| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 30-Apr-01 07:07 PM
A New Verdict on the Tokyo War-Crimes Trials
By TIMOTHY MAGA
Fifty-six years ago, at the end of World War II, few Americans questioned the authority of their government to bring the notorious leaders of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan to trial. Horrible crimes against humanity had been committed, and justice needed to be served. There was little disagreement in the United States over the need for war-crimes trials.
Most historians today agree that the Nuremberg trials constitute a good footnote to the good war in Europe; hardly anyone questions the fact that perpetrators of horror were punished, justice was served, and another nail was hammered into the coffin of Nazism. That viewpoint has barely shifted over the years, and it shouldn't.
In the case of the Tokyo trials, however, a certain political correctness has crept into the discussion among historians and many outside academe as well. The most popular view suggests that racist, angry Westerners used the Tokyo trials to punish a culture that they did not respect or understand. Woe be to those who suggest that there is a different view, something I found out firsthand after I started doing research for a book on the work of the 1946-48 Tokyo tribunal.
The motivation behind my book was both personal and professional. As a child, I had heard many a tale from my father, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, about his experiences in World War II. At the age of 19 he had served as a guard at the Pacific islands war-crimes trials in Guam. The cases fell under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo tribunal, and dramatic trials were held in Guam that set legal precedents in matters of torture and cannibalism in warfare. For years, I had wondered how many of the tales from my "greatest generation" father were in the historic record, but career paths had taken me elsewhere.
My personal interest merged with professional concerns in 1995, when I attended a seminar sponsored by Harvard University on the immediate postwar era in Japan. A number of speakers, including former policy makers and noted scholars from both the United States and Japan, spoke about the Tokyo trials. All of them denounced the "racist agenda" of the proceedings, the "allied crucifixion" of Japan's wartime leadership, and the hypocrisy of having the "perpetrators of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" pass judgment on Japan's leadership.
Each speech met with resounding applause, and no one among the academics, students, and politicians in the audience offered follow-up questions. That disturbed me. While others at the seminar might have left with unspoken questions, I decided to ask my own questions through my research. Rarely does only one view exist of a historical controversy. From the stories my father had told me, and my general knowledge of the late-1940's press accounts of the trials, I knew that there was more than one view. A thorough investigation was required -- and was overdue.
Like the Nuremberg trials going on at roughly the same time, the Tokyo trials started with the premise that evil should never go unpunished, a premise that remains valid today. That argument is echoed today, for example, by Dith Pran's Holocaust Awareness organization, which seeks justice and national healing after the genocide committed in the 1970's by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. (Pran, a recipient of the U.N. Medal of Freedom, was the focus of Sydney Schanberg's The Death and Life of Dith Pran, which was made into the film The Killing Fields in 1984.) Pran and others argue that the Cambodian holocaust might never have taken place if a permanent war-crimes tribunal in the Asian/Pacific region had been created in the late 1940's, as the justices in the Tokyo trials had recommended.
At Nuremberg, the defendants represented a government that prided itself on its commitment to genocide. They convicted themselves of crimes against humanity by their own actions. In contrast, the defendants on trial in Tokyo did not have such an obvious commitment, making successful prosecution more difficult. The European, American, and Australian trial judges in Tokyo were also very much aware of the fact that one culture was trying another culture. They made candid comments to the press about their awareness of that fact, and promised Asian-Americans and others that fair play would always prevail.
More defendants were found guilty of murder at Tokyo -- in classic criminal-case lawyering -- than were found guilty at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. More interested in criminal convictions than moralizing, the judges in Tokyo set the tone. As Sir William Webb, the chief trial judge, from Australia, pointed out, the Tokyo trials "sought justice not headlines."
Of the three categories of defendants at the Tokyo trials, 80 senior wartime policy makers were tried in the first, or Class A, category. The most notable among them included four former prime ministers, four war ministers, two navy ministers, six former generals, two ambassadors, and three economic and financial leaders. The other two categories emphasized trials for specific atrocities and included military personnel ranging from generals and admirals to 19-year-old recruits.
The cries of racism, victor's justice, and hypocrisy were first uttered by defense attorneys trying their best to save their clients from murder convictions. Those tactics never worked, and the defense counsels never expected them to. (In fact, the defense's best tactic was to play the mistrial card -- mistrials could be declared if even a single word of a defendant's testimony was translated incorrectly, and since Japanese cannot always be easily translated into English, mistranslation happened frequently.)
Today, those same race arguments, now used to denounce the trials over all, are uttered by politically correct academics in North America and nostalgic right-wing nationalists in Japan. A Japanese nationalist and a politically correct American liberal are strange bedfellows, but, for their own reasons, they can agree on the "racist" agenda of the trials.
To many liberals and academics in the United States, the history of postwar Japan has everything to do with race; with the occupation government of the American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur; and with one culture's imposing its will on another. Hence, the mantra of the "bad" Tokyo trials, in contrast to the "good" Nuremberg trials, has grown over the years. Without question, studying the influence of race and cultural misunderstanding on policy making is a worthy and necessary endeavor. However, lumping the Tokyo trials in that general endeavor has been too quickly and easily accomplished. History is never that simple, and an important part of the postwar history of Japan has been misrepresented.
When I began to spread the word that praise of the Tokyo trials would constitute much of the thesis of my book Judgment at Tokyo, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. I was warned by fellow historians, legal experts, and others that a political minefield lay ahead. You don't want to be on the wrong side of a political-correctness debate, I was told. One colleague even told me to stop the project immediately, for the sake of my career. Certainly, I wouldn't want to be identified with racists and Japan-bashers.
At best, an editor for an American university press explained to me, a study of the Tokyo trials must include a comparison with the Nuremberg trials. A book on the Tokyo trials could never stand on its own, I was informed, and would raise "unnecessary controversy." That editor simply assumed that the Tokyo trials stood in strong contrast to the Nuremberg trials, and that nobody cared to read about those forgotten trials in Tokyo anyway.
To my colleagues in Japan, where I taught history for seven years, the criticism of my project did not come as a surprise. The reluctance of Westerners to recognize the importance of the Tokyo trials for Japan was the real racism, I was told. For many Japanese, purging the militarist past in the Tokyo trials has always symbolized the beginning of the new Japan. Outside of the lingering small minority of old-line nationalists, majority public opinion in Japan had no problem with the many guilty verdicts in those trials.
Until my project, I had never heard the "r" word (racism) used so much by so many -- and so foolishly. Writing a book that praised the achievements of the Tokyo trials was "racist." But not continuing with the book would also be racist, said my old buddies in Japan. I would be caving in to those Eurocentric Americans who never saw a controversial issue in modern Japanese and Asian/Pacific history as an important one.
When controversy blinds historical analy-sis, no one wins. But my Japanese colleagues do have a point. The trials deserve closer attention from historians.
If you are to take on a topic like this one, however, you must be prepared to take the flak, and to be careful about who will be championing your book. There are many Web sites, for example, that are maintained by individuals who seek more retribution than justice for Japan's role in World War II. Most of those sites belong to individuals in China and Taiwan who demand an apology from the Japanese government for its wartime behavior. Their depiction of the Japanese people is far from flattering, and I will never associate my work with them. Unfortunately, a book that defends the record of the Tokyo trials will be easy fodder for them to exaggerate and annex to their angry cause.
For others, the issue of Japanese war crimes is not a historical matter, but a life-and-death issue quite relevant to the present. Cases filed on behalf of former "comfort women" (sex slaves to the Japanese Imperial Army) are still pending in the courts. Numerous Korean, Chinese, and Filipino politicians insist that equitable relations between Japan and their respective countries cannot exist until the current Japanese government truly apologizes for World War II atrocities. A formal apology was expected in the Asian/Pacific community in 1995, but the cryptic and interpretive comments from Japan's conservative Murayama government at the time did not equal an apology.
My book is not about bashing Japan or arguing over who the real war criminals were. It's about analyzing the facts, offering praise where it is due, and telling an important story in a straightforward fashion. From the beginning, I have believed that such scholarship still has a place, even in the politically volatile world of aca-deme.
Like a good lawyer, a good historian is supposed to search out the truth wherever it leads. In my work on the Tokyo tribunal, I found a much more complex tale than the mantra of bad-Tokyo-versus-good-Nuremberg suggested. I hope that the arguments over my writing of this history don't obscure the magnificent job that both the prosecution and defense teams did in punishing real criminals and setting legal precedents that are still in use today.
Timothy Maga is a professor of history at Bradley University. His book, Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials, was published in February by the University Press of Kentucky.
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