What the Tokyo Trial Unearths About Empire, Reminiscence, and Judgment

Meanwhile, Joseph Keenan, the American chief prosecutor, was prone to sonorous absurdities. He claimed that the Japanese aggressors had invaded countries in Asia intending to “destroy democracy and its essential basis—freedom and the respect of human personality.” These countries in Asia were, of course, European and U.S. colonies. That Keenan was often drunk is no excuse. Even Asians who had loathed their Japanese oppressors would have been astonished by this delusional flourish of American idealism.

The Asian judges, apart from Pal, had no doubts about the court’s jurisdiction. Bass is especially good on Mei, the Chinese judge, to whom too little attention has been paid in other books on the Tokyo trial. A man of considerable learning who had studied at Stanford University, Mei was perhaps the least cynical of the judges. He truly believed that the trial would create a more peaceful and democratic world order, and had the thankless task of promoting this idea even as his Nationalist government was being quickly overwhelmed by Mao Zedong’s Communist revolutionaries. He also did his best to focus attention on Japanese atrocities in China. If MacArthur thought the attack on Pearl Harbor was a murderous war crime, Chinese claims were far more persuasive: as many as twenty million Chinese died in the war between 1937 and 1945.

The retreating Japanese had destroyed most of the documents attesting to their actions, but there was nonetheless sufficient evidence to shock Japanese public opinion. Various witnesses gave accounts of what they saw when the Nationalist capital, Nanjing, was ransacked in the course of six weeks in 1937 by Japanese Imperial Army troops, who raped countless women and killed tens of thousands and possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. A Japanese Army document produced at the trial showed that superior officers had either encouraged or ignored these crimes. “In the battlefield we think nothing of rape,” one soldier said. Chinese P.O.W.s were lined up and “killed to test the efficiency of the machine gun,” another recalled.

The Japanese press reported these horrors at length, but Mei’s noble intention to establish a thorough historical record of Japan’s crimes was further hampered by the civil war in China. The Nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek tended to see trials against Japanese war criminals as a distraction from his struggle against the Communists. He even employed one of the most ruthless Japanese generals as his military adviser. The massacres perpetrated by this particular general had been directed mostly at Communist guerrillas, which didn’t especially concern Chiang. The Communists, in turn, didn’t bother much about the Nanjing Massacre until decades later, because its victims were governed by the Nationalists.

Other Japanese crimes were ignored at the Tokyo trial for equally cynical reasons. Japanese doctors and scientists in the notorious Unit 731, which was in charge of biological and chemical warfare, had conducted hideous experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners, and deliberately infected large numbers of Chinese with fatal diseases, such as bubonic plague, just to see what would happen. The leader of this unit, Shiro Ishii, and his team received immunity from the Americans in exchange for their data, which were thought to be useful. Quite how useful the data proved has never been divulged.

Nor was attention paid at the Tokyo trial to the organized effort of the Japanese Imperial Army to force Chinese, Korean, and other Asian women into sexual slavery. The wide-scale rape of local women had become a headache for the Army, since it provoked greater anti-Japanese resistance. To mitigate this problem, so-called comfort women were tricked or kidnapped and made to service Japanese soldiers. But their suffering wasn’t on anyone’s agenda in 1946. This enormity would become a serious issue only much later.

The extent to which the defendants in the Tokyo trial were personally responsible for the crimes in China, or in other parts of Asia, was hard to prove, so they were convicted for their failure to stop those crimes. But in the end it wasn’t the Western powers that came down hardest on the Japanese. Justice Mei thought the final judgment had been too soft in some respects. The Chinese Communists were outraged that Tojo and other defendants had been allowed to make self-justifying speeches in court and to be defended by able U.S. lawyers. The People’s Daily thundered, “MacArthur’s protection and indulgence is the real reason why war criminals such as Tojo dare to be so arrogant.”

In one important respect, the “Tokyo-trial version of history” was indeed utterly remiss. Emperor Hirohito, whose name was on many incriminating documents, was, for political reasons, neither prosecuted nor even called as a witness. When Tojo inadvertently let it slip that “no Japanese subject would go against the will of His Majesty,” he was swiftly reminded not to implicate the Emperor and stated that the Emperor had never had anything but peaceful intentions.

MacArthur, as well as his advisers, decided in 1945 that if the Emperor did not remain on his throne there would be a nationwide revolt that would upset SCAP’s administration. Only a few days after the formal Japanese surrender, as Bass writes, “both the American occupiers and the Japanese authorities converged on a common line: the imperial court, so useful for a peaceful occupation, was not to be blamed for the war.” Bass might have stressed, however, that this was the view of MacArthur’s most conservative advisers and the most reactionary Japanese authorities, and that many Japanese, including some of Hirohito’s closest relatives, thought he should at least abdicate. It was the Americans who quashed that idea from the beginning.

Bass describes some of the rifts in the U.S. Administration, in Tokyo as well as in Washington, D.C. At almost nine hundred pages, his book is already very long—“necessarily so,” in his opinion—but on the politics swirling around MacArthur’s court he could have said more. There were New Dealers in his entourage who wanted a more radical transformation of Japan than did more conservative figures such as Henry Stimson, George Kennan, and Joseph Grew, the former Ambassador to Japan. Some of the conservatives around MacArthur were rather disreputable, to put it mildly. General Willoughby, his intelligence chief, born in Germany as Adolf Karl Weidenbach, was an admirer of Mussolini. MacArthur called Willoughby “my pet fascist.” The intelligence chief, who arranged for the protection of Shiro Ishii, from Unit 731, found allies among Japanese right-wingers, including some influential figures who had been arrested for war crimes and who sought to shape Japan according to their political wishes.

Bass calls the New Dealers “retributive” and “maximalist.” That’s a little unfair; they were convinced that there was enough Japanese enthusiasm for civic rights to establish a more liberal democracy than had existed before, and to a large degree they were right. That Grew, Kennan, Stimson, and Willoughby were skeptical of the prospects for such a liberal democracy was partly a matter of cultural or racial prejudice. In Stimson’s view, the Japanese were “an oriental people with an oriental mind and religion,” and thus incapable of governing themselves. Attempts to democratize Japan, in his view, would end up making “a hash of it.”

MacArthur himself, a martinet and a staunch Republican, was torn between his New Dealers and the conservatives. He compared the Japanese to “a boy of twelve” in terms of the “standards of modern civilization.” But he also had a rather grandiose idea of what he saw as his historic mission to establish a Christian democracy in Japan. This resulted in a liberal constitution, trade unions, land reforms, a free press, and women’s suffrage, all of which were welcomed by most of the Japanese population. In the late nineteen-forties, however, when the Communists were winning in China and the Cold War was warming up, the right-wing, anti-Communist views of people such as Willoughby gained strength. “Reds” in government jobs, trade unions, universities, and other institutions were purged. But almost all the men who had been indicted for war crimes were released as soon as the Tokyo trial was over, in 1948. One of them was Nobusuke Kishi, the wartime vice-minister of munitions and Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, who escaped a prison sentence and became Prime Minister in 1957.