Japanese War Crimes? Book Review of Judgment at Tokyo
August 11, 2024
by William P. Meyers

Site Search

Popular pages:

Insights into the U.S. War Against Asia

Judgment at Tokyo
World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
by Gary J. Bass
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023

Very few Americans today know anything about the Tokyo war crimes trial, or the other executions or trials of the Japanese after World War II. Yet at the time they were highly publicized in the United States of America, and closely watched by the Japanese. My own knowledge of the trial was minimal, though I like to think I am a bit of a history buff. My father fought in the Pacific in World War II. Also, I am in the process of writing a history of the U.S. War Against Asia. And so, finally getting to a need for some detail on the post-war trial of the Japanese government and military, I was happy to find that a distinguished professor had written a massive account of the affair, recenlty published. Thus the Japanese war criminals can be known as well as the Nazi German war criminals, who were prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials. Given that the text of the book is 692 pages long, and the full book 894 pages, this review will highlight just a few of the facts and opinions that I found most interesting.

First, a semi-criticism. It is generally conceded to be a war crime to kill soldiers who have surrendered. Yet the victorious empires of World War II, British, Russian, and American, did not consider it a war crime to kill soldiers who had surrendered, if they could be accused of war crimes, especially if they were not white men. So a rather large number of Japanese who had surrendered were killed during and after the war. Professor Bass only mentions this in passing, and does not give numbers. His focus is on the Tokyo trial of the highest ranking Japanese, of whom only 7 were hung. While the book goes into astonishing levels of details on some subjects peripheral to the trial, it could have at least had a table showing how many Japanese soldiers were killed after other proceedings [920 per Wikipedia]. There were also large numbers killed by U.S. soldiers during battles, in the heat of the moment, who should have been spared because they had surrendered or were too wounded to resist capture. The actor Lee Marvin, a former Marine, among others who fought, spoke about the subject [See Lee Marvin: Point Blank by Dwayne Epstein]

Although the Tokyo trial was ex post facto, it generally conformed to world opinion at the time about the nature of war crimes, and it made quite some pretence to fairness. The Japanese defendants were provided with both Japanese and American lawyers, though the prosecutors were given far more resources. Some of the American lawyers were quite adept at pointing out the weakness and hypocrisy of the prosecution.

A surprise to me was the international nature of the trial, in particular that there was only one American judge, unless the Philippines judge is counted as a second. The Tribunal was packed with judges from the British Empire, though they did not always agree with one another. China got a single judge, India got one (it was part of the British Empire), France got one, and the Dutch (Netherlands) got one. The very composition of the court brought it into question. With the possible exception of the Chinese, each of the judges was part of an empire that had been built using military aggression. The Japanese defense pointed out that if the post World War I settlement, that included the establishment of the League of Nations, had accepted a Japanese proposal to stand against racism and colonial empires, the war in the Pacific would not have included most of the judges. Bass omits the interesting fact that Ho Chi Minh had tried to get U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to end French rule in Indochina (Vietnam), under his theory of national self-determination.

The Japanese do not come out looking good, even if their enemies look even worse. They tended to racism, though not as racist as America at the time. Their leaders were militarists, who used a light gloss of pan-Asian unity to cover up their sick love of violence, hierarchy, and dominance. They killed a lot of people, including civilians, unnecessarily. But their defense of the attack on Pearl Harbor seems justified: the U.S. had unofficially declared war by creating an embargo, supplying military aid to the war lord regime in China, and issuing the Hull note. The invasion of China, which took place much earlier, was less justified. I would like to see some historian argue about the governance of China by the Japanese and their native allies, who governed more of the population of that country during World War II than their rivals. It is notable that the leaders of the three main purported national governments, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, and Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei), had all, at one time, worked together in the Kuomintang, which preached Chinese nationalism and democratic control. Was Wang Ching-wei's government less Chinese than the other two? Was Chiang an American (and British) puppet? Was Mao a Soviet Union puppet? Each of these governments had complex relations with their non-Chinese sponsors. Chiang's government had proponents of democracy within it, but it was mainly a coalition of warlords and gangsters. Mao's government turned out to be quite independent of Stalin, and despite a bumpy road, in the end led to a modern, powerful China. Had Wang Ching-wei led China into our era, with Japanese tutelage, certainly we would think differently of his regime. Had President Truman known how quickly the corrupt Chiang Kai-Shek regime would collapse after the Japanese withdrew, he likely would have supported the Japanese sponsored regime (Wang Ching-wei had died in 1944) over the Communist one.

America does not come out looking good in Judgment at Tokyo. While much of the volume is devoted to Japanese crimes, too much is explained about America's belligerent attitude towards Japan before Pearl Harbor. The Philippines looms like a big stink bomb, showing the U.S. as a traditional aggressor and oppressor and racist regime, though Bass does not go deeply into the history of the American conquest of that nation. If the Japanese had acted more as allies than conquerors in the Philippines, Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies, the trial would have appeared even more hypocritical. Add a topping of purposeful mass murder of civilians by the U.S., first with fire bombings and then with atomic bombs, and the U.S. looks worse than Japan. Then consider the prior and future brutal invasions of other nations by the U.S., mostly in the Americas but also later in Korea and Vietnam, and winning the Pacific war does not seem like such a sterling thing.

The book should make everyone consider the nature of the Rule of Law. At the time of the trial, in America, the written law had harsher penalties for African Americans than for European Americans. Each of the empires had a different set of laws for their colonies. There was no international tribunal to punish the obvious war crimes of the victors. So the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials did little to change the world. They set a precedent: victors' justice. Even as the trial took place the French reinvaded Vietnam and the Dutch reinvaded Indonesia. America set up military bases around the world and used its economic and military power to depose regimes it did not like. An internal civil war in Korea was soon turned into a an international war. China was divided when the communists could not follow Chiang and his gang to Taiwan because of an illegal U.S. blockade.

I believe the earth needs a true global government that can provide protection for the environment and equal justice for all humans. Judgment at Tokyo both reminded me of how difficult that will be to achieve, and also hinted at some of the variables that might make it possible. There were many good actors at Tokyo, notably the American attorneys who worked hard to defend the Japanese victims, and the several judges that dissented from some or all of the death penalty and other punative sentences. "Therefore, while the world has still, much good, but much less good than ill . . ." I will recommend this book. It will inform you about the trial and how Asia came to be the way it is today. And, perhaps, how the whole world might be made better some day in the future.