Judgment at Tokyo: the Japanese war crimes trials

Abstract

In the years since the Japanese war crimes trials concluded, the proceedings have been coloured by charges of racism, vengeance and guilt. In this controversial book, Tim Maga contends that in the trials good law was practiced and evil did not go unpunished. The defendents ranged from lowly Japanese Imperial Army privates to former prime ministers. Since they did not represent a government for which genocide was a policy pursuit, their cases were more difficult to prosecute than those of Nazi war criminals. In contrast to Nuremberg, the efforts in Tokyo, Guam and other locations throughout the Pacific received little attention by the Western press. Once the Cold War began, America needed Pacific allies and the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers throughout the 1930s and early 1940s were rarely mentioned. The trials were described as phony justice and Japan bashing. Keenan and his compatriots adopted criminal court tactics and established precedents in the conduct of war crimes trials that still stand. Maga reviews the context for the trials, recounts the proceedings, and concludes that they were, in fact, decent examples of American justice and fairy play.