The Tokyo Trials

Abstract

Of the postwar trials convened in Tokyo to try Japanese leaders for crimes relating to the war in Asia and the Pacific, by far the longest and most far-reaching was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo Tribunal”). There, the eleven Allied prosecuting powers charged twenty-eight Japanese defendants — former prime ministers, cabinet ministers, military leaders, diplomats and ideologues — with being members of a militarist clique that had purposefully perpetrated a huge conspiracy, dating from 1 January 1928 to 2 September 1945, to secure “the military, naval, political and economic domination of East Asia, and of the Pacific and Indian Oceans”. This trial, much criticized at the time, and still much criticized today for its retroactive charges and procedural shortcomings, concluded with the handing down of sentences in November 1948.

Yet the Tribunal was not the only one convened in Tokyo dealing with crimes relating to the war. In the months before the proceedings opened, the Japanese ran their own trials, hoping to settle accounts on their own terms before the Allies took over. And in 1949, after the Tribunal had closed, the Americans convened two more trials in Tokyo, Tamura and Toyoda, also presided over by Allied judges. By this time, though, new Cold War priorities had taken hold, and the Allies’ appetite for prosecuting the Japanese had diminished: the Toyoda trial was the last of its kind to be convened in Japan.

Keywords: International Military Trinbunal for the Far East, Tokyo tribunal, international criminal law, crimes against peace, war crimes, common plan or conspiracy, Toyoda trial, Radhabinod Pal, Hirota Kok, Matsui Iwane

JEL Classification: K33, K41