Abstract
In the midst of the opening of the Nuremberg trial, plans were being made in Japan for what would become a much more immense legal undertaking in Tokyo—the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), or the Tokyo trial.1 Far less is known about this trial than its German counterpart, and few scholars have studied its transcripts, which remained closeted in a handful of archives until the early 1970s, when R. John Pritchard began a 14-year editing project that resulted in the publication of a 124-volume set of the Tokyo trial records.
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Notes
The Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial: The Records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, R. John Pritchard, ed. and comp., Vol. 2 (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1998), xxv.
The United Nations War Crimes Commission, History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War (Buffalo: William S. Hein, 2006), p. 91.
Neil Boister and Robert Cryer, The Tokyo International Military Tribunal: A Reappraisal [hereafter The Tokyo IMT] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 18.
Benjamin B. Ferencz, “War Crimes Trials: The Holocaust and the Rule of Law,” in In Pursuit of Justice: Examining the Evidence of the Holocaust (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995), p. 16.
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Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 178, 192–195;
Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 14; History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, pp. 153–154; Boister and Cryer, The Tokyo IMT, p. 19;
Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 842–843.
Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 4.
Edward Behr, Hirohito; Beyond the Myth (New York: Villard Books, 1989), pp. 295–300;
Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 493–496, 499–519; Boister and Cryer, The Tokyo IMT, p. 21. Japan and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact in 1941. Stalin denounced it in the spring of 1945, and declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945.
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Peter Maguire, Law and War: International Law & American History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 107.
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Edwin P. Hoyt, Warlord: Tōjō against the World (Lanham: Scarborough House, 1993), pp. 7–64 passim;
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C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1975 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 181, 186–187, 193–194, says that the number could have been as high as 25,000; Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, pp. 81–82.
Saburō Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931–1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan’s Role in World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 176.
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Ōnuma Yasuaki, “The Tokyo Trial: Between Law and Reason,” in Hosoya et al., The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, p. 47; Madoka Futamura, War Crimes Tribunals and Transitional Justice: The Tokyo Trial and the Nuremberg Legacy (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 72.
Kayoko Takeda, Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: A Sociopolitical Analysis (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), pp. 50–51.
Ashis Nandy, “The Other Within: The Strange Case of Radhabinod Pal’s Judgement on Culpability,” New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 1992), p. 60.
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© 2014 David M. Crowe
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Crowe, D.M. (2014). The Tokyo IMT Trial. In: War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037015_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037015_7
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