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5 Remembering the Trial: The Trial View of History

YUKI TAKATORI

THE TOKYO WAR CRIMES TRIAL s many as sixty million people may have perished in the Second AWorld War, most of them innocent far from the battle- fronts or prisoners of war. In the interwar years, the League of Nations, the embodiment of the lofty ideal of permanent world peace, had failed to hold the aggressor nations in check and had watched helplessly as the world was consumed in total war. Realizing how close they had come to defeat and subjugation, the leaders of the victorious nations urgently and conscientiously set out one more time to achieve the goal that the League of Nations had so disastrously fallen short of. It was as part of this attempt by the world leaders to restore sanity, and to affirm the moral values without which peace cannot endure, that two war crimes trials were held, one in Nuremberg and the other in Tokyo. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, officially known as the International for the Far East (IMTFE), was the longest war crimes trial following the Second World War, opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948.1 It put on trial twenty-eight Japanese wartime leaders on charges of (1) Crimes against Peace, (2) Conven- tional War Crimes, and (3) . Except for two defendants who died during the proceedings and one who was declared ‘unfit to stand his trial and unable to defend himself’, all were con- victed, including seven who received death sentences.2 The Trial generated disputes and raised questions still unsolved and unanswered nearly sixty years later. For instance, prior to the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, the term ‘war crimes’ was understood to 2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 79

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Figure 5.1: Former War Ministry building (Ichigaya, Tokyo), the venue of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. NWDNS-238-FE, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

mean ‘violations of the laws of war’, such as the killing of pop- ulations, the inhumane treatment of POWs or the use of poison gasses. Under this definition, individuals, combatants and non-combatants alike, could be held criminally responsible for breaking the rules gov- erning conduct during a war, but not for starting a war, no matter how much such an act might offend the conscience of mankind. In Nuremberg and Tokyo, however, initiating and waging an aggressive war itself was considered a , specifically a ‘’, for the first time in history.3 Furthermore, high-ranking government offi- cials, national leaders, who would hitherto have been shielded by their status, were the natural targets of prosecution under the revised defini- tion. The Allies hoped that by trying and punishing the former rulers of and Japan (including even those who might claim to have no blood on their hands), and by revealing their folly and cruelty, they would ‘educate’ the people, causing them to reject all that the men who had led them represented and leaving an indelible impression on the consciousness of the defeated nations. While many Allied representa- tives felt apprehensive about these juridical ventures, determining the guilt or innocence of the designers of war in a court of law seemed to be the only option that would later stand the test of history as a demon- stration of the ultimate triumph of morality and .