Defining Colonial “War Crimes”: Korean Debates on Collaboration, War Reparations, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

Abstract

This chapter examines how “war crimes” were discussed and framed among Koreans in the aftermath of liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Although Koreans were not given any significant role in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), Korean political leaders and intellectuals in both Korea and Japan created their own movements and debates on how to define Japanese and Korean “war crimes” committed within a colonial context. In this chapter, I focus on how they tried to approach the problems of colonial collaboration and war reparations while appropriating ideas and principles – such as “crimes against peace” and liberation from the “enslavement of the people of Korea” – that the Allied Powers had pushed forward through the IMTFE and the Cairo Declaration of 1943. Through an examination of the Korean debates on war crimes and their critiques of the IMTFE, this chapter shows how the limits of “victor’s justice” were understood by Japan’s former colonial subjects.