Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

by Gary J. Bass

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD FROM THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS ACCLAIMED AS ONE OF THE YEAR’S 10 BEST BOOKS BY THE WASHINGTON POST 12 ESSENTIAL NONFICTION BOOKS BY THE NEW YORKER 100 NOTABLE BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS BY THE ECONOMIST, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, AND AIR MAIL 10 ESSENTIAL BOOKS BY THE TELEGRAPH MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE FINALIST CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE FINALIST BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE LONGLIST THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE THE OBSERVER AND THE SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK DAUNT BOOKS OF THE YEAR A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg

“Nothing less than a masterpiece. With epic research and mesmerizing narrative power, Judgment at Tokyo has the makings of an instant classic.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.

From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Japan, Asia, World War II, Politics, War

Audible Audio

First published October 3, 2023

About the author

Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, is the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf); Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf); and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton).

The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction and won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz Book Award, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Award in India. It was also a New York Times and Washington Post notable book of the year, and a best book of the year in The Economist, Financial Times, The New Republic, and Kirkus Reviews. Freedom's Battle was a New York Times notable book of the year and a Washington Post best book of the year.

Bass has written articles for International Security, Philosophy & Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Michigan Law Review, Daedalus, NOMOS, and other journals, as well as numerous book chapters in edited volumes. A former reporter for The Economist, Bass has written often for The New York Times, as well as writing for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a zoo both in terms of the court’s jurisdiction and defense evidence excluded. The biggest deal was Gen. MacArthur’s immunity for Emperor Hirohito — in the interests of smoothing the way of the Occupation — who was IMV complicit well beyond a reasonable doubt. Here are some bits:

"Japanese officials systematically incinerated documents for the war crimes trials that would surely follow one of the grandest efforts at evidence tampering in legal history.

"In June 1945, Foreign Ministry officials began burning secret documents in anticipation of an Allied ground invasion, expanding their efforts in August. First to go up in flames were papers about China, then the Soviet Union and then the Axis. . . Protecting the throne, the Army Ministry had the troops burn imperial rescripts or anything written by Emperor Hirohito." (p. 112)

——

"For a Japanese [civilian] audience saturated with wartime propaganda, [Prosecutor] Keenan's horrifying tales — Australian prisoners being worked to death as slave labor building a railway through the Burmese and Thai jungles, Chinese civilians coerced to build military installations in Manchuria and then killed for secrecy, Australian nurses massacred off Sumatra — were fresh and shocking. So was the claim that the slaughters at Nanjing, Manila, and elsewhere were part of a systematic policy of atrocity warfare. Belying Imperial Japanese claims that its soldiers had fought honorably, Keenan contended that "identical measures were constantly employed throughout the areas of Japanese occupation to torture prisoners of war and civilians, such as the 'water-cure,' 'electric shock treatment,' 'hanging upside down, prying fingernails, and body beatings.'" (p.203)

——

Japan’s popularity as a reclaimer of European colonial possessions was popular with downtrodden natives. In other books I've read this barely gets a mention. The story of Subhas Chandra Bose's collaboration with Japan, as a means of freeing India from the British yoke, was entirely new to me.

"The war came home fast in Bengal. With nearby Burma falling into Japanese hands, Japanese bombers struck at Calcutta and southeast Bengal. As many as eight hundred thousand terrified people streamed out of Calcutta, about a third of the city's total population. There were rumors of an imminent Japanese invasion, a prospect welcomed by many Bengalis. Alarmed by growing sympathy for Japan among Bengalis, the British colonial authorities rushed to spread propaganda about Japan's imperialism and atrocities in China, Malaya, and Burma, as well as censoring or harassing Indian newspapers which spread what the British considered antiwar propaganda." (p. 217)

——

Since China had no institutions assigned to evidence gathering, when it came time for them to try their enemies in Tokyo, they could produce no compelling documentation. The result was that many defendants — like Hirohito's uncle Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, in part responsible for the Rape of Nanjing — were never tried. Fourteen years of Japanese war crimes in China, tens of millions of dead, and men like Asaka walked free.

"Beyond Nanjing, though, the evidence was far less comprehensive, often lacking corroboration or specifics. Nor did these statements show orders from commanders or link the war crimes to any of the defendants. This was the realization of [Chinese judge] Mei Ruao's fears about insufficient evidence gathered by the debilitated authorities of the Republic of China. In Nanjing, the prosecution put forward a compendium that could only be denied by fanatics; for the rest of China, while clearly there had been widespread horrors, the particulars were more debatable, sometimes unsuitable for conviction beyond a reasonable doubt." (p. 269)

When one defendant was questioned by prosecutors about events at Nanjing:

“Did the Japanese officer know that at one time some one thousand five hundred refugees were marched out of the Safety Zone and shot, their bodies thrown into a pond? ‘I never heard of such a matter up to now,’ replied the officer. ‘I believe that it is possibly not true.’ Did you investigate the more than one thousand Chinese civilians taken to the banks of the Yangzi River and machine-gunned? ‘No,’ said the witness. Did you know about Chinese policemen taken out and shot? ‘I don't think there was any such incident.’ Did you advise Japanese troops that they could search out former Chinese soldiers who had thrown away their weapons and shoot them? ‘I don't think there was any such case.’ Did you not know this was being done systematically by Japanese officers? ‘I never heard about that matter.’ (p. 395)

——

“The defense's first major historical task was rebutting accusations of aggression in Manchuria. Rather than challenging the prosecution evidence from internal Japanese cables and the testimony of three former prime ministers, the defense instead concentrated on vindicating Japan's colonial claims to Manchuria.

“The Japanese people, the defense asserted, believed that they had a moral right to Manchuria as a lifeline against the threatening Soviet Union. Manchuria, an American defense lawyer noted with jarring candor, became ‘an indispensable source’ of raw materials for Japan—a point which could equally well have been made by the prosecution. The Japanese residing in Manchuria, the defense said, were attacked by thieving bandits, with the Chinese government powerless to restore order.

“Relying on an official Japanese investigation, the defense accused Chinese troops of blowing up the South Manchuria Railway at Mukden. Yet the Japanese investigators, who arrived several days later, had no more compelling evidence for Chinese responsibility than the presence of the corpses of three Chinese men in army uniforms in the vicinity. On behalf of the judges, Webb asked if the Japanese investigators had checked the tags of the dead to identify them as Chinese soldiers, and was disgruntled when told that the Japanese had not.” (p. 367)

——

“Grim as the litany of war crimes before the judges was, the United States was secretly covering up what it knew about some of Japan's most shocking atrocities.

“Hidden away outside the frigid northeastern city of Harbin in occupied Manchuria, the Japanese army had since 1936 operated a top secret unit for human experiments with bacteriological warfare. In its hellish work, Unit 731 had killed some two thousand Chinese and Manchurian prisoners, as well as launching attacks on several Chinese cities. . . .

“In 1940 and 1941, with approval from Japan's army, Ishii's team flew a small airplane low over the Chinese cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, Jinhua, and Changde, spraying plague-ridden fleas and grains. Soon plague broke out in all the cities except Jinhua. In 1942, Ishii's teams used germ bombs and spray to support the conventional warfare of the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign. Some 250,000 Chinese civilians died in that onslaught . . . . Japan also set up a secret facility in occupied Singapore to do biowarfare experiments on humans, as well as centers in China and Burma.” (p. 383)

These atrocities remind me of what Robert Jay Lifton wrote about in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. The Japanese like the Nazis also had a belief in the purity of their blood. In fact,there was no difference between them and the Chinese; it was the absurd fear of the other again.

——

The idea that the Allies should have implicated themselves for the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities is preposterous. This was not a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“The inherent one-sidedness of the judgment was painfully apparent when it came to the Japanese execution of captured American bomber crews. To the American people, this was a well-publicized war crime; to the Japanese command, it was a fitting punishment for Americans who had themselves committed a war crime. Wholly taking the American side of that argument, the judgment dodged the hard question of why aerial bombardment of Japanese cities should not be reckoned a war crime.” (p. 544)

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting. Filled a vacuum. Made me re-think an historical judgment I thought I was sure of. Oh, and the writing was superb. 692 pages of text and I didn't skim a sentence.

This is the story of the War Crimes Trial held in Tokyo after the end of the Pacific part of the Second World War. The Nazi War Crimes Trial - Judgment at Nuremberg - is perhaps more well-known. Simpler, too. The Nazi war crimes were better documented, both as to aggression and inhumanity. Any defenses were technical; support was not in vogue.

The Tokyo Trial was different, I've now learned. It was a quasi-military trial, but with an ostensibly independent judiciary comprised of eleven different nations. Each one had its own axe to grind, and as it turned out, not always against those in the dock. Certain rights familiar to criminal jurisprudence were provided, but not all. Defense attorneys were assigned, including some American hotshots, some oddly wearing military uniforms. They advocated fiercely though. Oh, but there were drunks, and Soviets, and Holocaust deniers; enough personalities to make this a cluster (if you know what I mean).

There were the American judge and prosecutor, both cronies of Truman who appointed them, and both drunks. The Soviet judge could cite a League of Nations ruling as precedent, ignoring that the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for their conquest of Finland. The Australian judge, presiding as President Judge, berated everyone, colleagues and defendants alike, and was despised by everyone . . . except MacArthur, whose "Charter" enabled the whole play. He lurked there, as a character, generally hands off, except to make sure Hirohito was not a target. Strange bedfellows.

Then there was the Indian judge who clearly came to Tokyo prepared to acquit. He did well to argue against jurisdiction, and ex post facto laws, and the hypocrisy of convicting the defendants for firebombing cities, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, he refused to believe any evidence of torture, beheading or rape, unless in some twisted fashion he was able to justify it.

Still, hypocrisy loomed large for me in reading this. Made me think: what if the Vietnamese or Cambodians held a War Crimes Trial.

Consider this: the United States and Russia became aware of a Japanese program of bacteriological warfare. This was not inchoate. Unit 731 had produced dried anthrax--which, if aerosolized properly and carefully spewed by airplanes over a big city, could have killed hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions, of people. And more: In 1940 and 1941, with approval from Japan's army, Ishii's team flew a small airplane over the Chinese cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, Jinhua, and Changde, spraying plague-ridden fleas and grains. Soon plague broke out in all the cities except Jinhua. You would think, as a prosecutor at a War Crimes trial, that this would be a slam-dunk. Targeting civilians with unspeakable death, and all sanctioned by the government, not capable of being limited to some horny or violent soldier. And they had the guy in custody, cooperating, able to give it all up. But, no. Instead, the U.S. and the Soviets kept the evidence secret, so they could work the guy into teaching them how to do it.

There is so much here. About the clash of countries, and personalities. About justice, surely, but also the miscarriage of it. About culture, and history, and always race.

About the comfort of intellectual certainty, until you read a book like this.

World War II was a just war forced upon the Allies by Axis aggression, but that does not mean that the Americans could do no wrong fighting it.

Mid-January, and this is my Book of the Year.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judgment at Tokyo:... written by Gary J. Bass is a wonderfully written, thoroughly researched book about a very difficult time in our history. I knew much less about the Tokyo trial than I did about Nuremburg. Mr. Bass has helped to fill that blank spot with a book that will be kept and referred to often. Does war with Japan come down to lack of oil? Who has jurisdiction over war criminals? What about abuse of prisoners? So many issues to be examined and weighed by eleven judges from various countries who often did not agree and seventy five years ago had to come to some consensus as to who would be punished by death and who would live. If you see the value of history as guidance for the present, please read this book. It reflects dark issues of a dark time that we would prefer to forget. (Perhaps at our own peril). Did this trial achieve justice? You decide. Very highly recommended.

My thanks to the author, Gary J. Bass, and to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for my copy of this book. #Goodreads Giveaway

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary J. Bass's Judgment at Tokyo exhaustively recreates the International Military Tribunal of the Far East after World War II. Bass (author of The Blood Telegram and other books on international law) stresses how the trials were even more fraught and improvised than Nuremberg; a coterie of judges from the main Allied powers and several former colonies were selected, with vastly different opinions and agendas clashing in and outside the courtroom. Under the guidance of Douglas MacArthur, trying to rebuild Japan in the shadow of the Cold War, the trials prosecuted a handful of prominent Japanese military and political leaders (up to and including Premier Hideki Tojo) but refused to prosecute Emperor Hirohito, whose usefulness as a figurehead outweighed the benefits of holding him accountable. By its nature, Bass's book is often grim and frustrating reading; we receive detailed recitations of atrocities as varied as the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanjing, Unit 731 and other systematic crimes demonstrating the monstrous behavior of the Japanese military. Bass is equally interested, however, in the court's wrangling over the issue of how to prosecute nebulous crimes as "waging aggressive war," which could be fairly leveled at some leaders (Tojo in particular) but not others (Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, who actually opposed attacking Pearl Harbor). He profiles Australian Justice William Webb, who showed little sympathy for the defendants' arguments; Bert Roling of the Netherlands, who argues that the concept of aggressive war was a nebulous charge that could be leveled as easily at the Soviet Union, whose representative bizarrely argued for prosecution over border clashes in Mongolia; Asian representatives Mei Ju-Ao (China) and Delfin Jarnailla (the Philippines), who wanted harsher punishments for Japanese depredations in their countries; and Indian justice Radhabinod Pal, who blasted the Western powers' hypocrisy for decrying Japanese imperialism and racial supremacy (while also, unfortunately, apologizing for the Rape of Nanjing and later denying the Nazi Holocaust). Japanese figures receive layered treatment, particularly Minister Togo's unsuccessful fight against starting the war, while Premier Tojo humiliates the inept American prosecutor Joseph Keenan with his articulate defense of imperial prerogatives. Bass shows that the Tribunal couldn't help seeming like "winner's justice" in some ways; as Pal and others stressed, the Allied powers were hardly guiltless of imperialism (France and the Netherlands were fighting to reclaim their Asian colonies as the trial unfolded), while Webb and others ignored pleas to prosecute Japanese aerial bombing due to America's own relentless bombing campaign against Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the most egregious oversight, Unit 731's biological warfare experiments went unprosecuted as both the US and USSR found its research valuable to their own weapons programs. The trials resulted in seven death sentences and sixteen long prison sentences; unlike Nuremberg, Tokyo was considered, if not a travesty of justice, then certainly an embarrassment best forgotten afterwards. Judgment at Tokyo does not make for easy reading, but it is a valuable account demonstrating how difficult it can be to hold state criminals to account - especially when the prosecution has self-serving reasons not to.

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you ever wonder why the Nuremberg trials are well-known, but the Tokyo Trial is treated like it never happened? Well, Gary Bass is here to tell you why in Judgment at Tokyo. In a word, the trial was a mess. It was a mess for so many reasons including judges who didn't want to be there, lack of documentation because the Japanese were so effective at destroying evidence, and bad lawyering. It was a complex story which needed someone like Bass to make sense out of it.

While this topic would be interesting no matter who wrote it, Bass puts on a masterclass presenting the material. He will call out characters when they are clearly lying or in over their head. He doesn't do it often and I sometimes disagreed with him. However, his willingness to interject allows the reader to stop processing facts for a moment and ask themselves what they believe. It makes the book a conversation between the author and a reader. I don't vote for Pulitzer Prizes (because of course no one asked me to), but I know this book deserves one.

It needs to be said before you dive in that this is a very long book. No, that isn't me being squeamish. Bass says it himself in the preface. While I often find narratives can be cut down if you really try, I completely agree with Bass that the length is necessary in this case. There is so much ground to cover and complex characters ranging from dedicated defense lawyers who did not give up on lost causes to a judge who wins my vote as the biggest clown in this whole sordid episode. Most importantly, Bass answers the big question. Why don't we know more about the Tokyo Trial?

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor Books.)

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't award this book anything but five stars because otherwise how in the world can I justify reading its 670 odd pages of text, let alone recommend anyone else devout the time needed to read through it, and I do recommend reading it, but I have some reservations with the way the author allows his own moral revulsion with later American actions to colour his presentation of the Tokyo Trial judgements. The Tokyo trial was flawed, and its judgement is still controversial in Japan. As a result neither Japan, nor its neighbors, have managed to achieve anything approaching the closure that Germany has with erstwhile victims. This book is important in providing the background to the failure of Japan to follow the path of Germany (although to be accurate it was West Germany which first accepted and then attempted expiate its past followed by a united Germany. East Germany's attitude was analogous, but not identical to Japan's, in refusing to see that they had any connection with Germany's past crimes). But, and this is outside the scope of my review, if you want to understand why Germany and Japan have dealt with WWII in such different ways then you should read 'The Wages of Guilt' by Ian Buruma (sorry to do this but if you search for this book on Goodreads search for it under Ian-Buruma, that hyphen is essential, though wrong).

The first thing to understand about the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials is that both failed to achieve what their instigators and partisans thought they would, to make aggressive wars of conquest not simply illegal but things banished to Trotsky's capacious 'dustbin of history'. I would hope I don't have to belabour the obvious and list all those bloody conflicts which have occurred since the end of WWII, but then have there been aggressive wars? have they even been wars? who decides what is an aggressive war? nor point out that the presence of the Soviet Union at Nuremberg and even more so in Tokyo was grotesque. Perhaps the knowledge that the crime of waging 'aggressive war', never mind 'conspiracy' to wage aggressive war, have never been filed since Tokyo. We have had trials over 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' and Nuremberg helped make that possible. At Tokyo there were convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity but there is no comparison between what was established at Nuremberg, and at Tokyo. Although there was plenty of deeply moving and horrifying testimony about war crimes and crimes against humanity at Tokyo nothing was established in the systematic way it was at Nuremberg.

Why? Well it helped that the Japanese had plenty of time to destroy almost all archival sources that American bombing had not already destroyed. In addition the Japanese 'state' did not cease to exist in the same way that the Nazi 'state' ceased to exist. Japan was occupied but not in the way Germany was and McArthur, and the Americans, really didn't care about war crimes or crimes against humanity. They wanted to try Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbour before a declaration of war was delivered. Oddly no one tried the Japanese for their simultaneous attacks on Hong Kong and Malaya without a declaration of war. Indeed while the USA did get a declaration, albeit late, none was ever presented in London.

No one was interested in acknowledging that there might be a difference between attacking a proper 'state' such as Poland and colonies such as Hawaii, Philippines, Hong Kong or Malaya (didn't realise Hawaii was a colony - read 'How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States' by Daniel Immerwahr). Indeed colonialism, along with racism, was the elephant in the room at Tokyo (though they weren't the only ones) and Japan, although certainly as imperialist as the UK, USA, France or Netherlands and also as racist, at least pretended that they weren't. The hypocrisy of European colonial powers trying Japan for doing what they had done, but longer ago, was one of the reasons that inspired the judge from India, Radhabinod Pal, to dissent from not simply the Tokyo Courts judgements but from recognising the court's right to judge the defendants. Unfortunately Pal's stand went further and encompassed not simply a belief that those on trial were not responsible for events like the Rape of Nanking but cast doubt on any of the crimes against humanity having ever been convicted. That in later life Pal would also sweepingly dismiss the reality of the Shoah as revealed at Nuremberg makes him a deeply problematic figure as far as I am concerned.

Japan committed its greatest crimes in China, and committed them over the longest period, but the Nationalist Chinese State under Chiang Kai Shek was, during the course of the Tokyo trial, losing the Civil War to Mao's communists. The horrors perpetrated there were never adequately presented at the trial. The Japanese attempts at concealment were abetted by the way the obscenity of Unit 731 (Google it and weep) was completely covered up by the USA. Even though there were plenty of diplomatic and other Western observers to what took place at Nanking almost none of their evidence was called on (it was perhaps unfortunate that the man most responsible for denouncing Japanese crimes and for saving 250,000 Chinese was the German Consul General, John Rabe, a member of the Nazi party). But, to be honest, it was the charge of conspiring to commit and waging aggressive war that was of interest to most of the Allied prosecutors. The deaths of 'Asians' while useful, was not of paramount importance, which helps explain the exclusion of Japan's numerous crimes in Korea.

One of the areas were the author, Mr. Bass, allows himself to get bogged down in retrospective moral posturing is over the Allied firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although before WWII there had been plenty of opportunities to ban aerial bombardment of civilians in war no really effective restrictions were in place. Everyone considered it too important a potential weapon to curtail. Neither Germany nor Japan had any qualms about bombing civilians; the Germans had shown this as long ago as Guernica and the Japanese at Chongqing spent six years firebombing civilians. Don't misunderstand me, both the firebombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of the atom bombs were horrific but the question of whether they can be justified is outside the remit of this book. They weren't illegal and, although this is no justification, if it had been possible for the Japanese army to inflict such damage they would not have hesitated.

I remember back in my school days in the 1970s reading a rather gloriously over the top book 'Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes' by Lord Liverpool, which had plenty of grainy, but grisly, black and white pictures of various atrocities. It was from this book I first learnt of the Tokyo War Crimes trial and I was surprised, presuming it was like Nuremberg, that I'd never heard of it. Now over fifty years later Mr. Bass has provided an account of the trial in all its shoddiness because, at the heart of the trial's failure, was the absurd removal of the Emperor from any threat of prosecution. The lengths of twisted logic that the American prosecutor and the Japanese defendants went through to remove all trace of responsibility from the emperor is almost comic, if it wasn't so tragic in ensuring that for the Japanese the trial would never provide them with a reason to come to terms with their responsibility, never mind guilt.

It is an excellent book about a well meant but ultimately deeply flawed if not farcical event.

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me 3 weeks to read this. Which is slow going for a 700-page book. It isn't that it's
uninteresting or badly written, it just gets bogged down from time to time by all the legal wranglings. Plus I've been stressed out by other things, so I was finding it difficult to concentrate. That aside, this is a comprehensive, authoritative, account of the second most famous war crimes trial in history. More contentious and messier than Nuremberg, it brings the debate about victor's justice into greater focus. Until you read in detail the atrocities the Japanese committed. Particularly those against other Asiatics. The crimes against the Chinese are especially appalling. However imperfect victor's justice was in this case, we must keep reminding ourselves that the right side won. And what victor's justice would've looked like if it was Japan who had prevailed.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely well sourced and written chronicle of the Tokyo Trials. Studying Japanese history at university, I was aware prior to reading that the level of ‘justice’ as it were was not as lofty as its contemporary Nuremberg Trials. However, I did not have any idea about the depth of the infighting between the judges, the obstinacy of the Australians and Americans at times, the cajoling of the British, and just the chaos that it all brought.

I should say that this is an absolute tome of a book, 1000 pages just of matter, plus a few hundred of sources and footnotes. That being said, Bass writes in an engaging style, meaning it is very rare to encounter a boring part. There is some slight repetition at times, but I imagine this is due to each chapter being written to maintain some standalone information, which is pretty common in some academic literature.

Bass judges all the nations involved with depth, context, and scrutiny. He can be scathing at times, but seeing the history it is rarely unjustified. My only gripe was that I wish he discussed how there were plans for multiple trials of the Class A variety earlier, and talked more about the prisoners who were at Sugamo waiting for the second round. Don’t get me wrong, he does talk about it in depth, but I would have preferred that to be within the narrative of the trial, and not consigned to afterwards.

All in all, an excellent work. I can only hope that he does one on the Nuremberg trials. 5 stars

[Infosifter · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me more than a month to read this book, which is not typical for me even with really long books. Part of this was because I needed to take some breaks when reading about the terrible events that took place in countries such as China and the Philippines. I'm not complaining – it doesn't make much sense to discuss a trial over war crimes without first examining said crimes – but it does not make for easy reading. Because I spent so long reading this I'm finding it hard to summarize my conclusions other than that the trial itself was a shambles, and that hypocrisy on the part of Allied nations played a very large role in it. This is a fascinating book and very well-written, so I encourage anyone with any interest in the subject to give it a try.

[Bon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, thorough, nuanced, and perhaps the most engaging 900+ page book I've ever consumed.

Bass holds nothing back in examining the hypocrisy and atrocities on all sides, especially those in countries whose WWII horrors were never covered in mainstream classes in America. The research and context into the different judges was fantastic. I could go on and on, but it's just a very good nonfiction offering, perfect for anyone interested in international relations, WWII history, and Asian history.

Highly recommend the audiobook for getting through it, Simon Vance is a great narrator.

[Harlan Strader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent, but mind numbing detail. While interesting and complete a bit of a slog to get through.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immense amount of reading and sifting had to be done to present this narrative of an error-ridden, sometimes inept, and always political trial that took certain japanese ministers and military personnel through some kind of process to result in either judgment or vengeance. (How a reader might view the result of Bass' work will determine which of those two words best apply, though, of course, someone might see both as applicable.)

I would have appreciated a chapter or part of a chapter solely on the judges prior to the first day of the trial, instead of being given potted bios here and there, and more about most of them and their careers after (for surely this experience would have had consequences). Bass lets the correspondence and memoirs of the judges do most of the damning.

JaT doesn't stop at the conclusion of the trial and the hanging of certain figures. It talks about the ramifications of the judgment and one particular dissent through to today. That is, this trial has relevance for today, of a different kind, perhaps, than in the late 1940s.

Recommended.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Emperor Hirohito began the cold, bleak new year of 1946 by declaring that he was not a living god after all.”
I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes last year and the author implied that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence earlier in the war that Emperor Hirohito must relinquish his throne was the primary reason why Japan did not surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped. The book also stated that many scientists at the Manhattan Project felt that the information relating to nuclear fission should be held in common between the major global powers and that Joseph Stalin should be allowed to view the first nuclear tests at Los Alamos. Niels Bohr met with Robert Oppenheimer, possibly on behalf of Werner Heisenberg, specifically to talk about the larger implications of atomic power and the possible resulting arms race. Both the possibilities of including the Soviet Union in the collection of western countries involved in the Manhattan Project and the formation afterwards of a global organization to regulate nuclear weapons was suggested to Major General Leslie Groves and to President Harry Truman by Oppenheimer and both suggestions were refused outright.

“Yet according to [Kōichi] Kido's diary…the emperor ‘ordered’ [Hideki] Tojo ‘to act according to program.’ This was a singularly explosive piece of evidence…a private record from the emperor's closest aide that showed him personally ordering his prime minister to attack the United States.”
In Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass, the author implies that leaving Emperor Hirohito on the throne allowed Japan to later deny their responsibility for atrocities committed during the Second World War. General Douglas MacArthur believed Hirohito was essential to the peaceful occupation of Japan and its transition to democracy and though sufficient evidence existed to his collaboration with the men indicted, the Emperor was not prosecuted. Bass also states that there were already concerns among Allied powers of the military strength of the USSR and the spread of Communism. The Americans were so concerned that Truman, though he won a promise from Stalin to officially enter the war on the eastern front, hoped he could prevent this entry by dropping the atomic bomb and ending the war beforehand. Truman did not believe that the Allied powers could get the Soviet troops out of areas that they had “liberated”, such as Poland and Manchuria.

“The Japanese were provided with talented American defense lawyers, often in Army uniform; they were among the only people in the courtroom to really depart from their national scripts, giving a remarkable, full-throated representation to their Japanese clients.”
During the International Military Tribunal for the Far East War otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, twenty-eight defendants, mostly government officials and Imperial military officers, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity following the Second World War. The defense in the Tokyo Trial made the case that Japan needed resources and like other western colonists simply sought them elsewhere. Responding to Japan’s incursion into Indochina, the US placed an embargo on Japan, limiting gasoline and oil shipments. When the resulting negotiations with the Americans broke down and the ultimatum of the Hull note delivered, the defense claimed that the Japanese government was forced to take action simply for self-preservation, thus the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Finally though the defense tried to make the case that the Japanese government acted from fear of the spread of Communism, the Justices refused to accept this defense, though many of the western powers had the same concerns.

“During the eerie interval waiting for the Allied armies to arrive, Japanese officials systematically incinerated documents for the war crimes trials that would surely follow— one of the grandest efforts at evidence-tampering in legal history.”
The prosecution had difficulty establishing the Japanese chain of command, especially in the cases of rape and torture of civilians and prisoners. Fighting the Communist, the Chinese government lead by Chiang Kai-shek, was in retreat and therefore evidence needed by the prosecution was never collected.
“Hidden away…in occupied Manchuria, the Japanese army had since 1936 operated a top secret unit for human experiments with bacteriological warfare…Unit 731 had killed some two thousand Chinese and Manchurian prisoners….The operation had been run by General Ishii Shiro….”
The evidence of the bioweapons lab, Unit 731, was never presented during the Trial because the United States and Soviet Union wanted this information for their own military use. And finally many witnesses simply were unable to travel to Tokyo due to the distance and expense.

Twelve judges were named to the Tokyo Trial with William Webb from Australia acting as the Chief Justice. Three judges were named from nonwestern countries: Justice Delfin Jaranilla from the Philippines, Justice Ju-ao Mei from China and Justice Radhabinod Pal from India. The judges disagreed with the authority of the court and its procedures, dissented on opinions including that of the guilt of dependents, and often expressed the grievances of their country of origin. The Australian Chief Justice Webb bullied his peers, the English Justice Patrick tried to usurp power for himself, the Indian Justice Pal wanted to acquit the defendants and the Chinese Justice Mei thought the defense was too robust. Unfortunately there were no judges named to represent Vietnam or Korea.

This was an absolutely absorbing read. I also appreciated the inclusion of the history of Japan after the war, particularly the praise by Japanese conservatives of Justice Pal’s dissenting opinion and the deification of the individuals who committed war crimes at the Yasukuni shrine.
“In December 2013…[Shinzo] Abe visited Yasukuni, which prompted the usual Chinese denunciations and one unusual one: the Chinese ambassador in London wrote that ‘If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux.’”

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

detailed and insightful look at the lead up to the far east war and the war crime trial and the aftermath, well researched enjoyed the book overall.

[History Today]

In September 1945, shortly before his arrest by Allied soldiers, Japan’s wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki was asked by an American reporter who he considered responsible for the war. ‘You are the victors’, replied Tōjō, ‘and you are able to name him now … But historians 500 or 1,000 years from now may judge differently.’

Here, in essence, was one of the biggest challenges that faced the International Military Tribunal for the Far East when it convened in Tokyo in April 1946: how to avoid the impression of victors’ justice? Modelled on the Nuremberg trials, then ongoing in Germany, the aim of the ‘Tokyo trials’, as they became known, was to try senior Japanese leaders for a range of crimes committed both during the Second World War and in the period leading up to it. When the trials concluded in December 1948, each of the 25 defendants was found guilty on at least one count. Seven, including Tōjō Hideki, were sentenced to death.

In obvious ways the trials did indeed represent victors’ justice. The victors set the mandate and populated the judges’ bench. Their own conduct in the war – firebombing Japanese cities and using atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was exempt from consideration. And their point of view on the causes of war decided the chronology of the trials: beginning with Japanese militarism in the late 1920s, rather than – as a Japanese witness at the trial suggested – in 1853, with America’s forced opening of Japan to trade and diplomacy on Western terms. Tōjō himself thought that the Opium Wars of the 19th century might be a reasonable point of departure.

And yet as Gary J. Bass points out in this magisterial account – long but never sprawling; thick with detail yet always engrossing – true victors’ justice, as far as some of the Allied leaders were concerned, would have involved putting Emperor Hirohito on trial and most likely hanging him. Large proportions of the Allies’ domestic populations wanted to see Japan destroyed. Bass reports that 85 per cent of Americans had been in favour of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Christopher Harding is a cultural historian and broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) and he writes about Asia’s impact on Western life at IlluminAsia.org.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do we do when the war is over? The treaties and surrenders have been signed. The prisoners have been returned (hopefully). The armies have been demobbed. But the trauma remains, especially after wars as horrific as World War II. So many millions died that it seems wrong to just allow the surviving leaders of the German, Italian, and Japanese governments to live out their lives in peace, especially when the violence committed by Nazi and Imperial Japanese forces went well beyond the battlefield. After World War I, the victors relied on reparations, forced demilitarization, and treaties to ensure peace. After World War II, the victors turned to international law to hold (at least some) of their former enemies responsible. In Europe, Nazis were tried and sentenced at the Nuremberg Tribunals. In Asia, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, held in Tokyo, attempted to do the same to leaders of the former Japanese Empire. In Judgment at Tokyo, Gary J. Bass uses archival materials—letters, diaries, newspapers, testimonies, and court documents—to examine the thorny legal issues, judicial backbiting, realpolitik, and more to tell the story of the long fight to administer some kind of justice after long years of war...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials; the victors presiding over the vanquished. What about the other World War II war crimes tribunal established out of the same principle - international justice for the atrocities inflicted upon the winning Allied forces?

If you haven’t heard of the Tokyo Tribunal, where eleven different judges each representing eleven Allied nations (many of them colonies of greater powers at that time) - the United States, China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, Holland, New Zealand, India and the Philippines - then no worries, you’re not historically ignorant.

Most people have not heard anything about this grand trial against 25 Class A Japanese war criminals in the Pacific War theater for the simple reason that the entire thing, from start to finish (and even in present-day interpretations) was an utter fiasco.

To begin with, there was the obvious question of how representatives of victor nations could possibly judge their enemies with no bias (as it turns out - they couldn’t - there was blatant bias on display from the judges to the prosecution, defense, defendants, press and public alike).

The court was unable to even give a satisfactory explanation as for what gave it legal jurisdiction to conduct this criminal trial in an occupied, defeated, and demilitarized country.

They got only as far as “their rightful legal jurisdiction rested upon the charter drawn up by General Douglas MacArthur, overseeing the lawful occupation of Japan after their unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri.” But questions of bias and hypocrisy (ex post facto laws of aggressive war, American and other Allied countries’ own imperial conquests, the atomic bombs targeting mostly civilian populations) were never addressed and certainly never published in the court’s deliberations and majority opinion.

The only dissenters were Dutch judge Bert Röling - whom appeared more confused than opposed - and Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal - who used the opportunity to dissent on the grounds not just that the claims of jurisdiction and bias were dubious - but instead to act as some kind of vengeful warrior against European colonialism (never mind all of the crimes that took place against fellow Asians by the Japanese) who chose to acquit each and every defendant on the grounds that, apparently, the evidence was too sparse.

This included claiming that the victims of the victorious powers often became “overexcited” when testifying against their tormentors. Pal used this claim to discredit hundreds of accounts of rape at Nanjing - whether the account came from a tearful survivor herself, a Red Cross aide, a doctor or diplomat, made no difference - in his mind, “the suggestion of mass rape and murder is incorrect, and these abuses often occurred as rather isolated examples of lower-ranking soldiers not properly supervised.” All of this dispute overwhelming evidence and testimony. To this day, Pal remains a martyr to the extreme Japanese nationalists who made no apologies for the atrocities committed during World War II.

This masterpiece of investigate work by Gary Bass gives you everything you need to know about both sides of the story, and is the perfect blend - for me, anyway - of history and international law. Even though international law continues to remain a very abstract field, with so few examples. While the widespread atrocities and torture committed by indifferent Japanese military men could at times be difficult to read, it was at times entertaining to read just how petty the squabbles between the different judges, judges and attorneys, judges and defendants, and so on, actually became.

As horrible of a war criminal Tojo Hideki may have been, it really was quite preposterous for U.S. chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan (sadly ignorant of the law at best, often appearing inebriated at worst) - a Truman crony - to have handled Hideki’s cross-examination. Keenan had even brought in an legal assistant who had spent a year specializing on Tojo and putting in five weeks of intense preparation for the questioning of what would be the trial’s most notorious defendant.

Alas, when President Judge Webb told Keenan it broke precedent to allow a prosecutor to have an assistant, and demanded a reason for the assistant’s presence, Keenan could not say that this aide was much more knowledgeable and competent in the job than he was. Without being able to state the truth, he could not divide up the cross-examination between himself and the aide, and the aide, furious at having done so much preparation only to be sidelined - stormed out, rather than to sit around only as a consultative presence.

The result of Keenan v. Hideki was “appalling”, according to British prosecutor Comyns Carr, writing to British attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross:
”The results are best sumnarised by a girl from the British embassy who was in court this morning and said, ‘Tojo had a good morning hanging Keenan.’”

The only serious miscarriages of justice to me were Togo Shigenori and Shigemitsu Mamoru, who, like the book extolled, seemingly were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong room with the wrong people at the wrong time. Everything they, the other defendants, and official records/evidence said, supported their claims that they had done everything possible to avoid war, did not think they could win the war, yet found themselves sidelined by the militarist hardliners. Apparently the judges were not satisfied with this, as they “didn’t resign in protest” (despite one of the men threatening to resign twice, in fact) they must have supported the aggressive attack against Pearl Harbor.

This book leaves you with as many questions as it does answers. While most of the defendants were no doubt guilty of their crimes, was it fair to isolate them and punish them, and not the Americans who had killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the aerial bombings? What about the USSR, who was united with Hitler long before Japan, and with Stalin as the country’s leader executing, starving, and sentencing so many of his own people to penal colonies, were they really in any position to speak of honor and morality?

It definitely exposes the hypocrisy and atrocities and the underhanded actions on both the Allied and Axis sides. Bass weighs in at times to issue a verdict on the truthfulness of certain courtroom accounts, but never to the point where one might question if he was seeking to influence the opinion of the reader. No, there is enough information here for the reader to make up their own mind. The Tribunal was definitely a mistake, but what and how should things have been done differently?

These are all fascinating questions that the world may never know (and hopefully will never need to find out). Definitely a 5 star book if there was one, and every page really was necessary, justifying the rather lengthy “door knocker” of a book (my favorite expression for voluminous novels and a now a staple of my literary vocabulary).

[Dylan Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great chronicle of the Postwar environment in the Pacific Theater. Bass does a great job of detailing the events at the trials in Japan after the war and it is a valuable read. I would highly recommend this to fellow World War 2 buffs.

[Kiran · Rating 4 out of 5]

well researched and very interesting and way more readable than fourth wing

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

4.5 Stars for knowledge, research and other details.
2 Stars for editing
2.5 Stars for enjoyment

“The city’s rivers had boiled and liquefied glass and rained. The stench of burning flesh was so intense that US B-29 bomber pilots several thousand feet above had gagged.”

Bass is correct when he says that as the Japanese rampaged across Pacific Asia it had nothing to do with liberating anyone from tyranny but merely the battle of one aggressive, colonial empire against another – namely the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, the US in The Philippines, Hawaii and Guam etc and the British in India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong etc. And let’s not forget after this farcical trial, The US, UK and France would go onto detonate hundreds of nuclear devices throughout the Pacific all the way up to the 1990s.

“More Australians died from being imprisoned by the Japanese than from combat against them.”

There are many uncomfortable truths, and ridiculous examples of hypocrisy and double standards which put a giant pair of clown feet on the trial and its muddy aims. On one hand Japan is rightly being put in the dock for its years of atrocious torture, killing and colonial expansionism, extraction and exploitation – but at the same time France demands and is granted full American approval and support do the exact same throughout all of Indochina – something which would go onto help create America’s doomed invasion and part occupation of Vietnam.

But we have to remember some empires and genocides are more equal than others and America’s self-appointed “America first” exceptionalism has granted them perpetual immunity from ever having to answer to anyone or god forbid, face the consequences – this only applies to the poorer, English not as a first language parts of the world – unless you are Israel of course.

It seems beyond absurd that even after all that suffering, loss and killing that the Japanese still had the arrogance to not offer an unconditional surrender and insisted that the Emperor Hirohito be spared the shame in having to publicly surrender, and not only that he never had to answer for his war crimes, which was the ultimate insult to the millions who suffered or were tortured or murdered under his tyranny. It was even more absurd that the Brits suggested it and the Americans accepted it. The message is loud and clear - the pride and reputation of one emperor is far more important than the suffering and death of the millions who died as a result of his actions.

“China is the weakest of the four Allies, it’s as if a weak person has met a kidnapper, a hooligan and a bully.”

That’s both a brilliant and hilarious summary of the US, UK and Russia, spoken by Chiang Kai Shek – a man not averse to killing many through his own version of egotistic delusion and incompetence. The Japanese conduct from 1933 and all throughout WWII was atrocious and utterly unforgiveable and the clumsy cluster-fuck attempt at justice courtesy of the USA and the band of precious egos from the victorious nations was an insult to all those victims and is also unforgiveable in its weakness, injustice and incompetence.

It’s interesting as this reminds you how so often that those of high status believe that to be shamed is sufficient punishment and that really they are above the law – think of almost every leader of the UK and US since WWII and their collective criminality?...What is the worst any of them ever endure?...It remains to be seen how bad the crime must be or how blatant the corruption must be before any of these figures ever have to answer to their crimes or be held accountability and face the consequences like anyone else?...

Yes some justice was served, and some rightly were sentenced to death, but far too many significant players were let off lightly or never trialed at all, and overall this multi-national congregation of self-serving, pompous idiots failed. They failed the millions of innocent victims, they allowed their pettiness, ignorance and their monstrous egos dictate proceedings rather than ideas of justice for millions of victims. What probably comes through stronger than anything else is the sheer pettiness of these lawmakers. Is there anyone capable of more pettiness than those who possess so much power?...

Reading this raises so many questions about the hypocrisies, motivations and behaviour of the world’s governments. Can you imagine how the US would react if they were put in the dock for their mass slaughter in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan etc?...Or what about Britain, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain were put to trial for their centuries of murderous colonial expansion?...China paid a hefty price for the Japanese occupation, but that was nothing compared to what they would do to their own people, with Mao killing tens of millions of his own and then Stalin’s purges and terror in Russia also enslaved, tortured and killed millions.

Governments and elites learn from history, and what they learn is that some nations are more equal than others, but all elites tend to get treated the same, regardless of language spoken. Elites including elite enemies tend to choose criminal elite interests over that of non-elite victims, unless they are an immediate threat to corporate or political power. If they think that they can do business with you or think you are good for business you usually get to stay – if you’re seen as communist (Lumumba, Sukarno, Sankara etc) or a terrorist (Bin-Laden, Hussein, Gaddafi etc) then they will find a way of getting rid of you. But if you are shown to play the game and show deep allegiance to US and their interests, then you will not only survive but thrive, even if you have tortured, imprisoned, terrorised or murdered millions (Suharto, Pinochet, Mobuto et al).

That’s the whole point of why the system was set up in the first place, first and foremost to protect the many powerful interests of powerful interests. This is why Hirohito was literally above the law, it’s why the likes of Bush and Blair weren’t brought to the Hague on war criminal charges. If people start seeing elites being treated as mere mortals, the other elites know fine well that other people in other countries may start getting ideas about their own elites and questioning, judging and punishing them in line with everyone else’s standards – so by treating elites as untouchable they then know they can behave like they are untouchable and they never have to concern themselves about having to face the consequences that non-elites would rightly face.

“While Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologised for the crimes of WWII, there is no Japanese equivalent of the near-universal national repentance, and grief that are at the core of the current German politics and society…Japan’s official apologies are pallid and vague. If German lawmakers today were to utter some of the opinions about WWII routinely expressed by Japanese politicians - some of these atrocities never happened, the other side was just as bad, the historical record is unclear, we have nothing to apologise for - they would be publicly anathematised, ostracised and possibly indicted.”

Phew…that was all a bit dark and intense wasn’t it?...Since you’ve made it this far, how about we end on a lighter note shall we, I was wondering if the author happened to be related to ole Big Mouth Billy Bass?...Remember him?...the talking fish who sang “Take Me To The River”?...Billy was a bit of a divisive character, but I always enjoyed him, even when his batteries were going and his song and actions took on a haunted, ghoulish quality. I’m sure they did a follow up fish too?…Take me to da riiiiiiiiver!

[Breann Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A light Christmas read, clocking in at just under 700 pages… My main critique is that at a certain point in the trial coverage, Bass just recycles a lot of topics and phrases he previously used, which when you’re already on page 500 of reading about war crimes gets to be…. a bit much.

However, it’s certainly the definitive work on the topic. I think Bass was very fair in his coverage (and certainly exhaustive).

Would I recommend this book to others? If you want to develop arm strength I do recommend the hard cover version, probably the heaviest book I own (coincidentally, one of the heaviest books I own by subject matter as well). Proceed with caution.

[Jennifer Mangler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was WORK. I wanted to learn about the Tokyo trials because I knew very little. I wanted details. But man, at times I had a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. I'm glad I read it, but I would not recommend it to the casual reader.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fascinating book on a topic i know very little about. The author did get a bit bogged down in some spots.

[Jibraun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second book by Gary Bass with the first being Blood Telegram, an excellent book about the Bangladeshi Genocide and 1971 Pakistan-Indian war. Given how terrific that book was from cover-to-cover, I did not hesitate to pick this book up. And it starts off just as good as Blood Telegram ended with a clear thesis, interesting backstories about all the major players, proper context being given, and then a deep dive into the Tokyo Trials.

I knew next to nothing about the Tokyo Trials (the post-WW2 trials for the upper echelon Japanese war criminals), only having read and studied about the Nuremberg Trials previously. In short, Bass' thesis is simple. The trial was a misrun disaster for several reasons (better summarized by other reviewers here) basically satisfying no one in the end. I never thought I'd say this, but everyone should have listened to Douglas MacArthur -not a point that Bass harps on but shines through to me. MacArthur advocated strongly that Japanese war criminals should be subjected to military tribunals, focusing on obvious war crimes, to keep the trials short and punishment quick/expedient. Instead, Truman and crew rolled out the Nuremberg playbook, trying to prosecute the Japanese military upper echelons and civil society for "aggressive war," which really was not a crime at that point -- subjugating the actual war crimes to second billing. This led to a boondoggle of a trial, dragging out over years, overrun by incompetent attorneys, even worse judges, and the Allied powers playing politics in choosing who to prosecute and who not to (e.g. Emperor Hirohito). Basically all of the judges had pre-ordained biases leading to ruling that defied logic IMO except for perhaps the Dutch judge.

All of this analysis and background was fantastic, lasting about the first 450 pages of the book. But then the last 200 some odd pages started bogging down. Bass became heavily repetitive, at points almost verbatim repeating himself from earlier chapters. He also spent chapters on unnecessary topics, e.g., the actual executions of the defendants and the post-trial lives of some of the judges at the trials. He said at the beginning of the book that it was a long book because it was necessarily so. I agree it needed to be a long book, but it did not need to be this long. With that flop of an ending, I'm only giving the book 3.75 stars. I just recommend picking it up. Reading through the last chapter finishing the trial and then pick up a new book. You will have already read a full book's worth of information anyway, and you'll save yourself a whole lot of repetition.

[Randall Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an exhaustively-researched volume about a subject most of us never knew about or have forgotten. I read a book in college, in the last century, about Hirota Koki, the only civilian among the convicted and executed Japanese war criminals. From that, I knew some of the story before reading but came away fully sated in my curiosity about this mostly-forgotten slice of 20th century history.

The detail is both a strength and weakness of this book. I would guess he has spent years researching the subject and wanted to make sure he didn't let any of that work go to waste, including it appears a 2015 visit to Hiroshima to interview survivors of the atomic blast. Otherwise, I can't figure out why he went into the amount of detail he did. Would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in discussions with his editor about what to, or what not to include in his book.

However, I don't think it needed to be as long as it was. Think Bass could have told an equally-engrossing and compelling story in about half the length he did. That's why I give the book only three and a half stars, four stars for content but only three for the telling of the story.

I read Bass' previous book about the independence fight for Bangladesh in the 1970s and found it fascinating. I eagerly sought out this book after reading reviews and equating it with his authorship of The Blood Telegram.

He does a great job looking at the trial from a 10,000 foot perspective, identifying the larger issues about the court's legitimacy, composition and decision-making. His analysis in the final chapter ties together all the threads in a smoothly-woven tapestry. The role that racism played in the trial is not likely an element of many Occidental narratives about the subject. For that we should commend him.

The strengths of this book, beyond it's exhaustiveness, are the stories about the individual judges hearing the case, specifically Radhabinrod Pal, the Indian judge who cast one of two dissents and insisted on promoting a vigorous dissent in open court and subsequently publishing it in many forms. Chapter 29 "I am Wholly Dissenting", was my favorite section of the book.

Pal's principled stand against the other judges, save a Dutch judge who also dissented, should have confirmed his place in history for the questions he raised during the trial. However, his subsequent denial of Holocaust murder and Japanese killing during the Rape of Nanking diminished his credibility and stature later in life, most everywhere save Japan where he was feted and celebrated until the end of his life. Otherwise, his name would be known world-wide, as it is in Japan for his diminution of the blame for most of Japan's war crimes in the 30s and 40s in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Burma, the Philippines, etc. To Pal, Japan's actions were justified given the behavior of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the US in maintaining their colonial dominance over much of Asia at the time.

Another interesting thing about this book is his discussion of George Kennan, the father of containment. He outlines Kennan's behind-the-scenes role in guiding MacArthur to limit widespread punishment of the Japanese militarists in hopes of using the country as a potential bulwark, and potential source of pressure against the growing Soviet threat in East Asia. AS one who has read many of Kennan's writing, I never knew of this part of his biography.

Overall, this is a good book, the definitive work on the trial. Just don't think it's a book for the average reader, other than hardcore WWII historians, or legal historians. The length will scare away the average reader, who won't want to dive into 700 pages of history about such a relatively arcane slice of WWII history. For graduate students and legal scholars, they might likely disagree with my summary and call it nitpicking.

Don't mean to denigrate the book's research, plot or subject matter in any way whatsoever. It simply didn't seem to me that Bass needed 700 pages to tell the tale. That said, if you're a WWII history junkie like me, dive in!

[Liam McMahon · Rating 5 out of 5]

wwii facts: acquired
therapy: avoided

[Katarin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible and exhaustive account of the pacific war crimes tribunal that goes through the myriad of reasons they weren’t seen as nearly as successful as Nuremberg and also follows up on how the trials have aged in the years since. Can’t rec enough.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a World War II buff, you're definitely going to want this book on your shelf, both to read and consult. It's a definitive look at the Tokyo Trial of war criminals. So, if you have an interest in Japan (as I do) you will also find this interesting. That said, it's almost 900 pages long so there's a level of commitment here that may not be for the average reader. It reads well, though, and it doesn't feel at all cumbersome or long-winded; it's necessarily long and the reader will come away with a good sense of this event in history.

As a librarian, I'd definitely want this in my collection. As a reader, I'd definitely give this as a holiday present to a WW2 buff. It's the perfect book to curl up with and leisurely read through. As I said, it's a time commitment, but I believe it is one that will pay off for the reader.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's a fine piece of writing and research.

[Cheyne · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want a book on how awful the United States was during World War II, how racist and war criminal its leaders were, and unfair the treatment of Japan was then this is the book for you

[Jessica Tannenbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tbh I didn’t finish this, but I tried and want to acknowledge that. Was interested but sometimes like Wikipedia length of history learning…