Judgment at Tokyo Quotes

“Boastful as Truman could be in speeches about the aerial bombardment of cities, the ground-level reality jerked him into an apocalyptic frame of mind. “I hope for some kind of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.” He added, “We are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“For four years after Pearl Harbor, it was China’s desperate, dogged resistance that made it possible for the Allies to advance on other European and Pacific fronts.[52]”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“In the end, the judges would only deliver those “reasons to be given later” as part of the court’s final verdict in November 1948. The entire Tokyo trial would be conducted without an explanation from the court of its own legitimacy.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“On May 17, Webb announced in court that the defense’s jurisdiction motions were “dismissed for reasons to be given later”—an unsurprising outcome but with a shocking absence of any stated rationale.[70]”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“that the tribunal’s charter was nothing more than ex post facto law, belatedly declaring acts to be crimes which had not been criminal at the time they were committed”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“fueling the war machines of its Axis partners.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“imposing four-engined heavy bomber of the kind which”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“that it could only be upheld if “an enemy belligerent has no constitutional rights.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia