Together with its reputedly ‘sneak’ attack on Pearl Harbor, imperial Japan's policies on prisoners of war (POWs) stigmatized the nation in wartime Western eyes. Horrendous abuse of Allied POWs in the Bataan Death March and in building the ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’ created a stereotype of the Japanese military as demonically cruel. That stereotype, which lingers to this day, does not lack statistical grounding. In the Pacific War (1941–45), 27% or 35,756 of 132,134 American and British POWs, together with 35.9% or 8,033 of 22,376 Australian POWs, died in Japanese detention. In fact, more Australian troops died in prison camps than were killed in action. The vast majority of Allied deaths in Japanese captivity resulted from war crimes—types of inhumane abuse explicitly outlawed by the Hague and Geneva Conventions in effect at that time. According to historian-activist Utsumi Aiko, the Allied Powers were enraged by massive death tolls and by callous indifference to repeated protests against prisoner abuse, so they insisted in the July 1945 Potsdam Proclamation that no Japanese surrender would be tolerable unless ‘stern justice be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners’. In fact, apart from 28 suspects indicted for A-class war crimes at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 5,700 others faced trial at 51 military tribunals for B- and C-class crimes including prisoner abuse. Finally, 49 signatories to the San Francisco peace treaty in September 1951 stipulated that Japan ‘accept the judgments’ delivered at Allied war crimes tribunals (Article XI) and pay indemnities to surviving POWs (Article XVI). The prisoners' scars were so deep that former enemy states deemed such punitive measures a precondition to ending the Allied Occupation and allowing Japan to regain sovereignty in April 1952. Since then, many victim groups have tendered lawsuits for further compensation, most recently in January 2007. In other words, Utsumi examines issues not only replete with historical importance for World War II but also which also remain pertinent today for issues of popular memory and international reconciliation.