International Military Tribunal For The Far East Research Articles

Memorializing Dissent: Justice Pal in Tokyo

Memorials and monuments are envisioned as positive ways to honor victims of atrocity. Such displays are taken as intrinsically benign, respectful, and in accord with the arc of justice. Is this correlation axiomatic, however? Art, after all, may be a vehicle for multiple normativities, contested experiences, and variable veracities. Hence, in order to really speak about the relationships between the aesthetic and international criminal law, one must consider the full range of initiatives—whether pop-up ventures, alleyway graffiti, impromptu ceremonies, street art, and grassroots public histories—prompted by international criminal trials. Courts may be able to stage their own outreach, to be sure, but they cannot micromanage the outreach of others. And the outreach of others may look and sound strikingly different than that curated and manicured by courts. This essay presents one such othered outreach initiative: a memorial in Tokyo dedicated to Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, who authored a vehement dissent at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). The IMTFE was established in 1946 to prosecute Japan's leadership in the aftermath of the Second World War. Pal would have acquitted each defendant. This essay describes Justice Pal's legal philosophy, situates his place in the currents of international law, and reflects on the broader role of memorials as discursive sites.

The use of affidavit in practice of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

The U.S. lawyers played the leading role in organization and arrangement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) intended for trial of the main Japanese war criminals. Tribunal was established by a charter issued by the U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed as a Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan. Therefore, prevalence of Anglo-Saxon legal family is evident in the practice of tribunal. One of them is the use of affidavit in the Tokyo International Military Tribunal. The article applies the method of comparative legal studies; conducts analysis of the legal norms stipulated in decrees of the tribunals. Dogmatic method is employed for interpretation of legal norms presented in the decrees. The author examines the practice of presenting and usage of affidavit in the course of judicial procedure in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Affidavits were provided into the tribunal by prosecution witnesses, as well as by defendants themselves. The article also demonstrated the use of affidavits by the U.S. administration for political purposes.  

‘A Continuous Retrial’: Trans/national Memory in Chinese and Japanese Tribunal Films

On the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII, three prominent East Asian films on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) appeared in China and Japan. The Chinese film Tokyo Trial (Dongjing shenban, 2006) was heavily promoted in the Chinese mainland, screened extensively at universities in Beijing and Shanghai, and broke opening weekend box office records at that time. In Japan, there were two high-profile films on both the Tokyo (A-class war criminals) and Yokohama (B/C-class) trials: I Want to Be a Shellfish (Watashi wa kai ni naritai, 2008) and Best Wishes for Tomorrow (Ashita e no yuigon, 2007). All three tribunal films deal with the question of who gets to write the official “history,” or master narrative of the past, with the national narratives of other nations looming large. Produced at the height of the mid-2000s East Asia history conflict, the three films constitute a major layer in the discourse on national memory in China and Japan. Focusing on representations of race and memory and drawing from theories of the film as a site of memory, this paper will reveal how these films attempt to redefine the official history established at the IMTFE (International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and establish a national narrative of perpetrators, heroes, and victims of WWII.

Memory on Trial: Constructing and Contesting the ‘Rape of Nanking’ at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946–1948

AbstractThe spectre of the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’ continues to haunt China and Japan. Sixty years ago in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) announced its definitive ‘judgement’ of what happened in Nanking. This judgement purported to be intractable. The legal process used to reach it produced a disputed picture instead. The resulting narrative confusion continues to inform how memory of Nanjing is shaped, used and contested. This paper explores the construction of ‘Rape of Nanking’ narratives at the IMTFE. By demonstrating the inherently contested nature of narratives produced by adversarial legal proceedings, it argues that using courts as a panacea for postwar restoration and as validators of traumatic narratives is both short-sighted and ineffective. The IMTFE exemplifies the inadequacy of trial-based post-conflict reconciliation. It is hoped that the lessons learned from Tokyo's limitations will benefit the ongoing quest for tenable models of international justice.

The Tokyo war crimes trial: the pursuit of justice in the wake of World War II

This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) - commonly called the Tokyo trial - established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totami disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in 'victors' justice' in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg. This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (review)

Reviewed by: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II Franziska Seraphim The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. By Yuma Totani. Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. 335 pages. Hardcover $39.95. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial suffers from too much memory and too little history. Yuma Totani attempts to remedy this imbalance and set the record straight on some persistent myths about the trial, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which lasted from 1946 to 1948. Incredibly, this is only the second academic book in English on the trial based on the official records themselves, and it critically revises the first, Richard Minear's influential 1971 treatise, Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press). The more journalistic treatments by Philip Piccigallo (1979), Arnold Brackman (1987), and Tim Maga (2001), while listed in the bibliography, receive no attention from Totani. For intellectual company she has chosen instead Japanese scholars, in particular Awaya Kentarō, Fujita Hisakazu, and Yoshida Yutaka, who have undertaken the most rigorous academic reevaluations of the trial to date as part of the broader debate on war responsibility that has taken place in Japan since the late 1980s. Current global concern with international war crimes tribunals and humanitarian law presents a further context for Totani's study, one that she shares with another recently published book on the Tokyo Trial, Madoka Futamura's War Crimes Tribunals and Transitional Justice: The Tokyo Trial and the Nuremberg Legacy (Routledge, 2008). Whereas Futamura's sociological study tries to understand the reasons for the Tokyo Trial's low profile in postwar legal discourse relative to the Nuremberg trials, Totani ultimately contends that the Tokyo Tribunal's legal opinions have become "an integral part of the historical development of the international justice system" (p. 4), as evidenced by its citation in the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. If the trial records are allowed to speak for themselves, instead of postwar critics speaking for them, they have in fact much more to offer than conventionally recognized. With this important first book, Totani establishes herself as an archival historian distinguished by thorough research, nuanced textual analysis, and clear writing. Her book claims neither to be comprehensive nor to advance an original interpretation of [End Page 213] the trial as a whole. Indeed, she sees her work as a first step in mining a vast and largely untapped body of documents that can "expand our understanding of the Japanese war, war crimes, and war guilt as well as concepts of law, justice, and individual responsibility" (p. 261). To this end, the book is organized around those aspects of the tribunal that have drawn the fiercest and most enduring criticism, from the exoneration of Emperor Hirohito to the charge of conspiracy in waging an aggressive war and on to the failure to prosecute sexual slavery as a state-organized crime. The aim is not primarily to understand these postwar controversies, but to interrogate the trial records in order to discover the range of historical evidence and legal thinking available then, even if not all of this evidence was reflected in the final verdicts (for reasons that were procedural, political, or both). The result is a richly illuminating and engaging text within clearly drawn methodological parameters that students will find persuasive and experts will itch to explode. In order to assess the Tokyo Trial's contribution to historical knowledge of Japan's war crimes and the evolution of the international justice system, Totani seeks to lift the trial out of the interpretive framework that has unduly politicized and thereby clouded its significance in various ways since the 1950s—namely, an overreliance on contextualizing it as yet another Occupation policy serving the interests of the United States at the framing stages of the Cold War. Totani shows that from a procedural standpoint (the focus of the first three chapters), the trial was not even predominantly an American show: General Douglas MacArthur's forceful personality and considerable power in postsurrender Japan in fact had a very limited impact on...

The Tokyo Judgment. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (I.M.T.F.E.), 29 April 1946-12 November 1948. Edited by B. V. A. Röling and C. F. Rüter. APA—University Press Amsterdam: 1977. Two volumes, a third to follow.

The Tokyo Judgment. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (I.M.T.F.E.), 29 April 1946-12 November 1948. Edited by B. V. A. Röling and C. F. Rüter. APA—University Press Amsterdam: 1977. Two volumes, a third to follow.

Recent Japanese Political and Historical Materials

Historians and political scientists are frequently handicapped in analyzing the contemporary scene, or a recent period, by lack of documentary evidence. The Pacific war, however, has created a unique situation regarding Japanese political and economic documents giving authoritative evidence of Japanese affairs during the two decades prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As a result of military defeat, the Japanese government and people have been forced to submit to the occupation authorities thousands of documents which otherwise might never have been made available for research purposes. The total sum of this material is so great that significant research work is now possible in many fields of recent Japanese government, politics, and diplomacy.Soon after the beginning of the occupation, military teams were assigned the task of collecting documents. Their instructions were broad, and their haul was unbelievable. A large part of what they, and other agencies, have accumulated is still in the hands of the occupation forces, but two categories of materials are already available for private research: the documents assembled for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) and the Japanese Army and Navy department files which have been deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In this paper, an attempt will be made to survey the nature and scope of the first category: the IMTFE materials.