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Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg
“Nothing less than a masterpiece. With epic research and mesmerizing narrative power, Judgment at Tokyo has the makings of an instant classic.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.
For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.
From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.
“Nothing less than a masterpiece. With epic research and mesmerizing narrative power, Judgment at Tokyo has the makings of an instant classic.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.
For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.
From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.
912 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2023
About the author
Gary J. Bass
6 books103 followersGary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, is the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf); Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf); and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton).
The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction and won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz Book Award, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Award in India. It was also a New York Times and Washington Post notable book of the year, and a best book of the year in The Economist, Financial Times, The New Republic, and Kirkus Reviews. Freedom's Battle was a New York Times notable book of the year and a Washington Post best book of the year.
Bass has written articles for International Security, Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Michigan Law Review, Daedalus, NOMOS, and other journals, as well as numerous book chapters in edited volumes. A former reporter for The Economist, Bass has written often for The New York Times, as well as writing for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other publications.
The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction and won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz Book Award, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Award in India. It was also a New York Times and Washington Post notable book of the year, and a best book of the year in The Economist, Financial Times, The New Republic, and Kirkus Reviews. Freedom's Battle was a New York Times notable book of the year and a Washington Post best book of the year.
Bass has written articles for International Security, Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Michigan Law Review, Daedalus, NOMOS, and other journals, as well as numerous book chapters in edited volumes. A former reporter for The Economist, Bass has written often for The New York Times, as well as writing for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 139 reviews
October 16, 2023
Judgment at Tokyo:... written by Gary J. Bass is a wonderfully written, thoroughly researched book about a very difficult time in our history. I knew much less about the Tokyo trial than I did about Nuremburg. Mr. Bass has helped to fill that blank spot with a book that will be kept and referred to often. Does war with Japan come down to lack of oil? Who has jurisdiction over war criminals? What about abuse of prisoners? So many issues to be examined and weighed by eleven judges from various countries who often did not agree and seventy five years ago had to come to some consensus as to who would be punished by death and who would live. If you see the value of history as guidance for the present, please read this book. It reflects dark issues of a dark time that we would prefer to forget. (Perhaps at our own peril). Did this trial achieve justice? You decide. Very highly recommended.
My thanks to the author, Gary J. Bass, and to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for my copy of this book. #Goodreads Giveaway
My thanks to the author, Gary J. Bass, and to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for my copy of this book. #Goodreads Giveaway
January 17, 2024
Riveting. Filled a vacuum. Made me re-think an historical judgment I thought I was sure of. Oh, and the writing was superb. 692 pages of text and I didn't skim a sentence.
This is the story of the War Crimes Trial held in Tokyo after the end of the Pacific part of the Second World War. The Nazi War Crimes Trial - Judgment at Nuremberg - is perhaps more well-known. Simpler, too. The Nazi war crimes were better documented, both as to aggression and inhumanity. Any defenses were technical; support was not in vogue.
The Tokyo Trial was different, I've now learned. It was a quasi-military trial, but with an ostensibly independent judiciary comprised of eleven different nations. Each one had its own axe to grind, and as it turned out, not always against those in the dock. Certain rights familiar to criminal jurisprudence were provided, but not all. Defense attorneys were assigned, including some American hotshots, some oddly wearing military uniforms. They advocated fiercely though. Oh, but there were drunks, and Soviets, and Holocaust deniers; enough personalities to make this a cluster (if you know what I mean).
There were the American judge and prosecutor, both cronies of Truman who appointed them, and both drunks. The Soviet judge could cite a League of Nations ruling as precedent, ignoring that the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for their conquest of Finland. The Australian judge, presiding as President Judge, berated everyone, colleagues and defendants alike, and was despised by everyone . . . except MacArthur, whose "Charter" enabled the whole play. He lurked there, as a character, generally hands off, except to make sure Hirohito was not a target. Strange bedfellows.
Then there was the Indian judge who clearly came to Tokyo prepared to acquit. He did well to argue against jurisdiction, and ex post facto laws, and the hypocrisy of convicting the defendants for firebombing cities, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, he refused to believe any evidence of torture, beheading or rape, unless in some twisted fashion he was able to justify it.
Still, hypocrisy loomed large for me in reading this. Made me think: what if the Vietnamese or Cambodians held a War Crimes Trial.
Consider this: the United States and Russia became aware of a Japanese program of bacteriological warfare. This was not inchoate. Unit 731 had produced dried anthrax--which, if aerosolized properly and carefully spewed by airplanes over a big city, could have killed hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions, of people. And more: In 1940 and 1941, with approval from Japan's army, Ishii's team flew a small airplane over the Chinese cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, Jinhua, and Changde, spraying plague-ridden fleas and grains. Soon plague broke out in all the cities except Jinhua. You would think, as a prosecutor at a War Crimes trial, that this would be a slam-dunk. Targeting civilians with unspeakable death, and all sanctioned by the government, not capable of being limited to some horny or violent soldier. And they had the guy in custody, cooperating, able to give it all up. But, no. Instead, the U.S. and the Soviets kept the evidence secret, so they could work the guy into teaching them how to do it.
There is so much here. About the clash of countries, and personalities. About justice, surely, but also the miscarriage of it. About culture, and history, and always race.
About the comfort of intellectual certainty, until you read a book like this.
World War II was a just war forced upon the Allies by Axis aggression, but that does not mean that the Americans could do no wrong fighting it.
Mid-January, and this is my Book of the Year.
This is the story of the War Crimes Trial held in Tokyo after the end of the Pacific part of the Second World War. The Nazi War Crimes Trial - Judgment at Nuremberg - is perhaps more well-known. Simpler, too. The Nazi war crimes were better documented, both as to aggression and inhumanity. Any defenses were technical; support was not in vogue.
The Tokyo Trial was different, I've now learned. It was a quasi-military trial, but with an ostensibly independent judiciary comprised of eleven different nations. Each one had its own axe to grind, and as it turned out, not always against those in the dock. Certain rights familiar to criminal jurisprudence were provided, but not all. Defense attorneys were assigned, including some American hotshots, some oddly wearing military uniforms. They advocated fiercely though. Oh, but there were drunks, and Soviets, and Holocaust deniers; enough personalities to make this a cluster (if you know what I mean).
There were the American judge and prosecutor, both cronies of Truman who appointed them, and both drunks. The Soviet judge could cite a League of Nations ruling as precedent, ignoring that the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for their conquest of Finland. The Australian judge, presiding as President Judge, berated everyone, colleagues and defendants alike, and was despised by everyone . . . except MacArthur, whose "Charter" enabled the whole play. He lurked there, as a character, generally hands off, except to make sure Hirohito was not a target. Strange bedfellows.
Then there was the Indian judge who clearly came to Tokyo prepared to acquit. He did well to argue against jurisdiction, and ex post facto laws, and the hypocrisy of convicting the defendants for firebombing cities, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, he refused to believe any evidence of torture, beheading or rape, unless in some twisted fashion he was able to justify it.
Still, hypocrisy loomed large for me in reading this. Made me think: what if the Vietnamese or Cambodians held a War Crimes Trial.
Consider this: the United States and Russia became aware of a Japanese program of bacteriological warfare. This was not inchoate. Unit 731 had produced dried anthrax--which, if aerosolized properly and carefully spewed by airplanes over a big city, could have killed hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions, of people. And more: In 1940 and 1941, with approval from Japan's army, Ishii's team flew a small airplane over the Chinese cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, Jinhua, and Changde, spraying plague-ridden fleas and grains. Soon plague broke out in all the cities except Jinhua. You would think, as a prosecutor at a War Crimes trial, that this would be a slam-dunk. Targeting civilians with unspeakable death, and all sanctioned by the government, not capable of being limited to some horny or violent soldier. And they had the guy in custody, cooperating, able to give it all up. But, no. Instead, the U.S. and the Soviets kept the evidence secret, so they could work the guy into teaching them how to do it.
There is so much here. About the clash of countries, and personalities. About justice, surely, but also the miscarriage of it. About culture, and history, and always race.
About the comfort of intellectual certainty, until you read a book like this.
World War II was a just war forced upon the Allies by Axis aggression, but that does not mean that the Americans could do no wrong fighting it.
Mid-January, and this is my Book of the Year.
January 7, 2024
Gary J. Bass's Judgment at Tokyo exhaustively recreates the International Military Tribunal of the Far East after World War II. Bass (author of The Blood Telegram and other books on international law) stresses how the trials were even more fraught and improvised than Nuremberg; a coterie of judges from the main Allied powers and several former colonies were selected, with vastly different opinions and agendas clashing in and outside the courtroom. Under the guidance of Douglas MacArthur, trying to rebuild Japan in the shadow of the Cold War, the trials prosecuted a handful of prominent Japanese military and political leaders (up to and including Premier Hideki Tojo) but refused to prosecute Emperor Hirohito, whose usefulness as a figurehead outweighed the benefits of holding him accountable. By its nature, Bass's book is often grim and frustrating reading; we receive detailed recitations of atrocities as varied as the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanjing, Unit 731 and other systematic crimes demonstrating the monstrous behavior of the Japanese military. Bass is equally interested, however, in the court's wrangling over the issue of how to prosecute nebulous crimes as "waging aggressive war," which could be fairly leveled at some leaders (Tojo in particular) but not others (Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, who actually opposed attacking Pearl Harbor). He profiles Australian Justice William Webb, who showed little sympathy for the defendants' arguments; Bert Roling of the Netherlands, who argues that the concept of aggressive war was a nebulous charge that could be leveled as easily at the Soviet Union, whose representative bizarrely argued for prosecution over border clashes in Mongolia; Asian representatives Mei Ju-Ao (China) and Delfin Jarnailla (the Philippines), who wanted harsher punishments for Japanese depredations in their countries; and Indian justice Radhabinod Pal, who blasted the Western powers' hypocrisy for decrying Japanese imperialism and racial supremacy (while also, unfortunately, apologizing for the Rape of Nanjing and later denying the Nazi Holocaust). Japanese figures receive layered treatment, particularly Minister Togo's unsuccessful fight against starting the war, while Premier Tojo humiliates the inept American prosecutor Joseph Keenan with his articulate defense of imperial prerogatives. Bass shows that the Tribunal couldn't help seeming like "winner's justice" in some ways; as Pal and others stressed, the Allied powers were hardly guiltless of imperialism (France and the Netherlands were fighting to reclaim their Asian colonies as the trial unfolded), while Webb and others ignored pleas to prosecute Japanese aerial bombing due to America's own relentless bombing campaign against Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the most egregious oversight, Unit 731's biological warfare experiments went unprosecuted as both the US and USSR found its research valuable to their own weapons programs. The trials resulted in seven death sentences and sixteen long prison sentences; unlike Nuremberg, Tokyo was considered, if not a travesty of justice, then certainly an embarrassment best forgotten afterwards. Judgment at Tokyo does not make for easy reading, but it is a valuable account demonstrating how difficult it can be to hold state criminals to account - especially when the prosecution has self-serving reasons not to.
August 5, 2024
I can't award this book anything but five stars because otherwise how in the world can I justify reading its 670 odd pages of text, let alone recommend anyone else devout the time needed to read through it, and I do recommend reading it, but I have some reservations with the way the author allows his own moral revulsion with later American actions to colour his presentation of the Tokyo Trial judgements. The Tokyo trial was flawed, and its judgement is still controversial in Japan. As a result neither Japan, nor its neighbors, have managed to achieve anything approaching the closure that Germany has with erstwhile victims. This book is important in providing the background to the failure of Japan to follow the path of Germany (although to be accurate it was West Germany which first accepted and then attempted expiate its past followed by a united Germany. East Germany's attitude was analogous, but not identical to Japan's, in refusing to see that they had any connection with Germany's past crimes). But, and this is outside the scope of my review, if you want to understand why Germany and Japan have dealt with WWII in such different ways then you should read 'The Wages of Guilt' by Ian Buruma (sorry to do this but if you search for this book on Goodreads search for it under Ian-Buruma, that hyphen is essential, though wrong).
The first thing to understand about the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials is that both failed to achieve what their instigators and partisans thought they would, to make aggressive wars of conquest not simply illegal but things banished to Trotsky's capacious 'dustbin of history'. I would hope I don't have to belabour the obvious and list all those bloody conflicts which have occurred since the end of WWII, but then have there been aggressive wars? have they even been wars? who decides what is an aggressive war? nor point out that the presence of the Soviet Union at Nuremberg and even more so in Tokyo was grotesque. Perhaps the knowledge that the crime of waging 'aggressive war', never mind 'conspiracy' to wage aggressive war, have never been filed since Tokyo. We have had trials over 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' and Nuremberg helped make that possible. At Tokyo there were convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity but there is no comparison between what was established at Nuremberg, and at Tokyo. Although there was plenty of deeply moving and horrifying testimony about war crimes and crimes against humanity at Tokyo nothing was established in the systematic way it was at Nuremberg.
Why? Well it helped that the Japanese had plenty of time to destroy almost all archival sources that American bombing had already destroyed. In addition the Japanese 'state' did not cease to exist in the same way that the Nazi 'state' ceased to exist. Japan was occupied but not in the way Germany was and McArthur, and the Americans, really didn't care about war crimes or crimes against humanity. They wanted to try Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbour before a declaration of war was delivered. Oddly no one tried the Japanese for their simultaneous attacks on Hong Kong and Malaya without a declaration of war. Indeed while the USA did get a declaration, albeit late, but none was ever presented in London.
No one was interested in acknowledging that there might be a difference between attacking a proper 'state' such as Poland and colonies such as Hawaii, Philippines, Hong Kong or Malaya (didn't realise Hawaii was a colony - read 'How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States' by Daniel Immerwahr). Indeed colonialism, along with racism, was the elephant in the room at Tokyo (though they weren't the only ones) and Japan, although certainly as imperialist as the UK, USA, France or Netherlands and also as racist, at least pretended that they weren't. The hypocrisy of European colonial powers trying Japan for doing what they had done, but longer ago, was one of the reasons that inspired the judge from India, Radhabinod Pal, to dissent from not simply the Tokyo Courts judgements but from recognising the court's right to judge the defendants. Unfortunately Pal's stand went further and encompassed not simply a belief that those on trial were not responsible for events like the Rape of Nanking but cast doubt on any of the crimes against humanity having ever been convicted. That in later life Pal would also sweepingly dismiss the reality of the Shoah as revealed at Nuremberg makes him a deeply problematic figure as far as I am concerned.
Japan committed its greatest crimes in China, and committed them over the longest period, but the Nationalist Chinese State under Chiang Kai Shek was, during the course of the Tokyo trial, losing the Civil War to Mao's communists. The horrors perpetrated there were never adequately presented at the trial. The Japanese attempts at concealment were abetted by the way the obscenity of Unit 731 (Google it and weep) was completely covered up by the USA. Even though there were plenty of diplomatic and other Western observers to what took place at Nanking almost none of their evidence was called on (it was perhaps unfortunate that the man most responsible for denouncing Japanese crimes and for saving 250,000 Chinese was the German Consul General, John Rabe, a member of the Nazi party). But, to be honest, it was the charge of conspiring to commit and waging aggressive war that was of interest to most of the Allied prosecutors. The deaths of 'Asians' while useful, was not of paramount importance, which helps explain the exclusion of Japan's numerous crimes in Korea.
One of the areas were the author, Mr. Bass, allows to get himself bogged down in retrospective moral posturing is over the Allied firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although before WWII there had been plenty of opportunities to ban aerial bombardment of civilians in war no really effective restrictions were in place. Everyone considered it too important a potential weapon to curtail. Neither Germany nor Japan had any qualms about bombing civilians; the Germans had shown this as long ago as Guernica and the Japanese at Chongqing spent six years firebombing civilians. Don't misunderstand me, both the firebombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of the atom bombs were horrific but the question of whether they can be justified is outside the remit of this book. They weren't illegal and, although this is no justification, if it had been possible for the Japanese army to inflict such damage they would not have hesitated.
I remember back in my school days in the 1970s reading a rather gloriously over the top book 'Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes' by Lord Liverpool, which had plenty of grainy, but grisly, black and white pictures of various atrocities. It was from this book I first learnt of the Tokyo War Crimes trial and I was surprised, presuming it was like Nuremberg, that I'd never heard of it. Now over fifty years later Mr. Bass has provided an account of the trial in all its shoddiness because, at the heart of the trial's failure, was the absurd removal of the Emperor from any threat of prosecution. The lengths of twisted logic that the American prosecutor and the Japanese defendants went through to remove all trace of responsibility from the emperor is almost comic, if it wasn't so tragic in ensuring that for the Japanese the trial would never provide them with a reason to come to terms with their responsibility, never mind guilt.
It is an excellent book about a well meant but ultimately deeply flawed if not farcical event.
The first thing to understand about the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials is that both failed to achieve what their instigators and partisans thought they would, to make aggressive wars of conquest not simply illegal but things banished to Trotsky's capacious 'dustbin of history'. I would hope I don't have to belabour the obvious and list all those bloody conflicts which have occurred since the end of WWII, but then have there been aggressive wars? have they even been wars? who decides what is an aggressive war? nor point out that the presence of the Soviet Union at Nuremberg and even more so in Tokyo was grotesque. Perhaps the knowledge that the crime of waging 'aggressive war', never mind 'conspiracy' to wage aggressive war, have never been filed since Tokyo. We have had trials over 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' and Nuremberg helped make that possible. At Tokyo there were convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity but there is no comparison between what was established at Nuremberg, and at Tokyo. Although there was plenty of deeply moving and horrifying testimony about war crimes and crimes against humanity at Tokyo nothing was established in the systematic way it was at Nuremberg.
Why? Well it helped that the Japanese had plenty of time to destroy almost all archival sources that American bombing had already destroyed. In addition the Japanese 'state' did not cease to exist in the same way that the Nazi 'state' ceased to exist. Japan was occupied but not in the way Germany was and McArthur, and the Americans, really didn't care about war crimes or crimes against humanity. They wanted to try Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbour before a declaration of war was delivered. Oddly no one tried the Japanese for their simultaneous attacks on Hong Kong and Malaya without a declaration of war. Indeed while the USA did get a declaration, albeit late, but none was ever presented in London.
No one was interested in acknowledging that there might be a difference between attacking a proper 'state' such as Poland and colonies such as Hawaii, Philippines, Hong Kong or Malaya (didn't realise Hawaii was a colony - read 'How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States' by Daniel Immerwahr). Indeed colonialism, along with racism, was the elephant in the room at Tokyo (though they weren't the only ones) and Japan, although certainly as imperialist as the UK, USA, France or Netherlands and also as racist, at least pretended that they weren't. The hypocrisy of European colonial powers trying Japan for doing what they had done, but longer ago, was one of the reasons that inspired the judge from India, Radhabinod Pal, to dissent from not simply the Tokyo Courts judgements but from recognising the court's right to judge the defendants. Unfortunately Pal's stand went further and encompassed not simply a belief that those on trial were not responsible for events like the Rape of Nanking but cast doubt on any of the crimes against humanity having ever been convicted. That in later life Pal would also sweepingly dismiss the reality of the Shoah as revealed at Nuremberg makes him a deeply problematic figure as far as I am concerned.
Japan committed its greatest crimes in China, and committed them over the longest period, but the Nationalist Chinese State under Chiang Kai Shek was, during the course of the Tokyo trial, losing the Civil War to Mao's communists. The horrors perpetrated there were never adequately presented at the trial. The Japanese attempts at concealment were abetted by the way the obscenity of Unit 731 (Google it and weep) was completely covered up by the USA. Even though there were plenty of diplomatic and other Western observers to what took place at Nanking almost none of their evidence was called on (it was perhaps unfortunate that the man most responsible for denouncing Japanese crimes and for saving 250,000 Chinese was the German Consul General, John Rabe, a member of the Nazi party). But, to be honest, it was the charge of conspiring to commit and waging aggressive war that was of interest to most of the Allied prosecutors. The deaths of 'Asians' while useful, was not of paramount importance, which helps explain the exclusion of Japan's numerous crimes in Korea.
One of the areas were the author, Mr. Bass, allows to get himself bogged down in retrospective moral posturing is over the Allied firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although before WWII there had been plenty of opportunities to ban aerial bombardment of civilians in war no really effective restrictions were in place. Everyone considered it too important a potential weapon to curtail. Neither Germany nor Japan had any qualms about bombing civilians; the Germans had shown this as long ago as Guernica and the Japanese at Chongqing spent six years firebombing civilians. Don't misunderstand me, both the firebombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of the atom bombs were horrific but the question of whether they can be justified is outside the remit of this book. They weren't illegal and, although this is no justification, if it had been possible for the Japanese army to inflict such damage they would not have hesitated.
I remember back in my school days in the 1970s reading a rather gloriously over the top book 'Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes' by Lord Liverpool, which had plenty of grainy, but grisly, black and white pictures of various atrocities. It was from this book I first learnt of the Tokyo War Crimes trial and I was surprised, presuming it was like Nuremberg, that I'd never heard of it. Now over fifty years later Mr. Bass has provided an account of the trial in all its shoddiness because, at the heart of the trial's failure, was the absurd removal of the Emperor from any threat of prosecution. The lengths of twisted logic that the American prosecutor and the Japanese defendants went through to remove all trace of responsibility from the emperor is almost comic, if it wasn't so tragic in ensuring that for the Japanese the trial would never provide them with a reason to come to terms with their responsibility, never mind guilt.
It is an excellent book about a well meant but ultimately deeply flawed if not farcical event.
August 31, 2024
This brick of a book is a comprehensive discussion of the Tokyo Trials, the less well-known counterpart (at least in the West) to the Nuremberg trials, in which Japanese criminals were tried post-WWIII. Gary Bass recounts not just the events that were being judged at the Trials, and the deliberations and verdicts, but also how lingering resentments over the Trials have helped to shape international relations in East and South-East Asia in the near century since they took place.
The Tokyo Trials are far from straightforward, then or now. As Bass makes clear, they raise many thorny issues about racism, colonialism, imperialism, diplomacy, the rule of law and the nature of justice and of "just(ified) war." Was the tribunal a legitimate body? There might have been a moral case to answer, but was there actually a legal one? Should Emperor Hirohito have been tried or not? Why was the head of the notorious Unit 731, the Japanese group that carried out biological weapons testing and medical torture on Chinese people, not standing in the dock?
Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge on the court, wrote a blistering dissent against the convictions, several hundred pages long, which pointed out that Japan's actions weren't unique, that there was a long history of Western colonialism, racism, and hypocrisy, and that, apparently, "Only a lost war is a crime." Examining Pal's dissent and the forces that shaped it made for one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me. (Pal was certainly right about American hypocrisy—no high-ranking American ever faced consequences for the fire-bombing of Japanese cities or later for Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq or Afghanistan—but his rather binary way of thinking let him down some awful paths, such as engaging in denialism about mass rape as a war crime and about the Holocaust.)
This is a long, dense book, but Bass writes with verve. Even if you might not always agree with Bass's framing of some things (he recognises the U.S.'s faults here, but I did wish he had pushed his critique further) or some of his conclusions, this is a thoughtful book that you should find rewarding if you have an interest in this moment in history or these historical themes.
4.5, rounded up to 5.
The Tokyo Trials are far from straightforward, then or now. As Bass makes clear, they raise many thorny issues about racism, colonialism, imperialism, diplomacy, the rule of law and the nature of justice and of "just(ified) war." Was the tribunal a legitimate body? There might have been a moral case to answer, but was there actually a legal one? Should Emperor Hirohito have been tried or not? Why was the head of the notorious Unit 731, the Japanese group that carried out biological weapons testing and medical torture on Chinese people, not standing in the dock?
Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge on the court, wrote a blistering dissent against the convictions, several hundred pages long, which pointed out that Japan's actions weren't unique, that there was a long history of Western colonialism, racism, and hypocrisy, and that, apparently, "Only a lost war is a crime." Examining Pal's dissent and the forces that shaped it made for one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me. (Pal was certainly right about American hypocrisy—no high-ranking American ever faced consequences for the fire-bombing of Japanese cities or later for Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq or Afghanistan—but his rather binary way of thinking let him down some awful paths, such as engaging in denialism about mass rape as a war crime and about the Holocaust.)
This is a long, dense book, but Bass writes with verve. Even if you might not always agree with Bass's framing of some things (he recognises the U.S.'s faults here, but I did wish he had pushed his critique further) or some of his conclusions, this is a thoughtful book that you should find rewarding if you have an interest in this moment in history or these historical themes.
4.5, rounded up to 5.
November 6, 2023
Did you ever wonder why the Nuremberg trials are well-known, but the Tokyo Trial is treated like it never happened? Well, Gary Bass is here to tell you why in Judgment at Tokyo. In a word, the trial was a mess. It was a mess for so many reasons including judges who didn't want to be there, lack of documentation because the Japanese were so effective at destroying evidence, and bad lawyering. It was a complex story which needed someone like Bass to make sense out of it.
While this topic would be interesting no matter who wrote it, Bass puts on a masterclass presenting the material. He will call out characters when they are clearly lying or in over their head. He doesn't do it often and I sometimes disagreed with him. However, his willingness to interject allows the reader to stop processing facts for a moment and ask themselves what they believe. It makes the book a conversation between the author and a reader. I don't vote for Pulitzer Prizes (because of course no one asked me to), but I know this book deserves one.
It needs to be said before you dive in that this is a very long book. No, that isn't me being squeamish. Bass says it himself in the preface. While I often find narratives can be cut down if you really try, I completely agree with Bass that the length is necessary in this case. There is so much ground to cover and complex characters ranging from dedicated defense lawyers who did not give up on lost causes to a judge who wins my vote as the biggest clown in this whole sordid episode. Most importantly, Bass answers the big question. Why don't we know more about the Tokyo Trial?
(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor Books.)
While this topic would be interesting no matter who wrote it, Bass puts on a masterclass presenting the material. He will call out characters when they are clearly lying or in over their head. He doesn't do it often and I sometimes disagreed with him. However, his willingness to interject allows the reader to stop processing facts for a moment and ask themselves what they believe. It makes the book a conversation between the author and a reader. I don't vote for Pulitzer Prizes (because of course no one asked me to), but I know this book deserves one.
It needs to be said before you dive in that this is a very long book. No, that isn't me being squeamish. Bass says it himself in the preface. While I often find narratives can be cut down if you really try, I completely agree with Bass that the length is necessary in this case. There is so much ground to cover and complex characters ranging from dedicated defense lawyers who did not give up on lost causes to a judge who wins my vote as the biggest clown in this whole sordid episode. Most importantly, Bass answers the big question. Why don't we know more about the Tokyo Trial?
(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor Books.)
March 22, 2024
Excellent, thorough, nuanced, and perhaps the most engaging 900+ page book I've ever consumed.
Bass holds nothing back in examining the hypocrisy and atrocities on all sides, especially those in countries whose WWII horrors were never covered in mainstream classes in America. The research and context into the different judges was fantastic. I could go on and on, but it's just a very good nonfiction offering, perfect for anyone interested in international relations, WWII history, and Asian history.
Highly recommend the audiobook for getting through it, Simon Vance is a great narrator.
Bass holds nothing back in examining the hypocrisy and atrocities on all sides, especially those in countries whose WWII horrors were never covered in mainstream classes in America. The research and context into the different judges was fantastic. I could go on and on, but it's just a very good nonfiction offering, perfect for anyone interested in international relations, WWII history, and Asian history.
Highly recommend the audiobook for getting through it, Simon Vance is a great narrator.
March 4, 2024
It took me 3 weeks to read this. Which is slow going for a 700-page book. It isn't that it's
uninteresting or badly written, it just gets bogged down from time to time by all the legal wranglings. Plus I've been stressed out by other things, so I was finding it difficult to concentrate. That aside, this is a comprehensive, authoritative, account of the second most famous war crimes trial in history. More contentious and messier than Nuremberg, it brings the debate about victor's justice into greater focus. Until you read in detail the atrocities the Japanese committed. Particularly those against other Asiatics. The crimes against the Chinese are especially appalling. However imperfect victor's justice was in this case, we must keep reminding ourselves that the right side won. And what victor's justice would've looked like if it was Japan who had prevailed.
uninteresting or badly written, it just gets bogged down from time to time by all the legal wranglings. Plus I've been stressed out by other things, so I was finding it difficult to concentrate. That aside, this is a comprehensive, authoritative, account of the second most famous war crimes trial in history. More contentious and messier than Nuremberg, it brings the debate about victor's justice into greater focus. Until you read in detail the atrocities the Japanese committed. Particularly those against other Asiatics. The crimes against the Chinese are especially appalling. However imperfect victor's justice was in this case, we must keep reminding ourselves that the right side won. And what victor's justice would've looked like if it was Japan who had prevailed.
July 21, 2024
It took me more than a month to read this book, which is not typical for me even with really long books. Part of this was because I needed to take some breaks when reading about the terrible events that took place in countries such as China and the Philippines. I'm not complaining – it doesn't make much sense to discuss a trial over war crimes without first examining said crimes – but it does not make for easy reading. Because I spent so long reading this I'm finding it hard to summarize my conclusions other than that the trial itself was a shambles, and that hypocrisy on the part of Allied nations played a very large role in it. This is a fascinating book and very well-written, so I encourage anyone with any interest in the subject to give it a try.
March 18, 2024
“Emperor Hirohito began the cold, bleak new year of 1946 by declaring that he was not a living god after all.”
I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes last year and the author implied that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence earlier in the war that Emperor Hirohito must relinquish his throne was the primary reason why Japan did not surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped. The book also stated that many scientists at the Manhattan Project felt that the information relating to nuclear fission should be held in common between the major global powers and that Joseph Stalin should be allowed to view the first nuclear tests at Los Alamos. Niels Bohr met with Robert Oppenheimer, possibly on behalf of Werner Heisenberg, specifically to talk about the larger implications of atomic power and the possible resulting arms race. Both the possibilities of including the Soviet Union in the collection of western countries involved in the Manhattan Project and the formation afterwards of a global organization to regulate nuclear weapons was suggested to Major General Leslie Groves and to President Harry Truman by Oppenheimer and both suggestions were refused outright.
“Yet according to [Kōichi] Kido's diary…the emperor ‘ordered’ [Hideki] Tojo ‘to act according to program.’ This was a singularly explosive piece of evidence…a private record from the emperor's closest aide that showed him personally ordering his prime minister to attack the United States.”
In Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass, the author implies that leaving Emperor Hirohito on the throne allowed Japan to later deny their responsibility for atrocities committed during the Second World War. General Douglas MacArthur believed Hirohito was essential to the peaceful occupation of Japan and its transition to democracy and though sufficient evidence existed to his collaboration with the men indicted, the Emperor was not prosecuted. Bass also states that there were already concerns among Allied powers of the military strength of the USSR and the spread of Communism. The Americans were so concerned that Truman, though he won a promise from Stalin to officially enter the war on the eastern front, hoped he could prevent this entry by dropping the atomic bomb and ending the war beforehand. Truman did not believe that the Allied powers could get the Soviet troops out of areas that they had “liberated”, such as Poland and Manchuria.
“The Japanese were provided with talented American defense lawyers, often in Army uniform; they were among the only people in the courtroom to really depart from their national scripts, giving a remarkable, full-throated representation to their Japanese clients.”
During the International Military Tribunal for the Far East War otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, twenty-eight defendants, mostly government officials and Imperial military officers, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity following the Second World War. The defense in the Tokyo Trial made the case that Japan needed resources and like other western colonists simply sought them elsewhere. Responding to Japan’s incursion into Indochina, the US placed an embargo on Japan, limiting gasoline and oil shipments. When the resulting negotiations with the Americans broke down and the ultimatum of the Hull note delivered, the defense claimed that the Japanese government was forced to take action simply for self-preservation, thus the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Finally though the defense tried to make the case that the Japanese government acted from fear of the spread of Communism, the Justices refused to accept this defense, though many of the western powers had the same concerns.
“During the eerie interval waiting for the Allied armies to arrive, Japanese officials systematically incinerated documents for the war crimes trials that would surely follow— one of the grandest efforts at evidence-tampering in legal history.”
The prosecution had difficulty establishing the Japanese chain of command, especially in the cases of rape and torture of civilians and prisoners. Fighting the Communist, the Chinese government lead by Chiang Kai-shek, was in retreat and therefore evidence needed by the prosecution was never collected.
“Hidden away…in occupied Manchuria, the Japanese army had since 1936 operated a top secret unit for human experiments with bacteriological warfare…Unit 731 had killed some two thousand Chinese and Manchurian prisoners….The operation had been run by General Ishii Shiro….”
The evidence of the bioweapons lab, Unit 731, was never presented during the Trial because the United States and Soviet Union wanted this information for their own military use. And finally many witnesses simply were unable to travel to Tokyo due to the distance and expense.
Twelve judges were named to the Tokyo Trial with William Webb from Australia acting as the Chief Justice. Three judges were named from nonwestern countries: Justice Delfin Jaranilla from the Philippines, Justice Ju-ao Mei from China and Justice Radhabinod Pal from India. The judges disagreed with the authority of the court and its procedures, dissented on opinions including that of the guilt of dependents, and often expressed the grievances of their country of origin. The Australian Chief Justice Webb bullied his peers, the English Justice Patrick tried to usurp power for himself, the Indian Justice Pal wanted to acquit the defendants and the Chinese Justice Mei thought the defense was too robust. Unfortunately there were no judges named to represent Vietnam or Korea.
This was an absolutely absorbing read. I also appreciated the inclusion of the history of Japan after the war, particularly the praise by Japanese conservatives of Justice Pal’s dissenting opinion and the deification of the individuals who committed war crimes at the Yasukuni shrine.
“In December 2013…[Shinzo] Abe visited Yasukuni, which prompted the usual Chinese denunciations and one unusual one: the Chinese ambassador in London wrote that ‘If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux.’”
I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes last year and the author implied that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence earlier in the war that Emperor Hirohito must relinquish his throne was the primary reason why Japan did not surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped. The book also stated that many scientists at the Manhattan Project felt that the information relating to nuclear fission should be held in common between the major global powers and that Joseph Stalin should be allowed to view the first nuclear tests at Los Alamos. Niels Bohr met with Robert Oppenheimer, possibly on behalf of Werner Heisenberg, specifically to talk about the larger implications of atomic power and the possible resulting arms race. Both the possibilities of including the Soviet Union in the collection of western countries involved in the Manhattan Project and the formation afterwards of a global organization to regulate nuclear weapons was suggested to Major General Leslie Groves and to President Harry Truman by Oppenheimer and both suggestions were refused outright.
“Yet according to [Kōichi] Kido's diary…the emperor ‘ordered’ [Hideki] Tojo ‘to act according to program.’ This was a singularly explosive piece of evidence…a private record from the emperor's closest aide that showed him personally ordering his prime minister to attack the United States.”
In Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass, the author implies that leaving Emperor Hirohito on the throne allowed Japan to later deny their responsibility for atrocities committed during the Second World War. General Douglas MacArthur believed Hirohito was essential to the peaceful occupation of Japan and its transition to democracy and though sufficient evidence existed to his collaboration with the men indicted, the Emperor was not prosecuted. Bass also states that there were already concerns among Allied powers of the military strength of the USSR and the spread of Communism. The Americans were so concerned that Truman, though he won a promise from Stalin to officially enter the war on the eastern front, hoped he could prevent this entry by dropping the atomic bomb and ending the war beforehand. Truman did not believe that the Allied powers could get the Soviet troops out of areas that they had “liberated”, such as Poland and Manchuria.
“The Japanese were provided with talented American defense lawyers, often in Army uniform; they were among the only people in the courtroom to really depart from their national scripts, giving a remarkable, full-throated representation to their Japanese clients.”
During the International Military Tribunal for the Far East War otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, twenty-eight defendants, mostly government officials and Imperial military officers, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity following the Second World War. The defense in the Tokyo Trial made the case that Japan needed resources and like other western colonists simply sought them elsewhere. Responding to Japan’s incursion into Indochina, the US placed an embargo on Japan, limiting gasoline and oil shipments. When the resulting negotiations with the Americans broke down and the ultimatum of the Hull note delivered, the defense claimed that the Japanese government was forced to take action simply for self-preservation, thus the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Finally though the defense tried to make the case that the Japanese government acted from fear of the spread of Communism, the Justices refused to accept this defense, though many of the western powers had the same concerns.
“During the eerie interval waiting for the Allied armies to arrive, Japanese officials systematically incinerated documents for the war crimes trials that would surely follow— one of the grandest efforts at evidence-tampering in legal history.”
The prosecution had difficulty establishing the Japanese chain of command, especially in the cases of rape and torture of civilians and prisoners. Fighting the Communist, the Chinese government lead by Chiang Kai-shek, was in retreat and therefore evidence needed by the prosecution was never collected.
“Hidden away…in occupied Manchuria, the Japanese army had since 1936 operated a top secret unit for human experiments with bacteriological warfare…Unit 731 had killed some two thousand Chinese and Manchurian prisoners….The operation had been run by General Ishii Shiro….”
The evidence of the bioweapons lab, Unit 731, was never presented during the Trial because the United States and Soviet Union wanted this information for their own military use. And finally many witnesses simply were unable to travel to Tokyo due to the distance and expense.
Twelve judges were named to the Tokyo Trial with William Webb from Australia acting as the Chief Justice. Three judges were named from nonwestern countries: Justice Delfin Jaranilla from the Philippines, Justice Ju-ao Mei from China and Justice Radhabinod Pal from India. The judges disagreed with the authority of the court and its procedures, dissented on opinions including that of the guilt of dependents, and often expressed the grievances of their country of origin. The Australian Chief Justice Webb bullied his peers, the English Justice Patrick tried to usurp power for himself, the Indian Justice Pal wanted to acquit the defendants and the Chinese Justice Mei thought the defense was too robust. Unfortunately there were no judges named to represent Vietnam or Korea.
This was an absolutely absorbing read. I also appreciated the inclusion of the history of Japan after the war, particularly the praise by Japanese conservatives of Justice Pal’s dissenting opinion and the deification of the individuals who committed war crimes at the Yasukuni shrine.
“In December 2013…[Shinzo] Abe visited Yasukuni, which prompted the usual Chinese denunciations and one unusual one: the Chinese ambassador in London wrote that ‘If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux.’”
April 14, 2024
detailed and insightful look at the lead up to the far east war and the war crime trial and the aftermath, well researched enjoyed the book overall.
Read
January 22, 2024In September 1945, shortly before his arrest by Allied soldiers, Japan’s wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki was asked by an American reporter who he considered responsible for the war. ‘You are the victors’, replied Tōjō, ‘and you are able to name him now … But historians 500 or 1,000 years from now may judge differently.’
Here, in essence, was one of the biggest challenges that faced the International Military Tribunal for the Far East when it convened in Tokyo in April 1946: how to avoid the impression of victors’ justice? Modelled on the Nuremberg trials, then ongoing in Germany, the aim of the ‘Tokyo trials’, as they became known, was to try senior Japanese leaders for a range of crimes committed both during the Second World War and in the period leading up to it. When the trials concluded in December 1948, each of the 25 defendants was found guilty on at least one count. Seven, including Tōjō Hideki, were sentenced to death.
In obvious ways the trials did indeed represent victors’ justice. The victors set the mandate and populated the judges’ bench. Their own conduct in the war – firebombing Japanese cities and using atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was exempt from consideration. And their point of view on the causes of war decided the chronology of the trials: beginning with Japanese militarism in the late 1920s, rather than – as a Japanese witness at the trial suggested – in 1853, with America’s forced opening of Japan to trade and diplomacy on Western terms. Tōjō himself thought that the Opium Wars of the 19th century might be a reasonable point of departure.
And yet as Gary J. Bass points out in this magisterial account – long but never sprawling; thick with detail yet always engrossing – true victors’ justice, as far as some of the Allied leaders were concerned, would have involved putting Emperor Hirohito on trial and most likely hanging him. Large proportions of the Allies’ domestic populations wanted to see Japan destroyed. Bass reports that 85 per cent of Americans had been in favour of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Christopher Harding is a cultural historian and broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) and he writes about Asia’s impact on Western life at IlluminAsia.org.
Here, in essence, was one of the biggest challenges that faced the International Military Tribunal for the Far East when it convened in Tokyo in April 1946: how to avoid the impression of victors’ justice? Modelled on the Nuremberg trials, then ongoing in Germany, the aim of the ‘Tokyo trials’, as they became known, was to try senior Japanese leaders for a range of crimes committed both during the Second World War and in the period leading up to it. When the trials concluded in December 1948, each of the 25 defendants was found guilty on at least one count. Seven, including Tōjō Hideki, were sentenced to death.
In obvious ways the trials did indeed represent victors’ justice. The victors set the mandate and populated the judges’ bench. Their own conduct in the war – firebombing Japanese cities and using atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was exempt from consideration. And their point of view on the causes of war decided the chronology of the trials: beginning with Japanese militarism in the late 1920s, rather than – as a Japanese witness at the trial suggested – in 1853, with America’s forced opening of Japan to trade and diplomacy on Western terms. Tōjō himself thought that the Opium Wars of the 19th century might be a reasonable point of departure.
And yet as Gary J. Bass points out in this magisterial account – long but never sprawling; thick with detail yet always engrossing – true victors’ justice, as far as some of the Allied leaders were concerned, would have involved putting Emperor Hirohito on trial and most likely hanging him. Large proportions of the Allies’ domestic populations wanted to see Japan destroyed. Bass reports that 85 per cent of Americans had been in favour of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Christopher Harding is a cultural historian and broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) and he writes about Asia’s impact on Western life at IlluminAsia.org.
June 29, 2024
What do we do when the war is over? The treaties and surrenders have been signed. The prisoners have been returned (hopefully). The armies have been demobbed. But the trauma remains, especially after wars as horrific as World War II. So many millions died that it seems wrong to just allow the surviving leaders of the German, Italian, and Japanese governments to live out their lives in peace, especially when the violence committed by Nazi and Imperial Japanese forces went well beyond the battlefield. After World War I, the victors relied on reparations, forced demilitarization, and treaties to ensure peace. After World War II, the victors turned to international law to hold (at least some) of their former enemies responsible. In Europe, Nazis were tried and sentenced at the Nuremberg Tribunals. In Asia, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, held in Tokyo, attempted to do the same to leaders of the former Japanese Empire. In Judgment at Tokyo, Gary J. Bass uses archival materials—letters, diaries, newspapers, testimonies, and court documents—to examine the thorny legal issues, judicial backbiting, realpolitik, and more to tell the story of the long fight to administer some kind of justice after long years of war...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
February 21, 2024
Everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials; the victors presiding over the vanquished. What about the other World War II war crimes tribunal established out of the same principle - international justice for the atrocities inflicted upon the winning Allied forces?
If you haven’t heard of the Tokyo Tribunal, where eleven different judges each representing eleven Allied nations (many of them colonies of greater powers at that time) - the United States, China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, Holland, New Zealand, India and the Philippines - then no worries, you’re not historically ignorant.
Most people have not heard anything about this grand trial against 25 Class A Japanese war criminals in the Pacific War theater for the simple reason that the entire thing, from start to finish (and even in present-day interpretations) was an utter fiasco.
To begin with, there was the obvious question of how representatives of victor nations could possibly judge their enemies with no bias (as it turns out - they couldn’t - there was blatant bias on display from the judges to the prosecution, defense, defendants, press and public alike).
The court was unable to even give a satisfactory explanation as for what gave it legal jurisdiction to conduct this criminal trial in an occupied, defeated, and demilitarized country.
They got only as far as “their rightful legal jurisdiction rested upon the charter drawn up by General Douglas MacArthur, overseeing the lawful occupation of Japan after their unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri.” But questions of bias and hypocrisy (ex post facto laws of aggressive war, American and other Allied countries’ own imperial conquests, the atomic bombs targeting mostly civilian populations) were never addressed and certainly never published in the court’s deliberations and majority opinion.
The only dissenters were Dutch judge Bert Röling - whom appeared more confused than opposed - and Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal - who used the opportunity to dissent on the grounds not just that the claims of jurisdiction and bias were dubious - but instead to act as some kind of vengeful warrior against European colonialism (never mind all of the crimes that took place against fellow Asians by the Japanese) who chose to acquit each and every defendant on the grounds that, apparently, the evidence was too sparse.
This included claiming that the victims of the victorious powers often became “overexcited” when testifying against their tormentors. Pal used this claim to discredit hundreds of accounts of rape at Nanjing - whether the account came from a tearful survivor herself, a Red Cross aide, a doctor or diplomat, made no difference - in his mind, “the suggestion of mass rape and murder is incorrect, and these abuses often occurred as rather isolated examples of lower-ranking soldiers not properly supervised.” All of this dispute overwhelming evidence and testimony. To this day, Pal remains a martyr to the extreme Japanese nationalists who made no apologies for the atrocities committed during World War II.
This masterpiece of investigate work by Gary Bass gives you everything you need to know about both sides of the story, and is the perfect blend - for me, anyway - of history and international law. Even though international law continues to remain a very abstract field, with so few examples. While the widespread atrocities and torture committed by indifferent Japanese military men could at times be difficult to read, it was at times entertaining to read just how petty the squabbles between the different judges, judges and attorneys, judges and defendants, and so on, actually became.
As horrible of a war criminal Tojo Hideki may have been, it really was quite preposterous for U.S. chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan (sadly ignorant of the law at best, often appearing inebriated at worst) - a Truman crony - to have handled Hideki’s cross-examination. Keenan had even brought in an legal assistant who had spent a year specializing on Tojo and putting in five weeks of intense preparation for the questioning of what would be the trial’s most notorious defendant.
Alas, when President Judge Webb told Keenan it broke precedent to allow a prosecutor to have an assistant, and demanded a reason for the assistant’s presence, Keenan could not say that this aide was much more knowledgeable and competent in the job than he was. Without being able to state the truth, he could not divide up the cross-examination between himself and the aide, and the aide, furious at having done so much preparation only to be sidelined - stormed out, rather than to sit around only as a consultative presence.
The result of Keenan v. Hideki was “appalling”, according to British prosecutor Comyns Carr, writing to British attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross:
”The results are best sumnarised by a girl from the British embassy who was in court this morning and said, ‘Tojo had a good morning hanging Keenan.’”
The only serious miscarriages of justice to me were Togo Shigenori and Shigemitsu Mamoru, who, like the book extolled, seemingly were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong room with the wrong people at the wrong time. Everything they, the other defendants, and official records/evidence said, supported their claims that they had done everything possible to avoid war, did not think they could win the war, yet found themselves sidelined by the militarist hardliners. Apparently the judges were not satisfied with this, as they “didn’t resign in protest” (despite one of the men threatening to resign twice, in fact) they must have supported the aggressive attack against Pearl Harbor.
This book leaves you with as many questions as it does answers. While most of the defendants were no doubt guilty of their crimes, was it fair to isolate them and punish them, and not the Americans who had killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the aerial bombings? What about the USSR, who was united with Hitler long before Japan, and with Stalin as the country’s leader executing, starving, and sentencing so many of his own people to penal colonies, were they really in any position to speak of honor and morality?
It definitely exposes the hypocrisy and atrocities and the underhanded actions on both the Allied and Axis sides. Bass weighs in at times to issue a verdict on the truthfulness of certain courtroom accounts, but never to the point where one might question if he was seeking to influence the opinion of the reader. No, there is enough information here for the reader to make up their own mind. The Tribunal was definitely a mistake, but what and how should things have been done differently?
These are all fascinating questions that the world may never know (and hopefully will never need to find out). Definitely a 5 star book if there was one, and every page really was necessary, justifying the rather lengthy “door knocker” of a book (my favorite expression for voluminous novels and a now a staple of my literary vocabulary).
If you haven’t heard of the Tokyo Tribunal, where eleven different judges each representing eleven Allied nations (many of them colonies of greater powers at that time) - the United States, China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, Holland, New Zealand, India and the Philippines - then no worries, you’re not historically ignorant.
Most people have not heard anything about this grand trial against 25 Class A Japanese war criminals in the Pacific War theater for the simple reason that the entire thing, from start to finish (and even in present-day interpretations) was an utter fiasco.
To begin with, there was the obvious question of how representatives of victor nations could possibly judge their enemies with no bias (as it turns out - they couldn’t - there was blatant bias on display from the judges to the prosecution, defense, defendants, press and public alike).
The court was unable to even give a satisfactory explanation as for what gave it legal jurisdiction to conduct this criminal trial in an occupied, defeated, and demilitarized country.
They got only as far as “their rightful legal jurisdiction rested upon the charter drawn up by General Douglas MacArthur, overseeing the lawful occupation of Japan after their unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri.” But questions of bias and hypocrisy (ex post facto laws of aggressive war, American and other Allied countries’ own imperial conquests, the atomic bombs targeting mostly civilian populations) were never addressed and certainly never published in the court’s deliberations and majority opinion.
The only dissenters were Dutch judge Bert Röling - whom appeared more confused than opposed - and Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal - who used the opportunity to dissent on the grounds not just that the claims of jurisdiction and bias were dubious - but instead to act as some kind of vengeful warrior against European colonialism (never mind all of the crimes that took place against fellow Asians by the Japanese) who chose to acquit each and every defendant on the grounds that, apparently, the evidence was too sparse.
This included claiming that the victims of the victorious powers often became “overexcited” when testifying against their tormentors. Pal used this claim to discredit hundreds of accounts of rape at Nanjing - whether the account came from a tearful survivor herself, a Red Cross aide, a doctor or diplomat, made no difference - in his mind, “the suggestion of mass rape and murder is incorrect, and these abuses often occurred as rather isolated examples of lower-ranking soldiers not properly supervised.” All of this dispute overwhelming evidence and testimony. To this day, Pal remains a martyr to the extreme Japanese nationalists who made no apologies for the atrocities committed during World War II.
This masterpiece of investigate work by Gary Bass gives you everything you need to know about both sides of the story, and is the perfect blend - for me, anyway - of history and international law. Even though international law continues to remain a very abstract field, with so few examples. While the widespread atrocities and torture committed by indifferent Japanese military men could at times be difficult to read, it was at times entertaining to read just how petty the squabbles between the different judges, judges and attorneys, judges and defendants, and so on, actually became.
As horrible of a war criminal Tojo Hideki may have been, it really was quite preposterous for U.S. chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan (sadly ignorant of the law at best, often appearing inebriated at worst) - a Truman crony - to have handled Hideki’s cross-examination. Keenan had even brought in an legal assistant who had spent a year specializing on Tojo and putting in five weeks of intense preparation for the questioning of what would be the trial’s most notorious defendant.
Alas, when President Judge Webb told Keenan it broke precedent to allow a prosecutor to have an assistant, and demanded a reason for the assistant’s presence, Keenan could not say that this aide was much more knowledgeable and competent in the job than he was. Without being able to state the truth, he could not divide up the cross-examination between himself and the aide, and the aide, furious at having done so much preparation only to be sidelined - stormed out, rather than to sit around only as a consultative presence.
The result of Keenan v. Hideki was “appalling”, according to British prosecutor Comyns Carr, writing to British attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross:
”The results are best sumnarised by a girl from the British embassy who was in court this morning and said, ‘Tojo had a good morning hanging Keenan.’”
The only serious miscarriages of justice to me were Togo Shigenori and Shigemitsu Mamoru, who, like the book extolled, seemingly were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong room with the wrong people at the wrong time. Everything they, the other defendants, and official records/evidence said, supported their claims that they had done everything possible to avoid war, did not think they could win the war, yet found themselves sidelined by the militarist hardliners. Apparently the judges were not satisfied with this, as they “didn’t resign in protest” (despite one of the men threatening to resign twice, in fact) they must have supported the aggressive attack against Pearl Harbor.
This book leaves you with as many questions as it does answers. While most of the defendants were no doubt guilty of their crimes, was it fair to isolate them and punish them, and not the Americans who had killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the aerial bombings? What about the USSR, who was united with Hitler long before Japan, and with Stalin as the country’s leader executing, starving, and sentencing so many of his own people to penal colonies, were they really in any position to speak of honor and morality?
It definitely exposes the hypocrisy and atrocities and the underhanded actions on both the Allied and Axis sides. Bass weighs in at times to issue a verdict on the truthfulness of certain courtroom accounts, but never to the point where one might question if he was seeking to influence the opinion of the reader. No, there is enough information here for the reader to make up their own mind. The Tribunal was definitely a mistake, but what and how should things have been done differently?
These are all fascinating questions that the world may never know (and hopefully will never need to find out). Definitely a 5 star book if there was one, and every page really was necessary, justifying the rather lengthy “door knocker” of a book (my favorite expression for voluminous novels and a now a staple of my literary vocabulary).
July 24, 2023
This was a great chronicle of the Postwar environment in the Pacific Theater. Bass does a great job of detailing the events at the trials in Japan after the war and it is a valuable read. I would highly recommend this to fellow World War 2 buffs.
January 1, 2024
A light Christmas read, clocking in at just under 700 pages… My main critique is that at a certain point in the trial coverage, Bass just recycles a lot of topics and phrases he previously used, which when you’re already on page 500 of reading about war crimes gets to be…. a bit much.
However, it’s certainly the definitive work on the topic. I think Bass was very fair in his coverage (and certainly exhaustive).
Would I recommend this book to others? If you want to develop arm strength I do recommend the hard cover version, probably the heaviest book I own (coincidentally, one of the heaviest books I own by subject matter as well). Proceed with caution.
However, it’s certainly the definitive work on the topic. I think Bass was very fair in his coverage (and certainly exhaustive).
Would I recommend this book to others? If you want to develop arm strength I do recommend the hard cover version, probably the heaviest book I own (coincidentally, one of the heaviest books I own by subject matter as well). Proceed with caution.
May 30, 2024
A really fascinating book on a topic i know very little about. The author did get a bit bogged down in some spots.
November 16, 2023
If you're a World War II buff, you're definitely going to want this book on your shelf, both to read and consult. It's a definitive look at the Tokyo Trial of war criminals. So, if you have an interest in Japan (as I do) you will also find this interesting. That said, it's almost 900 pages long so there's a level of commitment here that may not be for the average reader. It reads well, though, and it doesn't feel at all cumbersome or long-winded; it's necessarily long and the reader will come away with a good sense of this event in history.
As a librarian, I'd definitely want this in my collection. As a reader, I'd definitely give this as a holiday present to a WW2 buff. It's the perfect book to curl up with and leisurely read through. As I said, it's a time commitment, but I believe it is one that will pay off for the reader.
Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's a fine piece of writing and research.
As a librarian, I'd definitely want this in my collection. As a reader, I'd definitely give this as a holiday present to a WW2 buff. It's the perfect book to curl up with and leisurely read through. As I said, it's a time commitment, but I believe it is one that will pay off for the reader.
Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's a fine piece of writing and research.
January 5, 2024
This well-researched, well-written book was enlightening and thought provoking. The trials were not at all cut and dried convictions of each of the accused. There were so many nuances to their stories and to the men who sat in judgment. What surprised me most was the vigorous defenses the the Japanese accused received. The infighting among the judges was other eye-opening aspect of this book. The author was mostly evenhanded in his evaluations and critiques. This is the way I much prefer history to be presented and written about.
February 8, 2024
Tbh I didn’t finish this, but I tried and want to acknowledge that. Was interested but sometimes like Wikipedia length of history learning…
December 17, 2023
Maybe my favorite book of 2023. A wonderful popular history of a controversial aspect of the post-WWII era, meticulously researched and very well told. Bass does an excellent job of following the impact of the Tokyo war crimes trial through to today's Asian Pacific relationships. Important and recommended.
Read
August 6, 2024I think the book is riveting and merciless, and I would add that I think it is fundamental for American readers if they are to understand the history of Asia until the present day. Just as Germany did, imperial Japan transformed herself into a functioning democracy still largely administered by management who had worked in prewar governments and armies.
December 10, 2023
Excellent, but mind numbing detail. While interesting and complete a bit of a slog to get through.
April 9, 2024
Of all the books I read for the 2024 BookTube Prize octofinals, this one covers the grandest scope. In the (second attempt to) end all world wars, Nuremberg is largely remembered. Bass’s book covers the more forgotten trial in the far east.
After the U.S. dropped the atom bombs in 1945 and Japan finally surrendered, the question became how the victors would deal with the vanquished. Perhaps it’s unusual that it came down to a 2-year trial. Perhaps, historically, the “crimes against humanity” that Japan was accused of would have fallen under the purview of victor actions in earlier times—raping, pillaging, mass deaths of civilians and prisoners of war. A forced diaspora instead of an occupation.
But post-World War II attempted to be the start of a new era, or perhaps a continuation of post-World War I, where technically speaking, the goal was meant to be more lofty than spoils for the winners. This was supposed to set a precedent for the future, an internationally agreed on sense of law and order: an exercise, one could argue, in futility.
It’s too simplistic to claim Bass says the Tokyo trial “failed,” but he arduously looks at what morality it argued and what morality it left out. The international trial was presided over by judges of some but not all of the allies, and focused one-sidedly on Japanese “crimes against humanity” and “war conspiracy.” These, and other terms, were recently minted by western powers, and then not applied to their, arguably similar actions in warfare. I couldn’t help but think of the movie “Oppenheimer,” which wasn’t out yet when this book was published. It also, arguably, isn’t a U.S. reckoning with dropping the atom bombs, but rather a biopic of one man.
Japan’s national reckoning with war crimes isn’t as thorough as, say, Germany’s. It’s a complicated bag, and arguments against contrition go as far back as a judge’s dissenting opinions in this trial. And yet, in many ways Japan remade itself into a peaceful, thriving democratic culture. Which is saying something when many other world powers fractured into authoritarianism.
Plus, there’s still the argument (not fully borne out when taking into account Japan’s treatment of its Asian neighbors in WWII) that the nation was attempting to right the wrongs of western imperialism. The immediate post-war years certainly didn’t see a decline in western racism towards Asians (and other non-whites,) at the very least. Bass covers all of these topics and more, in an exhaustive critique of the Tokyo trial and its impact.
I listened to the audiobook, as narrated by Simon Vance. Perhaps that colored my own take, since Vance’s crisp British voice reminded me of war propaganda reels. :P Not to say I thought this was propaganda—quite the opposite, given the critiques that Bass brought to all sides. I’m speaking purely aesthetically about getting into the historical mood.
And yet, it’s difficult to not extrapolate modern arguments from these thorough historical points—about the malleability of language in discussing war crimes, how said crimes are argued with bias, and how these trials can’t be divorced from evolving political realities. World War II, arguably, was about various actors engaged in imperialism or new forms of expansion, arguing that the similar actors were committing crimes against humanity. (Though Germany’s race laws, and specifically the Final Solution, certainly set the Nazis and their direct collaborators into a league of their own.) The end of the war was supposed to be about punishing the guilty and setting a new stage for international cooperation. Except that certain people—namely the Japanese emperor, Hirohito—were explicitly excluded from judgment. This had to do not with the emperor’s actions in the war as much as it did with the U.S. wanting to maintain a status quo in post-war Japanese governance, and create new allies as old kinda-ones (*cough* the Soviet Union and China *cough cough*) became/continued to be communist “enemies.” Spoiler alert: utopian peace was not achieved.
Bass meticulously (and often repetitively) went through the actions that ended the war on the Asian theater, the pre-trial, the trial itself and the aftermath. He did center on some characters to weave a compelling narrative—or maybe these aren’t all of them, but the ones that stood out most to me. There was the Australian presiding/president judge, William Webb, who was grandiose and standoffish. U.S. General Macarthur, who wasn’t directly involved in the trial, still loomed large as the head of the (censorious) U.S. occupation of Japan. There was Mei Ju-ao, the Chinese judge, an American-educated nationalist-turned-communist who wanted justice for war crimes against his country. There was “British Indian” judge Rahdabinod Pal, who dissented strongly to the damning trial verdicts, often by invoking criticism of western racism and colonialism, and who is hailed now as a hero by Japanese rightist nationalists. And on the Japanese side there was Tojo Hideki, who was prime minister during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, etc . He wasn’t the only Japanese person to be convicted of war crimes, but he bore the brunt of the punitive guilt, arguably as a scapegoat.
All of these men, and the international decisions in which they were a part, are conveyed complexly on the page. It’s the sort of granular reportage where most details can’t stick, unless the reader is already well-versed in the subject, or perhaps this book is read and dissected in a classroom setting. These considerations, plus the large page count, will likely lessen its popular appeal. But I can’t help but think that despite any flaws, Bass succeeded where indeed international tribunals failed in dissecting the reality of World War II, and particularly the Asian theater and its aftermath, with objectivity and nuance. Arguably the best the world can get in terms of true justice.
After the U.S. dropped the atom bombs in 1945 and Japan finally surrendered, the question became how the victors would deal with the vanquished. Perhaps it’s unusual that it came down to a 2-year trial. Perhaps, historically, the “crimes against humanity” that Japan was accused of would have fallen under the purview of victor actions in earlier times—raping, pillaging, mass deaths of civilians and prisoners of war. A forced diaspora instead of an occupation.
But post-World War II attempted to be the start of a new era, or perhaps a continuation of post-World War I, where technically speaking, the goal was meant to be more lofty than spoils for the winners. This was supposed to set a precedent for the future, an internationally agreed on sense of law and order: an exercise, one could argue, in futility.
It’s too simplistic to claim Bass says the Tokyo trial “failed,” but he arduously looks at what morality it argued and what morality it left out. The international trial was presided over by judges of some but not all of the allies, and focused one-sidedly on Japanese “crimes against humanity” and “war conspiracy.” These, and other terms, were recently minted by western powers, and then not applied to their, arguably similar actions in warfare. I couldn’t help but think of the movie “Oppenheimer,” which wasn’t out yet when this book was published. It also, arguably, isn’t a U.S. reckoning with dropping the atom bombs, but rather a biopic of one man.
Japan’s national reckoning with war crimes isn’t as thorough as, say, Germany’s. It’s a complicated bag, and arguments against contrition go as far back as a judge’s dissenting opinions in this trial. And yet, in many ways Japan remade itself into a peaceful, thriving democratic culture. Which is saying something when many other world powers fractured into authoritarianism.
Plus, there’s still the argument (not fully borne out when taking into account Japan’s treatment of its Asian neighbors in WWII) that the nation was attempting to right the wrongs of western imperialism. The immediate post-war years certainly didn’t see a decline in western racism towards Asians (and other non-whites,) at the very least. Bass covers all of these topics and more, in an exhaustive critique of the Tokyo trial and its impact.
I listened to the audiobook, as narrated by Simon Vance. Perhaps that colored my own take, since Vance’s crisp British voice reminded me of war propaganda reels. :P Not to say I thought this was propaganda—quite the opposite, given the critiques that Bass brought to all sides. I’m speaking purely aesthetically about getting into the historical mood.
And yet, it’s difficult to not extrapolate modern arguments from these thorough historical points—about the malleability of language in discussing war crimes, how said crimes are argued with bias, and how these trials can’t be divorced from evolving political realities. World War II, arguably, was about various actors engaged in imperialism or new forms of expansion, arguing that the similar actors were committing crimes against humanity. (Though Germany’s race laws, and specifically the Final Solution, certainly set the Nazis and their direct collaborators into a league of their own.) The end of the war was supposed to be about punishing the guilty and setting a new stage for international cooperation. Except that certain people—namely the Japanese emperor, Hirohito—were explicitly excluded from judgment. This had to do not with the emperor’s actions in the war as much as it did with the U.S. wanting to maintain a status quo in post-war Japanese governance, and create new allies as old kinda-ones (*cough* the Soviet Union and China *cough cough*) became/continued to be communist “enemies.” Spoiler alert: utopian peace was not achieved.
Bass meticulously (and often repetitively) went through the actions that ended the war on the Asian theater, the pre-trial, the trial itself and the aftermath. He did center on some characters to weave a compelling narrative—or maybe these aren’t all of them, but the ones that stood out most to me. There was the Australian presiding/president judge, William Webb, who was grandiose and standoffish. U.S. General Macarthur, who wasn’t directly involved in the trial, still loomed large as the head of the (censorious) U.S. occupation of Japan. There was Mei Ju-ao, the Chinese judge, an American-educated nationalist-turned-communist who wanted justice for war crimes against his country. There was “British Indian” judge Rahdabinod Pal, who dissented strongly to the damning trial verdicts, often by invoking criticism of western racism and colonialism, and who is hailed now as a hero by Japanese rightist nationalists. And on the Japanese side there was Tojo Hideki, who was prime minister during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, etc . He wasn’t the only Japanese person to be convicted of war crimes, but he bore the brunt of the punitive guilt, arguably as a scapegoat.
All of these men, and the international decisions in which they were a part, are conveyed complexly on the page. It’s the sort of granular reportage where most details can’t stick, unless the reader is already well-versed in the subject, or perhaps this book is read and dissected in a classroom setting. These considerations, plus the large page count, will likely lessen its popular appeal. But I can’t help but think that despite any flaws, Bass succeeded where indeed international tribunals failed in dissecting the reality of World War II, and particularly the Asian theater and its aftermath, with objectivity and nuance. Arguably the best the world can get in terms of true justice.
January 9, 2024
This book is a masterpiece of history, exhaustively researched and compiled and wonderfully written. Bass writes about the Allied War Crime Tribunal that was convened in Tokyo to try the military and political leaders of Japan in the aftermath of the war. It is a stunning and compelling work that delves into the trial itself over the course of it 2 ½ years, the eleven judges from eleven countries, the prosecution and defense attorneys, the Japanese defendants and the numerous, weighty legal and moral issues and their subsequent repercussions.
Bass explains the various high level Japanese government meetings, decisions and wartime incidents and events that were the basis for the charges levied at the Tribunal.
The several of the charges (specifically waging aggressive war and conspiracy to wage aggressive war) were controversial both in general and among the judges.
The inability of the Tribunal to establish its legal and moral basis as well as to define and justify these charges undermined the credibility of the process and the results, especially in the longer term as Japan regained its independence with the end of occupation. Bass explores this with clarity.
The people engaged in the Tribunal are fascinating, flawed, of varying levels of competence, occasionally deplorable. The Chief prosecutor (American) was a drunk and incompetent. Several of the defense attorneys were highly effective, as were a couple of the British assistant prosecutors who were subordinated to the American Chief. The conflicts were endless. The defendants were a mix of unrepentant militarists, former ministers and prime ministers. Some of the latter are almost tragic figures who did in fact try to avoid or mitigate the war, and yet were severely sentenced regardless. The eleven judges were also often at odds with each other. The Chief Judge (Australian) was a bully and mediocre legal talent who dominated proceedings. The Indian judge announced at the outset he would be in dissent. The Chinese and Philippine judges were focused on retribution, the British Commonwealth trio (Canada, UK, New Zealand) formed a unified bloc, and the American was largely passive. The inclusion of a Soviet judge was inexplicable, in retrospect, and led to intractable issues in the judging, the procedural issues and the sentencing. All played out against a background of Indian independence, the Chinese Communists coming to power, and the emergence of the Cold War.
The process of the Tribunal, its strengths (documenting actual Japanese war crimes, for example Nanking, Manila, treatment of POWs, etc.) and weaknesses (hubris, ill-defined grandiose charges that were as applicable to the Allied war effort as to the Japanese, incomplete or insufficient evidence, and an appearance of victor’s vengeance in the rulings and sentencings) are compelling reading, as are the people involved – the defendants, the attorneys on both sides, the judges and the political figures overseeing it all. Bass is superb in his narration and analysis of the actions and events that ultimately led to the Tribunal and the charges, as he is in discussing the consequences both ion the near term of the Tribunal itself and long term – years after.
This is a book that, the deeper into it I read, the more eager I was to read more. It is a masterful exposition on the end of the war and a widely overlooked and underplayed event that had major implications leading into the Cold War. It is one of the most important contributions to the history of the War in the Pacific that has been published in years. Definitely a "must read"!
Bass explains the various high level Japanese government meetings, decisions and wartime incidents and events that were the basis for the charges levied at the Tribunal.
The several of the charges (specifically waging aggressive war and conspiracy to wage aggressive war) were controversial both in general and among the judges.
The inability of the Tribunal to establish its legal and moral basis as well as to define and justify these charges undermined the credibility of the process and the results, especially in the longer term as Japan regained its independence with the end of occupation. Bass explores this with clarity.
The people engaged in the Tribunal are fascinating, flawed, of varying levels of competence, occasionally deplorable. The Chief prosecutor (American) was a drunk and incompetent. Several of the defense attorneys were highly effective, as were a couple of the British assistant prosecutors who were subordinated to the American Chief. The conflicts were endless. The defendants were a mix of unrepentant militarists, former ministers and prime ministers. Some of the latter are almost tragic figures who did in fact try to avoid or mitigate the war, and yet were severely sentenced regardless. The eleven judges were also often at odds with each other. The Chief Judge (Australian) was a bully and mediocre legal talent who dominated proceedings. The Indian judge announced at the outset he would be in dissent. The Chinese and Philippine judges were focused on retribution, the British Commonwealth trio (Canada, UK, New Zealand) formed a unified bloc, and the American was largely passive. The inclusion of a Soviet judge was inexplicable, in retrospect, and led to intractable issues in the judging, the procedural issues and the sentencing. All played out against a background of Indian independence, the Chinese Communists coming to power, and the emergence of the Cold War.
The process of the Tribunal, its strengths (documenting actual Japanese war crimes, for example Nanking, Manila, treatment of POWs, etc.) and weaknesses (hubris, ill-defined grandiose charges that were as applicable to the Allied war effort as to the Japanese, incomplete or insufficient evidence, and an appearance of victor’s vengeance in the rulings and sentencings) are compelling reading, as are the people involved – the defendants, the attorneys on both sides, the judges and the political figures overseeing it all. Bass is superb in his narration and analysis of the actions and events that ultimately led to the Tribunal and the charges, as he is in discussing the consequences both ion the near term of the Tribunal itself and long term – years after.
This is a book that, the deeper into it I read, the more eager I was to read more. It is a masterful exposition on the end of the war and a widely overlooked and underplayed event that had major implications leading into the Cold War. It is one of the most important contributions to the history of the War in the Pacific that has been published in years. Definitely a "must read"!
August 21, 2024
a fantastically written account of the aftermath of the second world war in the pacific theater.
a couple of interesting takeaways:
1) American cultural memory is obsessed with the European theater of the Second World War and hardly thinks about the pacific theater at all. This is strange, because our involvement in the latter was so much more important than the former. I think a lot of it has to do with an unwillingness to confront the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. and, it's not as easy to paint the conflict as a struggle between good and pure evil, as is the case with the Nazis.
2) i've been working on a project focused on the laws of armed conflict / war crimes for the last couple of months. this book made it clear that this is an extremely difficult area to regulate using legal means. a major recurring them is how rhetorically difficult the Tokyo Tribunal was for the prosecution, given that many of the crimes alleged against the Japanese were committed by the Americans and the British. the international criminal court was set up partially to deal with the problems generated when the victors try the losers for crimes committed during conflicts. it is a shame that the ICC has failed to take hold, since the need for accountability for crimes committed in conflict is so pressing.
3) the role of the discourse of race and imperalism in the pacific theater. the japanese often argued that their war was against racial domination by the western world. this co-existed with their own extremely racialized campaigns of violence against China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. in japan's memory of the war, the former completely displaces the latter. the united states' position was similar in some regards. ever since woodrow wilson, the united states had positioned itself as an anti-imperialist power. this sometimes actually guided the behavior of senior american policymakers. and it definitely shaped the views of american soldiers fighting alongside the british empire. this was belied by the existence of an american empire put together over the course of the nineteenth century. but the fact that both the US and the Soviet Union were nominally anti-imperialist powers did substantially influence the post-war international system that they created.
4) japan's post-war development is nothing short of a miracle! as we've hopefully learned by now, it's very difficult for victorious powers to set up functional and durable democracies in conquered territory. but this really did work in japan! some of it has to do with japanese experience of democracy before the authoritarian turn in the run-up to the war, but it's shocking how quickly japanese civil society and politics shifted out of war footing into a successful democratic polity.
5) war is bad. we really should not do it.
a couple of interesting takeaways:
1) American cultural memory is obsessed with the European theater of the Second World War and hardly thinks about the pacific theater at all. This is strange, because our involvement in the latter was so much more important than the former. I think a lot of it has to do with an unwillingness to confront the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. and, it's not as easy to paint the conflict as a struggle between good and pure evil, as is the case with the Nazis.
2) i've been working on a project focused on the laws of armed conflict / war crimes for the last couple of months. this book made it clear that this is an extremely difficult area to regulate using legal means. a major recurring them is how rhetorically difficult the Tokyo Tribunal was for the prosecution, given that many of the crimes alleged against the Japanese were committed by the Americans and the British. the international criminal court was set up partially to deal with the problems generated when the victors try the losers for crimes committed during conflicts. it is a shame that the ICC has failed to take hold, since the need for accountability for crimes committed in conflict is so pressing.
3) the role of the discourse of race and imperalism in the pacific theater. the japanese often argued that their war was against racial domination by the western world. this co-existed with their own extremely racialized campaigns of violence against China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. in japan's memory of the war, the former completely displaces the latter. the united states' position was similar in some regards. ever since woodrow wilson, the united states had positioned itself as an anti-imperialist power. this sometimes actually guided the behavior of senior american policymakers. and it definitely shaped the views of american soldiers fighting alongside the british empire. this was belied by the existence of an american empire put together over the course of the nineteenth century. but the fact that both the US and the Soviet Union were nominally anti-imperialist powers did substantially influence the post-war international system that they created.
4) japan's post-war development is nothing short of a miracle! as we've hopefully learned by now, it's very difficult for victorious powers to set up functional and durable democracies in conquered territory. but this really did work in japan! some of it has to do with japanese experience of democracy before the authoritarian turn in the run-up to the war, but it's shocking how quickly japanese civil society and politics shifted out of war footing into a successful democratic polity.
5) war is bad. we really should not do it.
January 29, 2024
You don't even get to the Trial until Chapter 4 and there is a third of the book left after the verdicts are given out. Which was a fantastic choice.
Even with all the detail I am glad I had some familiarity with the events..what this book does very well is set how much procedure was being made up as they went a long. How concerned people were that if the Trial "failed" it would put the Nuremberg trials into question. How angry people were still about Manchuria. How difficult it was to connect the atrocities in Nanjing and the POW camps with the people on trial.
I am looking forward to reading other people's thoughts on the last third of the book where the author connects The Trial with current views on war crimes and accountability. Why China felt ignored even though a Chinese judge was there. I was personally suprised how little Korea came up in the Trial given how much we know about it now.
This book is an excellent jumping off point for taking WWII out of the realm of a singular unconnected event and placing it into the connected puzzle of history and current events.
Even with all the detail I am glad I had some familiarity with the events..what this book does very well is set how much procedure was being made up as they went a long. How concerned people were that if the Trial "failed" it would put the Nuremberg trials into question. How angry people were still about Manchuria. How difficult it was to connect the atrocities in Nanjing and the POW camps with the people on trial.
I am looking forward to reading other people's thoughts on the last third of the book where the author connects The Trial with current views on war crimes and accountability. Why China felt ignored even though a Chinese judge was there. I was personally suprised how little Korea came up in the Trial given how much we know about it now.
This book is an excellent jumping off point for taking WWII out of the realm of a singular unconnected event and placing it into the connected puzzle of history and current events.
April 7, 2024
This is an exhaustively-researched volume about a subject most of us never knew about or have forgotten. I read a book in college, in the last century, about Hirota Koki, the only civilian among the convicted and executed Japanese war criminals. From that, I knew some of the story before reading but came away fully sated in my curiosity about this mostly-forgotten slice of 20th century history.
The detail is both a strength and weakness of this book. I would guess he has spent years researching the subject and wanted to make sure he didn't let any of that work go to waste, including it appears a 2015 visit to Hiroshima to interview survivors of the atomic blast. Otherwise, I can't figure out why he went into the amount of detail he did. Would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in discussions with his editor about what to, or what not to include in his book.
However, I don't think it needed to be as long as it was. Think Bass could have told an equally-engrossing and compelling story in about half the length he did. That's why I give the book only three and a half stars, four stars for content but only three for the telling of the story.
I read Bass' previous book about the independence fight for Bangladesh in the 1970s and found it fascinating. I eagerly sought out this book after reading reviews and equating it with his authorship of The Blood Telegram.
He does a great job looking at the trial from a 10,000 foot perspective, identifying the larger issues about the court's legitimacy, composition and decision-making. His analysis in the final chapter ties together all the threads in a smoothly-woven tapestry. The role that racism played in the trial is not likely an element of many Occidental narratives about the subject. For that we should commend him.
The strengths of this book, beyond it's exhaustiveness, are the stories about the individual judges hearing the case, specifically Radhabinrod Pal, the Indian judge who cast one of two dissents and insisted on promoting a vigorous dissent in open court and subsequently publishing it in many forms. Chapter 29 "I am Wholly Dissenting", was my favorite section of the book.
Pal's principled stand against the other judges, save a Dutch judge who also dissented, should have confirmed his place in history for the questions he raised during the trial. However, his subsequent denial of Holocaust murder and Japanese killing during the Rape of Nanking diminished his credibility and stature later in life, most everywhere save Japan where he was feted and celebrated until the end of his life. Otherwise, his name would be known world-wide, as it is in Japan for his diminution of the blame for most of Japan's war crimes in the 30s and 40s in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Burma, the Philippines, etc. To Pal, Japan's actions were justified given the behavior of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the US in maintaining their colonial dominance over much of Asia at the time.
Another interesting thing about this book is his discussion of George Kennan, the father of containment. He outlines Kennan's behind-the-scenes role in guiding MacArthur to limit widespread punishment of the Japanese militarists in hopes of using the country as a potential bulwark, and potential source of pressure against the growing Soviet threat in East Asia. AS one who has read many of Kennan's writing, I never knew of this part of his biography.
Overall, this is a good book, the definitive work on the trial. Just don't think it's a book for the average reader, other than hardcore WWII historians, or legal historians. The length will scare away the average reader, who won't want to dive into 700 pages of history about such a relatively arcane slice of WWII history. For graduate students and legal scholars, they might likely disagree with my summary and call it nitpicking.
Don't mean to denigrate the book's research, plot or subject matter in any way whatsoever. It simply didn't seem to me that Bass needed 700 pages to tell the tale. That said, if you're a WWII history junkie like me, dive in!
The detail is both a strength and weakness of this book. I would guess he has spent years researching the subject and wanted to make sure he didn't let any of that work go to waste, including it appears a 2015 visit to Hiroshima to interview survivors of the atomic blast. Otherwise, I can't figure out why he went into the amount of detail he did. Would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in discussions with his editor about what to, or what not to include in his book.
However, I don't think it needed to be as long as it was. Think Bass could have told an equally-engrossing and compelling story in about half the length he did. That's why I give the book only three and a half stars, four stars for content but only three for the telling of the story.
I read Bass' previous book about the independence fight for Bangladesh in the 1970s and found it fascinating. I eagerly sought out this book after reading reviews and equating it with his authorship of The Blood Telegram.
He does a great job looking at the trial from a 10,000 foot perspective, identifying the larger issues about the court's legitimacy, composition and decision-making. His analysis in the final chapter ties together all the threads in a smoothly-woven tapestry. The role that racism played in the trial is not likely an element of many Occidental narratives about the subject. For that we should commend him.
The strengths of this book, beyond it's exhaustiveness, are the stories about the individual judges hearing the case, specifically Radhabinrod Pal, the Indian judge who cast one of two dissents and insisted on promoting a vigorous dissent in open court and subsequently publishing it in many forms. Chapter 29 "I am Wholly Dissenting", was my favorite section of the book.
Pal's principled stand against the other judges, save a Dutch judge who also dissented, should have confirmed his place in history for the questions he raised during the trial. However, his subsequent denial of Holocaust murder and Japanese killing during the Rape of Nanking diminished his credibility and stature later in life, most everywhere save Japan where he was feted and celebrated until the end of his life. Otherwise, his name would be known world-wide, as it is in Japan for his diminution of the blame for most of Japan's war crimes in the 30s and 40s in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Burma, the Philippines, etc. To Pal, Japan's actions were justified given the behavior of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the US in maintaining their colonial dominance over much of Asia at the time.
Another interesting thing about this book is his discussion of George Kennan, the father of containment. He outlines Kennan's behind-the-scenes role in guiding MacArthur to limit widespread punishment of the Japanese militarists in hopes of using the country as a potential bulwark, and potential source of pressure against the growing Soviet threat in East Asia. AS one who has read many of Kennan's writing, I never knew of this part of his biography.
Overall, this is a good book, the definitive work on the trial. Just don't think it's a book for the average reader, other than hardcore WWII historians, or legal historians. The length will scare away the average reader, who won't want to dive into 700 pages of history about such a relatively arcane slice of WWII history. For graduate students and legal scholars, they might likely disagree with my summary and call it nitpicking.
Don't mean to denigrate the book's research, plot or subject matter in any way whatsoever. It simply didn't seem to me that Bass needed 700 pages to tell the tale. That said, if you're a WWII history junkie like me, dive in!
May 6, 2024
Thorough, scholarly and well written. Everything from the horrors of war crimes and atrocities (not for the squeamish), complexities of international law, ammorality of cold war politics, the characters and flaws of the accused (who went to their deaths protecting the Emperor and shouting "Banzai"), their judges (eccentrics, academics, or hacks) and attorneys (the competent and incompetent, the zelous, the self promoting) to the nessesity, conceites and fatal flaws of the trial and their ambiguous legacy to this day.
March 19, 2024
This book is a beast and I’m glad to be done with it. I don’t think I could have learned more about the Tokyo Trials if I wanted to. This book reads as very academic and gets really into the weeds to the point where it can be grueling to read. Like I said though-I don’t think you could learn more about the subject than this book here.
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