Narratives of World War II in the Pacific

On Trial

First set of Japanese Class A War Criminals standing at attention before the trial.

When people hear the name Nuremburg, they immediately think of the trials of the Nazi war criminals and the justice that was served or not served. What people don’t really know is that the same kind of trials were going on in Tokyo, Japan as well. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East or IMTFE tried all of the Japanese Class A war criminals. The United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, France, and five other allied nations were all represented as justices for the trials. The Nuremburg Trials only lasted a short time in comparison to the two years that the Tokyo War Crime Trials lasted. Only twenty-eight of the eighty Class A war criminals were actually put on trial with the IMTFE. The crime of these war criminals was the decision to and carry out ill-treatment and even murder of their prisoners and civilian internees. These troops and officers forced these prisoners to do labor in inhumane conditions. Along with this they also carried out things like destroying whole towns while murdering and raping along the way. Only seven of these twenty-eight were sentenced to death, because of their crimes they were implicated in were of a greater scale and most were just sentenced to life in prison.[1]

To many historians the Tokyo war crime trials were not taken as seriously as the ones in Nuremburg. ”Tokyo arguably had second rate participants. For example, the American judge at Nuremberg was former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle and the chief prosecutor was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (who was on leave from the court). At Tokyo, however, the U.S. judge was Maj. Gen. Myron C. Cramer, the former Army Judge Advocate General who was caused out of retirement to file a last minute vacancy, and the chief counsel was American Joseph B. Kennan, whose in-court drunkenness and general incompetency cast a pull on the entire prosecution. Finally, while the American, British, French and Soviet judges at Nuremberg reached unanimous or virtually unanimous conclusions about the guilt of the Nazi defendants, only 8 of the 11 judges at Tokyo concurred fully in the findings. Most damaging was the vigorous dissent of Indian judge Radhabinad Pal. His insistence that the Japanese accused- one and all- were not guilty of any crime had the immediate effect of undercutting the moral and legal validity of the verdict.” The whole idea of these trials in both cases were to blame and find the justice for all that many innocent people lost, but in the case of Japan many of these officers and troops felt victims themselves. They called the trials a “victors’ justice” and rejected them all together.[2] But in contrast to the way that American prisoners were treated between the Nazis and Japan is apparently quite extreme. “Japanese treatment of American (and British) POW’s had no parallel in German treatment of Anglo-American captives: roughly two of every five American POW’s in the Pacific died because of Japanese executions, brutality, or neglect, or to inadvertent American sinking of POW ships and bombing of POW camps.” From what we can gather not much is actually known about what Japan did during and before the war. To people it becomes that they feel the Nazis were the real criminals, because they knew of the numbers that were executed and the extent of their want. “Yet so much less is known about death rates and their causes in Asia that this obvious explanation must be scrutinized carefully.”[3]

The real problem about the Tokyo War Trials was that many Japanese felt they were the victims as well. They felt that the higher up should be punished and they were not. Fujii Shizue went through the question of why some had to die and other who she felt were guiltier than her brother. Her brother was on the lower scale of officers, but yet he was one of then that was executed for his crimes. She mourned for her brother as she read about his fellow comrades going free. Justice just was not equally served in these trials as people felt for the other trials.

There is not much gathered on the Tokyo War Crime Trials, which I feel was for the most part was the way that not only how the Allies felt about Japan, but also how Japan felt about themselves in the war. For the Allies they saw Japan as lesser enemies, because they had sided with Germany mainly for protection. But, truthfully we know that Japan themselves were trying to take over China and Korea before the Nazis and in truth they caused quite a destruction, both physically and emotionally for many.  Japan though saw themselves as the injured. They felt that Germany had tricked them and that none of it was their fault. To some point I agree that not all Japanese military troops knew what they were doing and why. But, the military was still at fault. I do feel that they did not properly put on trial all that should have been on there. I also feel that after reading about these trials that everything was so messed up that they were not sure who should be guilty and who you could say was just following orders.

: Cook, Haruko Taya., and Theodore F. Cook. Shizue, Fujii. “They didn’t tell me”. Japan at War: An Oral History. 427-431. New York: New York Press, 1992.

This oral history is about one woman’s struggle with the after effects of the war trials. Her brother was part of the military and wrote her often. He was able to write and tell her that he would not be alive, and that he was being put on trial. She later learned of his death. Then, when she was reading the paper she learned that not everyone was put on trial and sentenced to death. She struggled to understand why her brother lost his life for following orders, and the people giving them are free to walk around.