Japan’s Nuremberg

On May 3, 1946, a warm spring morning in Tokyo, the marshal bellowed for the audience to rise, and 11 judges filed into the courtroom for the opening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The judges, from numerous Allied countries, were watched by well over a hundred Japanese spectators and nearly that many Japanese and foreign journalists. Less than a year had passed since Japan’s surrender to the Allies; a few days prior, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor had handed down a 55-count indictment of Japan’s wartime military and civilian leaders.

Twenty-eight defendants sat before the judges. Among them was Tojo Hideki, Japan’s prime minister until mid-1944. Tojo knew his surroundings well. During the war, the building—Japan’s Army Ministry—had housed his office. Now that office was occupied by the judges who held his life in their hands. This irony, and many of the tribunal’s other ironies, was not lost on Tojo, or on anyone else.

Especially compared with the Nuremberg trials, “the Tokyo trial,” as it became known, has received little attention in the West. When Westerners remember World War II, they focus on the European theater: the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, and D-Day. When they do glance toward Asia, they tend to linger on Western experiences there, such as the United Kingdom’s loss of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 or the blood-soaked beaches of Saipan and Iwo Jima. Americans remember the atomic bombardments of Japan, but less to mourn civilians’ suffering than to mark the war’s end or to ponder the dawn of the nuclear age.

Gary Bass’s magnificent Judgment at Tokyo encourages a deeper understanding of the Asian experience under war and occupation. He shows how the trial played formative roles both in postwar Asian politics and in the formation of the postwar global human rights regime. A professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, Bass has deeply studied the intersection of human rights ideals and politics; a past life in journalism—he was a reporter for The Economist—brings clarity and sparkle to his text. Judgment at Tokyo is written with the gravity the topic deserves, yet with winks of wit. (The Soviet judge’s English was not so bad, Bass reports; at least he knew the phrase “bottoms up.”)

Held over the course of 1946–48, the trial lasted almost three times as long as Nuremberg. Readers learn the judges’ extraordinary stories and distinctive perspectives. The trial’s multinational cast of characters includes familiar names such as Japanese Emperor Hirohito and U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur. But lesser-known supporting players emerge as pivotal, too—Bass brings to life the tragic Togo Shigenori, a “peace-minded Japanese foreign minister” who tried to prevent Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor yet wound up on trial as a war criminal. Famous figures appear in startling cameos: Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as a university student; China’s last Qing emperor, Puyi, as a witness.

More than 400 witnesses recounted Japan’s campaign of imperialism and a chilling litany of atrocities. The defendants also took the stand. In a particularly vivid chapter, Bass describes Tojo’s poised, defiant testimony; he “wipe[d] the floor” with chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan. Tojo’s testimony—and the dissent issued by the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal—helped create a powerful counternarrative championed by Japanese conservatives after the war.

These Japanese conservatives, and many others, have scorned the Tokyo trial as “victor’s justice.” But Judgment at Tokyo presents the trial as a flawed yet admirable endeavor. Neither a starry-eyed idealist nor a curled-lip cynic, Bass shows how liberal ideals shaped the Allied effort to bring World War II to a just end. But he also reveals how these ideals were sacrificed to political and military realities, most prominently in the Allies’ decision to grant impunity to Hirohito.

A question at the heart of Judgment at Tokyo is how history should judge a trial that was neither a kangaroo court nor an exemplar of the principles it sought to represent. This question is not only of historical interest; it has profound relevance to contemporary debates about a “rules-based international order” championed by the United States and its liberal partners. Critics of this order dismiss its language of “rules” as cold realpolitik dressed up as idealism. Bass’s exploration of the Tokyo trial gives readers a surprising lens for considering that debate. His depiction shows that in international politics, the pursuit of idealism has always competed with pragmatism and self-interest, requiring tradeoffs and fueling resentment.

WAR STORIES

The end of World War II unleashed an era of fantastical narrative creation. Americans and Western Europeans identified the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy as the war’s turning point, although it was the Soviets who defeated the bulk of the German army in the East. In August 1944, Charles de Gaulle paraded down the Champs Élysées as if he had just liberated France. In the war’s aftermath, the Italians remembered their soldiers as brava gente—fine, upstanding people not responsible for the kinds of brutalities the German military inflicted.

Politically useful narratives also emerged about postwar Asia. Today, American schoolchildren learn that after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hirohito surrendered unconditionally to the United States. But Bass shows how, even after the U.S. military burned down more than 60 Japanese cities and destroyed two remaining cities with atomic weapons, the war’s end was still a negotiation. In that negotiation, the victor was forced to make clench-jawed compromises. (This section is important reading for those discussing how the war in Ukraine might end, particularly for those who insist Russia can be forced to give up every one of its goals.)

The key condition of Japan’s “unconditional surrender” was impunity for Hirohito. The decision to leave him off the tribunal’s indictment outraged many judges and incensed Allied publics, who viewed Hirohito as the mastermind of Japanese imperialism. But U.S. military leaders feared a violent Japanese insurgency would emerge after the country’s defeat. Hirohito is “a symbol which unites all Japanese,” MacArthur warned. “Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate.” As a result, Bass writes, “despite Hirohito’s involvement in much of his government’s deliberations for expansion across Asia and the attack on Pearl Harbor, . . . the war ended with Hirohito staying in the Imperial Palace while his underlings were hauled into the dock.”

The decision to spare Hirohito led Japanese elites and the U.S. officials who established Japan’s postwar occupation to join forces in creating a myth about Hirohito’s innocence: to “sanitize,” as Bass puts it, Hirohito’s wartime role. The Japanese media—which U.S. officials influenced and censored after the war’s end—along with Tokyo trial defendants, spun the story of a helpless figurehead forced into war by aggressive military leaders. To play his part in this mythmaking, Hirohito said in 1946 that he “was virtually a prisoner and powerless.”

Bass isn’t having it, and Judgment at Tokyo adds to the shellacking that the Hirohito myth has already received from Herbert Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat. Bass most powerfully illustrates that Hirohito’s helplessness was a myth by recounting a moment in which that myth was accidentally punctured—ironically, by one of its most committed supporters. During his testimony, Tojo at one point “slipped up catastrophically,” Bass writes, stating that the Japanese government went to war “in accord with the will of the emperor.” The chief justice pointed out Tojo’s slip, and “a stunned hush fell” in the courtroom.

MOCK TRIAL

Many have considered Hirohito’s impunity to be the original sin that rendered the Tokyo trial a political project. Indeed, the French judge, Henri Bernard, issued a dissent in which he argued that if Japan’s military leaders were guilty of conspiracy, then that conspiracy “had a principal author who escaped all prosecution.” In addition to demonstrating how the trial violated the principle of individual accountability in the case of the emperor, Bass shows the many other ways it failed to live up to proper standards of jurisprudence.

Early on, defense attorneys offered a “spirited challenge to the court’s very jurisdiction,” arguing that “the court itself was not properly constituted and that some of the offenses in its charter were not crimes.” In response, Bass writes, a bumbling Keenan turned red (nearly purple, observed the Chinese judge, Mei Ruao) and protested that mankind should not “place itself in a straightjacket of legal precepts.” The chief judge, William Webb, eventually declared that a justification for the court’s jurisdiction would be “given later.” It never was.

The trial also violated the norm of judicial independence, as many judges consulted closely with their governments. And it flouted the legal norm that one should not be a judge in one’s own case. In Chongqing, Mei had suffered under Japanese bombardment, and the Philippine judge, Jaranilla, had endured the 1942 Bataan Death March.

The trial selectively overlooked human rights abuses, too. Nobody was indicted for Japan’s wartime “comfort women” program in which hundreds of thousands of Asian women were imprisoned and repeatedly raped in frontline brothels. If the trial had spotlighted these atrocities, it could have helped strengthen norms forbidding violence against women and sexual trafficking. Instead, in the ensuing decades, Asian women’s bodies continued to be commodified in sex tourism in Southeast Asia and in the prostitution that flourished around regional U.S. military bases.

The Tokyo trial was shaped by empire and permeated by racism.

The list of omissions goes on and on. The tribunal spared Japanese Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, the head of Unit 731. This secret biological weapons program conducted horrific medical experiments on Chinese civilians and soldiers and killed 250,000 people by deliberately releasing bubonic plague into Chinese cities. Spared from indictment, Ishii made a deal with the U.S. military so that it could learn from what Bass calls Ishii’s “ghastly expertise.”

The tribunal also erased Japanese victims of atrocities. With a Soviet judge on the stand, no Soviet officials were brought to justice for the crimes they committed against Japanese prisoners of war, who, Bass writes, “perished in staggering numbers in Soviet captivity.” Judgment at Tokyo also explores Japanese suffering under conventional and nuclear U.S. bombardments: in a different postwar settlement, Bass notes, these bombings might have been deemed war crimes. “Fortunately,” U.S. General Curtis LeMay mused years later, “we were on the winning side.”

Bass depicts the trial as often shaped by empire and permeated by racism. “Japanese leaders would be booked,” he argues, “not for attacking Burma, Malaya, or Singapore but for attacking the British Commonwealth.” Empire drove who had a voice at the trial. “The Indonesians would be spoken for by Dutchmen and the Vietnamese by Frenchmen, and the Koreans not at all.”

The “monumental dissent” by the Indian judge, Pal, pulled back the curtain on such themes. Running over 1,000 pages, Pal’s dissent was “the only Tokyo judgment that explicitly treats both racism and imperialism as major themes in world politics,” Bass notes. Pal lambasted Soviet hypocrisy given the Soviet Union’s postwar brutalization of Eastern Europe. But he “was equally withering on Western colonialism,” Bass points out. “If the domination of one nation by another was an international crime,” Pal wrote, “then many of the powerful nations would be criminal.”

Pal gave voice to ideas that the architects of the tribunal preferred to obscure. But Bass also shows that Pal’s dissent included troubling themes. India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was “appalled by Pal’s opinion,” which he called a “monumental justification of Japan’s conduct during the last three decades.” Pal’s glossing-over of Japanese atrocities, Bass writes, became a prominent feature of a postwar Japanese conservative counternarrative.

FAIR PLAY

And yet, despite the trial’s shortcomings, Bass notes that “the fact that there was a trial at all was remarkable.” One of Judgment at Tokyo’s profound contributions is how it illuminates the roads that were not taken. MacArthur wanted a tribunal comprising only U.S. judges to try Tojo and others for attacking Pearl Harbor. Vengeful Allied publics—as well as the Chinese and Russian leadership—favored “a simpler way of dealing with Japan’s leaders: just kill them.”

Instead, thanks to its extensive witness testimony and its variety of judges, the trial helped establish a richer—incomplete, but richer—history of the war in Asia. The judges were not somebody’s nephew on a boondoggle but were, for the most part, their countries’ best legal minds. The Dutch, French, and Indian judges held steadfast to legal principles and issued dissents that defied their governments’ preferred rulings. Defendants received “some version of due process and legal procedure,” Bass writes, and the defense attorneys—Japanese and U.S. lawyers—had a “strong sense of professionalism” and gave “full-throated representation to their Japanese clients.” The Japanese were shocked when Ben Blakeney—a lawyer and major in the U.S. Army who served as a defense attorney for two Japanese defendants—questioned his own government’s indictment, which asserted that the killing of U.S. troops at Pearl Harbor was equivalent to murder. If that was so, Blakeney argued, then “we know the name of the very man whose hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

Bass argues that the Tokyo trial performed a vital educational role for the world and for Japan. The trial “shined a harsh light on such calamitous decisions as invading China and attacking the United States,” Bass writes. And “the Japanese people recoiled in shock” when they learned from eyewitness testimony about “the horrific sacking of Nanjing and Manila” and their military’s “mass rape of civilian women.” To be sure, the historical record would have been much more enriched if the trial had done more to foreground Asian countries instead of their colonizers and to expose Allied violence as well as Allied suffering. But by illuminating these human rights violations, the trial contributed to the historical record, helping to discredit a militarist foreign policy in Japan and empowering liberal scholars and political leaders to push back against those who tried to deny Japanese human rights abuses.

An intriguing element of Judgment at Tokyo, however, is its attentiveness to the way that departures from liberal idealism may also have promoted postwar stability. In the case of impunity for Hirohito, Bass encourages readers to consider the virtues of pragmatism. Nobody can know whether trying Hirohito would have triggered an insurgency. But after the war, “there was virtually no sign of organized resistance,” Bass writes; the Japanese themselves oversaw the massive enterprise of demobilization. Japan later achieved the stunning economic growth that allowed it to join the ranks of the world’s most prosperous countries.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Bass writes that his book “is meant to allow readers to make up their own minds about how the trial worked and what it meant.” He is too modest. His contribution extends far beyond Tokyo in the 1940s, shedding light on an enduring debate about liberalism and international politics.

As the Allies did during the Tokyo trial, U.S. leaders and their allies and partners today often describe their foreign policies as aimed at upholding a set of objective laws that can promote peace worldwide rather than as rooted in self-interest. In 2022, for instance, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in these pages that Western governments only intend to maintain “a global order that binds power to rules and that confronts revisionist acts.” That same year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the liberal international order as one “that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”

After World War II, many Japanese believed that “all the fancy talk about law was eyewash,” writes Bass. Today, too, critics around the world respond to liberal rhetoric with a curled lip. On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wang Wenbin, the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, scorned the U.S.-led “rules-based international order” as no better than “the law of the jungle.” In October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained that “all we hear is the West is insisting on a rules-based order,” adding, “Where did that come from anyway? Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or approved them?” Putin has also argued, as he did in 2007, that “the use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN.”

One might think that these Chinese and Russian leaders are on weak ground given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is tacitly supported by China and, of course, not authorized by the UN. Yet their critiques resonate in a world in which, according to an ongoing study run by the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the United States has used force more than 100 times since 1990, frequently without UN authority. They resonate when the United States extols the principle of sovereignty in Ukraine, despite having ignored it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they resonate when Washington touts its adherence to a global rules-based trade order while using its influence within that order to smash the Iranian and Russian economies, cut China out of the global semiconductor supply chain, and impose tariffs on Chinese products that the World Trade Organization deems illegitimate.

Proponents of a liberal international order argue that its contradictions and hypocrisies are, in fact, grounds for hope. As the scholar Matias Spektor wrote earlier this year in Foreign Affairs, “Western hypocrisy can be beneficial” because it “requires policymakers in the Western alliance to get their response right whenever they are confronted with their failure to live up to their moral commitments.” As a result, Spektor argued, “the Western international order is capable of learning, adapting, and evolving.” In this call for the benefit of the doubt, one thinks of a Tokyo court that assured the world that its jurisdiction would be explained later. Despite that astonishing failure, the trial went ahead anyway. But in today’s world, the United States no longer runs the courtroom.