946, the opening year of the Tokyo Trial, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was an instant bestseller both in America and, in striking fashion, in Japan too. Yet it began life oddly. In the spring of 1945, while working for the Office of War Information’s foreign morale analysis division, Benedict, who had never been to Japan, reported to US intelligence officers on the Japanese mind. Her conclusions were based on three months of field research on behaviour among… Japanese Americans in America. Nevertheless, her generalisations became very popular, both in America and Japan.

Benedict rushed to believe that all the Japanese were loyal to the Emperor – although this idea she characteristically and narrowly based on reports she had received from ‘capable Americans who knew Japan’, as well as ‘the testimony of Japanese prisoners of war’ (p24). She also stressed Japanese adherence to group norms and hierarchy. ‘The master of the house’, Benedict wrote, ‘saddles himself with great difficulties if he acts without regard for group opinion’. Likewise, ‘every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his family… He learns that a person gives all deference to those who outrank him’ (pp48, 49). ‘In Japan’, she added, ‘one is only sure of support from one’s own group as long as approval is given by other group’ (p262).

Benedict was big on Japanese deference. ‘The Japanese way of life’, she wrote, ‘gives much greater deference – and therefore freedom of action – to “superiors” than Western cultures do’ (p81). She was also certain that all Japanese were themselves big on State Shinto, the compulsory, not-quite religious veneration of the Emperor.

These stereotypes were sweeping but important. Instead of sneers about the Japanese, Benedict now offered a palatable menu of what we today know as ‘cultural difference’. There were chapters on the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japanese self-discipline, and child learning. There were nearly 60 references to feudal Japanese society, and plenty more to rural village life. Chrysanthemum was a primordial instruction manual for the subtle, non-racist American racialism of 2021. It was a vacuous doctrine that gave MacArthur full scope for treating the Japanese as the malleable children he believed them to be – indeed, for him to assume something of the Emperor’s role of father to the Japanese people.

In the manner of a lazy American, Benedict completely ignored Japanese society’s division into classes, which as we shall see made the working class far from deferential. But her ideas were extremely convenient. By talking up and eternalising ‘the primacy of shame in Japanese life’, a shameless manoeuvre in itself, Benedict helped stigmatise the masses, while she exonerated the Emperor. All in the cause of stabilising Japan as America’s principal post-war base for Asian operations.

A biased court, kid gloves, and multiple purposes

The Tribunal opened within two months of Churchill declaring that an ‘Iron Curtain’ now lay between the West and the communist East. Not for nothing, then, did the prosecution open its case with the rather ludicrous charge of a Japanese conspiracy bent on world conquest. Though we should not overestimate the anti-Soviet dimensions of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (13), this was a departure from Nuremberg. In Germany the Nazis’ bestial crimes against humanity had formed the main event. In Tokyo, aggressive war – a common plan and series of policies, stretching from 1928 to 1945, in which 756 separate crimes against peace had been committed – was made the principal charge at Tokyo. That was a warning to Moscow. After the Iron Curtain had gone up, Washington didn’t want Stalin pushing it out to his geographical advantage, as he’d already done in Germany and Eastern Europe.

That, however, was not the main reason why crimes against peace were selected as the spearhead of the prosecution’s attack. The point was to establish the Japan’s military and political leaders as responsible for war in China, and for Pearl Harbor. Japan’s victory against Russia in 1905 had been racially unpalatable to the West, and Japan had been excluded from the League of Nations on racial grounds. In the minds of Japan’s leaders, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s July 1940 restrictions on aircraft fuel bound for Japan and his August 1941 total oil embargo were only the climax of moves begun in 1939, when FDR terminated America’s 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. Yet this was not how the majority of the Tokyo Trial’s judges saw it.

For the majority, as for MacArthur, the crimes under review, though not defined before they were enacted, could now, as at Nuremberg, be applied retrospectively, highlighting individual responsibility for those crimes. From the start, all the defendants were pretty much assumed to be guilty. The standard of evidence accepted was weak, and favoured the prosecution, not the defence. Unlike the arrangements at Nuremberg, everything was solely funded by the Americans, and the prosecution solely led by Americans, even if Australia and Britain played an important role. At the discretion of the Tribunal, defence counsel could be removed at any time (14). Resources for translation, stenography and other tasks were available to the prosecution, but not the defence.

The Americans determined the composition of the judges. They selected the judges’ Australian president, Sir William Bell, who by chance had spent two years investigating Japanese war crimes in Papua and New Guinea. ‘A large, florid man, with the bold nose of a Wellington’, as a distinguished US diplomat later described him, Bell was backed up by Joseph B Keenan, the American chief of the prosecution, another gentleman cast as ‘florid’, and in addition ‘aggressive, but not unkindly’ (15).

At one level, then, the whole thing was a racist set-up, a farce, and a lengthy car crash for the presiding Americans. The majority judgment, in the words of Richard Minear, ‘completely ducked’ the task of defining what ‘aggression’ meant (16). The Chinese judge was not a judge, but a Nationalist politician. The Filipino judge was a survivor of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, so was hardly impartial. Several judges, and especially Pal and Bell, were absent for large portions of the Trial, and of all the judges, only Pal had a background in international law. Death penalties were imposed by slimmer majorities than had been obtained at Nuremberg. A bespectacled but defiant Tojo had belonged to no party, had instilled discipline in the Imperial Army after its rebellion in 1936, and had left power a year before the war ended – but as a defendant filling in for the Emperor, he was deemed the big prize. Last, though the Soviet prosecutor at the IMTFE tried to initiate a new tribunal to try personnel from Unit 731, the Emperor’s fearsome chemical and biological warfare apparatus, MacArthur ‘ensured that his initiatives were thwarted’ (17). In a fascinating and characteristic manner, he swapped immunity for members of Unit 731 for the medical data they had derived from their ghoulish experiments on 3000 live human subjects in Manchuria.

All around Asia, the IMTFE was accompanied by scores of separate, local trials for lower-ranking officials and even some business figures accused of ‘Class B’ and ‘C’ crimes – war crimes and crimes against humanity respectively. Yet as James Heartfield observes, of the 200,000 Japanese forced to stand down from their jobs, not many were eventually detained – ‘unlike the position in Germany’ (18), where de-Nazification, though weak, was nevertheless a more extensive process. Indeed as the always brilliant historian John Dower has noted of these separate trials, those actually executed (chiefly by the Dutch and the British) amounted to just 920 people (19) – not much retribution against the hundreds of thousands of men and women whom Japanese imperialism killed in the Rape of Nanjing, the massacre in Manila, the campaign in Burma and other theatres.

If the IMTFE treated the Japanese elite selectively and with kid gloves, then, what were it and its satellite trials really all about? Here Dr Kirsten Sellars, a specialist in Asia and international law, has made a pithy summation. By focusing the Tokyo Trial on Japan’s aggression, she writes,

‘the Americans hoped to explain away the military debacle at Pearl Harbour, the Soviets wished to excuse their treaty-breaking invasion of Manchuria, and the colonial powers wanted to justify their post-war reclamation of the Asian colonies. Consequently, thirty-six of the fifty-five counts in the indictment held the accused collectively responsible for conspiring to wage aggressive wars and individually responsible for the initiation and waging of them.’

There is much in this. If, by creating NATO in 1949, the purpose of the Allies was, famously, to ‘keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’, that of the IMTFE in 1946-8 was broadly to keep the Russians intimidated and side-lined (their judge could anyway speak no English), the Americans in, the Japanese down, and the rest of Asia waiting, but onside.

And yet…. And yet there are still other dynamics to consider.

Bonapartism and the bewilderment of the Japanese Left

Unlike occupied Germany, where the US, the UK, France and Russia each held sway, occupied Japan in the 1940s was a blasted heath lorded over by a single, reclusive but Napoleonic figure who worked 10-hour days, seven days a week (20): MacArthur. While millions of Japanese could barely eat, such were the food shortages and inflation that set in during in 1946, anti-capitalist feeling in Japan ran high. In the April general election, women voted for the first time in Japan. There were enormous, nationwide demonstrations on May Day, and then again, on 19 May, to protest the crisis that food rationing had become. Month after month, blue- and white-collar workers wrested ‘production control’ from workplace managers. In August, socialist and communist trade union federations were formed. Later, plans for a general strike on 1 February 1947 were drawn up, only for it to be suppressed by MacArthur.

Workers and farmers in Japan were hungry, angry but powerless. The Japanese ruling class was defeated and disorientated. Anything could happen. That is why, raising himself above unstable class conflict in a Bonapartist manner, MacArthur spent the IMTFE years tacking to the masses, legalising the Japanese Communist Party and trade unions and agreeing a new law on labour standards, only to tack right after the Trial in the infamous Red Purge of 1949-51. Both empowered and spooked by a fairly blank canvas, he filled it in according to the exigencies of the moment. Or, to mix metaphors: MacArthur’s was a reasonably easy balancing act, but one whose acrobatic qualities succeeded in completely bewildering an already-bewildered Japanese Left.

Despite the various repressions of the 1920s, 1930s and late 1940s, Marxism continually attracted plenty of enthusiastic Japanese. The problem was that Japan’s version of the politics of Soviet Stalinism, together with its frenzied, hothouse economic development over the interwar and wartime years, combined to confuse the Left utterly. The big discussion – factional, largely academic and almost entirely removed from working class struggles – was between those who thought that the Meiji Restoration had ushered in a developed form of capitalism, and those who thought that feudal relations were still the main event.

This was indeed an important issue. However, by about 1926 victory in the JCP lay with those who wanted to finish what they thought was an unfinished capitalist revolution (21). In fact, of course, the zaibatsu conglomerates had enormous power in pre-war and wartime Japanese society, and a market clout that far outweighed that of feudal remnants from decades past (22). Had Marx’s Grundrisse been published in Japanese, indeed, the Left might have found the following instructive:

‘In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialised within it.’

By the 20th century Japan’s big urban industrial combines had fully come to ‘predominate’ over its backward agriculture. Yet despite this, the victorious faction within the JCP missed how what their enemy was capitalism, not feudalism. As a result, when MacArthur came along and briefly adopted a liberal face, many self-professed Marxists welcomed him as a new, democratic broom who would sweep the old feudal detritus away – and why, too, just before the projected general strike of 1947, the JCP called for it to be stopped.

The Left just couldn’t deal with the IMTFE. The peculiarities of Japan’s development, the Stalinist tradition, dictatorship, exile and finally the Trojan Horse of MacArthur: all these combined to mystify, confuse and disorientate the Left. No wonder the Japanese state was able to smash a series of militant strikes and to see through round after round of heavy job losses. All the way from October 1946 through to 1960, the ever-weakening left did its bit to accept the arduous conditions that allowed the Japanese economy – and the rightist Liberal Democratic Party – to boom from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Conclusion: reasons to understand

In Asia today, both domestic politics and disputes over islands and maritime boundaries reflect the region’s uniquely bloody past conflicts. They reflect, too, the bitter, festering and imperfect settlements it came to in the 20th century. Seventy-five years ago, in 1946, the principal settlements at issue in Asia were Japan’s new Constitution and the IMTFE.

In 1947 and 1950 the American manufacturing expert W Edwards Deming visited Japan. But, much more than the mythology that grew up about Deming’s role in post-war Japan’s revival, it was MacArthur and Benedict who really moulded Japan and Western perceptions of it. And, along with the Constitution, the IMTFE did a lot of moulding too.

Until the recent prominence acquired by Asia, the Tokyo Trial was always regarded as a junior partner to that held in Nuremberg. In recent years, however, slavish liberal devotion to globalist bodies such as the International Criminal Court, born in 2002, have revived interest in the IMTFE. Indeed, in the future it could lose more of its lowly and obscure status. After all, Japan will continue to play an important, frontline role, as both protagonist and victim, in the cockpit now shaping up in East Asia. Its wartime deeds are always coming up for condemnation in China and South Korea. So though the IMTFE may remain opaque to many, that situation could well begin to change.

Yes, after three decades of economic torpor, Japan does not get the attention it last gained in the 1980s. Yes, it is not so important that HMS Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s leaky new aircraft carrier, will coordinate with the Japanese Navy when it arrives in the seas of East Asia in summer. But Japan has a weighty past with China, and generates the world’s largest GDP next to that country and America.

More than ever, Japan and the Tokyo Trial demand our understanding. 

Footnotes

(1) The silent war: imperialism and the changing perception of race, by Frank Furedi, Pluto Press, 1998, p181

(2) Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity, by Gerald Horne, NYU Press, 2018

(3) General Charles Willoughby, head of General Headquarters (GHQ) Japan, to Bert Röling, quoted in Embracing defeat: Japan in the aftermath of World War II, by John Dower, Penguin, 1999, p451

(4) Victors’ justice: the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, by Richard Minear, Princeton, 1971

(5) Hirohito and the making of modern Japan, by Herbert P Bix, HarperCollins, 2000, chapters 11 and 12.

(6) ‘The Tokyo Tribunal’s legal origins and contributions to international jurisprudence as illustrated by its treatment of sexual violence’, by Diane Orentlicher, in Rikki Kersten and David Williams, eds, The left in the shaping of Japanese democracy, Routledge, 2006, pp98-100

(7) Embracing defeat: Japan in the aftermath of World War II, by John Dower, Penguin, 1999, p375

(8) MacArthur’s template for US jurisdiction over Japan is still around today. It’s true that, seventy years ago last month, US President Harry Truman dismissed him from his post – not just for right-wing insubordination, but also for a reckless desire to up the ante against China, which by late 1950 had entered the war in Korea. In southern Korea, typically enough, MacArthur had also been in charge until 1948. But despite his dismissal around events there, his legacy in Japan lives on.

(9) Though nearly 40,000 US troops are left in Germany and numbers are marginally increasing under Joe Biden, even more US servicemen are on duty in Japan. There are 55,000 of them, at a cost to the US of $5bn a year. They also cause considerable resentment in Okinawa, a small island which lies to the south of the mainland, not too far from Taiwan. It was Okinawa, scene of well over 100,000 Japanese deaths, that was originally specified by MacArthur as the strongpoint from which America could launch amphibious operations in Northern Asia: see The long peace: enquiries into the history of the Cold War, by John Lewis Gaddis, OUP, 1987, p74. As a result, Okinawa today is home to most of America’s forces and 14 of its 23 bases in Japan. If any serious trouble starts brewing in or around Taiwan, then America will want Japan – and South Korea – to assist it in that theatre. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and the amphibious assault ship USS America will try to set off from the Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and Sasebo, northwest of Nagasaki on Kyushu Island and near South Korea. But down in Okinawa, US bases, being concentrated on less than one per cent of Japan’s total land area, could fall victim to perhaps 1,000 ballistic or land-attack cruise missiles launched by Beijing, capable of reaching America’s F-35 fighters in as little as six minutes.

(10) The other Nuremberg: the untold story of the Tokyo war crimes trials, by Arnold C Brackman [1987], Fontana/Collins edition, 1990, pp28-29. Brackman’s book, written by. A United Press journalist present at the Trial, is a defence of it.

(11) War without mercy, by John Dower, Random House, 1987. This work is a classic.

(12) The all-important Article 9 of America’s new Constitution for the Japanese people reflected MacArthur’s point of view. It told them that they would forever renounce war as a sovereign right. However, after some amendments, Article 9 gave MacArthur’s children, in John Dower’s perceptive account, ‘a miasma of ambiguity’ that would ‘survive as one of the most perplexing of the occupation’s legacies’: see Embracing defeat: Japan in the aftermath of World War II, by John Dower, Penguin, 1999, p394. Why? The second paragraph in Article 9 said that Japan’s armed forces, ‘as well as other war potential’, would never be maintained, and that the Japanese state had no right to belligerency. This, however, has not prevented Japan from building the means to be belligerent; it’s just that, for a 2019 outlay of a cool $47.5bn on weapons and uniformed men – nearly as much as Britain, Germany and France – Japan today maintains what it is pleased to call Self-Defence Forces.

(13) The overdone doctrine that Truman and Attlee used atomic weapons chiefly to intimidate the Soviet Union was famously put forward in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, by Gar Alperovitz, Simon & Schuster, 1965, and again in The untold history of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, Gallery, 2011, p172

(14) ‘Nuremberg, Tokyo and the crime of aggression: an intertwined and still unfolding legacy’, by Donald M Ferencz,, in The Tokyo Tribunal: perspectives on law, history and memory, edited by Viviane E Dittrich, Kerstin von Lingen, Philipp Osten and Jolana Makraiova, Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2020, p203

(15) With MacArthur in Japan: a personal history of the Occupation, by Ambassador William J Sebald with Russell Brines, The Cresset Press, 1965, pp156-7

(16) Victors’ justice: the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, by Richard Minear, Princeton, 1971, p58

(17) War Crimes Investigations in Japan 1945-1948: A Personal Remembrance, by William R Gill, quoted here.

(18) An unpatriotic history of the Second World War, by James Heartfield, Zed Books, 2012, p393

 (19) Embracing defeat: Japan in the aftermath of World War II, by John Dower, Penguin, 1999, p447

(20) The other Nuremberg: the untold story of the Tokyo war crimes trials, by Arnold C Brackman [1987], Fontana/Collins edition, 1990, p172. Brackman’s book

(21) ‘The Left hand of darkness: forging a political Left in interwar Japan’, by Christopher Goto-Jones, in Rikki Kersten and David Williams, eds, The left in the shaping of Japanese democracy, Routledge, 2006, p26

(22) For example, despite its ownership by just one extended family, Mitsubishi’s market position in 1944 resembled, in relative terms, that of US Steel, GM, Standard Oil, Alcoa, DuPont, Westinghouse, AT&T, RCA, IBM, Dole Pineapple, National City Bank, Woolworth Stores and more – combined. ‘Trust busting in Japan’, by Eleanor Hadley, Harvard Business Review, July 1948, cited in The American occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, by Michael Shaller, OUP, 1985, p32.