International Military Tribunal for the Far East

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convened on the 29th of April 1946, in the War Ministry office in Tokyo, and what unfolded there over the next two and a half years would become one of the most contested legal proceedings of the twentieth century. Twenty-eight of Japan's highest-ranking military commanders and political leaders sat in the dock, charged with 55 separate counts ranging from conspiracy to wage aggressive war to murder, torture, and forced labor. The court drew judges, prosecutors, and staff from eleven nations. Its deliberations ran more than twice as long as the trials at Nuremberg. And when it was over, the verdicts raised questions that certain participants refused to leave unanswered. What crimes were prosecuted? What crimes were not? Who was shielded from the dock, and why? And what did the tribunal's own judges think of the justice they had delivered?

• 2. Building the Court

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  United States General Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, issued the proclamation creating the court on the 19th of January 1946, the same day he approved the Charter that prescribed its composition, jurisdiction, and crimes. The IMTFE Charter followed the model of the Nuremberg Charter closely, though the Tokyo tribunal exercised broader temporal reach, extending jurisdiction back to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. MacArthur had not waited for legal frameworks to be finalized before acting. On the 11th of September 1945, barely a week after Japan's formal surrender, he ordered the arrest of 39 suspects, most of them members of Hideki Tojo's war cabinet. Tojo himself tried to take his own life and was resuscitated by U.S. physicians. The chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan, was a former U.S. assistant attorney general appointed by President Harry S. Truman. Keenan's counterpart at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, held the considerably more senior position of justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a disparity that critics would later cite as evidence of the Tokyo trial's lower official standing.

• 3. Charges and Evidence

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  The three classes of charges organized the defendants' alleged conduct into distinct legal categories. Class A covered crimes against peace, meaning the planning and waging of aggressive wars, and applied only to Japan's top leaders. Class B covered conventional war crimes committed against enemy or neutral nationals, citing specific events such as the Rape of Nanjing, the attack on Pearl Harbor without a prior declaration of war, and the Bataan Death March. Class C addressed crimes against humanity committed against any civilian population, including Japan's use of Korean and Taiwanese subjects as forced laborers and comfort women. Chief Prosecutor Keenan, in releasing the indictment, described the accused as "plain, ordinary murderers" who should be "stripped of the glamour of national heroes". The prosecution took 192 days to present its case, drawing on testimony from 419 witnesses and admitting 4,336 exhibits, including depositions and affidavits from 779 additional individuals. Evidentiary standards were deliberately loose. The Charter stated the court would not be "bound by technical rules of evidence" and could admit anything it deemed to have probative value, including unsigned diaries and letters. One piece of prosecution evidence, the Tanaka Memorial, a document purportedly from 1927 outlining Japanese plans for world domination, was later revealed to be a hoax of Chinese origin, though its authenticity was not widely challenged at the time. The defense, by contrast, was expected to adhere to the best evidence rule, an asymmetry that did not go unremarked.

• 4. Verdicts and Sentences

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  The 1,781-page judgment took fifteen months to draft after the defense concluded its presentation on the 9th of September 1947. Its reading, from November 4 to 12, 1948, delivered verdicts against all remaining defendants. Seven were sentenced to death by hanging: Kenji Doihara, Koki Hirota, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, Hideki Tojo, and Iwane Matsui. Sixteen received life sentences; three of those died in prison, and the remaining thirteen were paroled between 1952 and 1958. Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo received 20 years and died in prison in 1950. Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu received 7 years, was paroled in 1950, and later served as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama. MacArthur confirmed the sentences on the 24th of November 1948, two days after meeting with the Allied Control Commission for Japan. The seven condemned men were executed at Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro on the 23rd of December 1948. MacArthur, concerned about antagonizing the Japanese public, defied President Truman's wishes and barred all photography, instead bringing four members of the Allied Council to serve as official witnesses. Beyond the main trial, more than 5,700 lower-ranking personnel were indicted across domestic tribunals in around fifty locations in Asia and the Pacific; 984 of those were sentenced to death.

• 5. Judges in Dissent

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  Five of the eleven justices filed separate opinions outside the main judgment, and the disagreements were fundamental. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India produced the most sweeping dissent, calling for the acquittal of all defendants on every charge. Pal found the prosecution's conspiracy case weak, argued that aggressive war had not been established as an illegal act in international law by the time the alleged offenses were committed, and concluded that the trial amounted to victor's justice. Crucially, he drew a direct parallel between Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II expressing willingness to use brutal means to end World War I rapidly, which Pal noted was regarded as criminal conduct, and the Allied decision to deploy atomic bombs, writing that "future generations will judge this dire decision". Justice Bert Röling of the Netherlands also called for acquittals, including for Hirota, and argued that the bench should have included both neutral nations and Japanese members. "I think that not only should there have been neutrals in the court, but there should have been Japanese also," he wrote. Justice Henri Bernard of France concluded that the entire verdict was procedurally defective because the principal author of Japan's declaration of war had escaped prosecution entirely, leaving the convicted defendants in the position of accomplices whose chief had never been charged. Justice Delfin Jaranilla of the Philippines, who had survived the Bataan Death March himself, dissented in the opposite direction, writing that the penalties were "too lenient, not exemplary and deterrent, and not commensurate with the gravity of the offence or offences committed".

• 6. Emperor Hirohito's Immunity

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  Before the trials began, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the International Prosecution Section, and court officials worked behind the scenes to prevent the Imperial Family from facing indictment. Potential suspects included career officer Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, and Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda. As early as the 26th of November 1945, MacArthur confirmed to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai that the Emperor's abdication would not be required. Historian Herbert P. Bix documented that Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, immediately upon arriving in Japan, moved to shield Hirohito and allowed major criminal suspects to coordinate their testimony so the Emperor would not be implicated. A written report by Admiral Yonai's interpreter, Shuichi Mizota, recorded a meeting on the 6th of March 1946, at which Fellers told Yonai: "It would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the emperor is completely blameless. I think the forthcoming trials offer the best opportunity to do that. Tojo, in particular, should be made to bear all responsibility at this trial." Historian John W. Dower characterized the effort to absolve Hirohito as knowing "no bounds" and described MacArthur's prosecution team as effectively functioning as "a defense team for the emperor." Australian Justice William Webb, while stopping short of personally indicting Hirohito, wrote in his separate concurring opinion that "no ruler can commit the crime of launching aggressive war and then validly claim to be excused for doing so because his life would otherwise have been in danger."

• 7. Unit 731 and the Immunity Deal

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  Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare program, never faced a war crimes tribunal. MacArthur, acting as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, granted immunity to Ishii and all members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data gathered through human experimentation on live prisoners. On the 6th of May 1947, MacArthur wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence." The deal was finalized in 1948. Soviet forces, by contrast, did prosecute members of Unit 731 at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The full scope of what had been concealed remained obscure for decades. In 1981, John W. Powell published an account of Unit 731's experiments and its open-air germ warfare tests on civilians in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Justice Röling, by then the last surviving member of the Tokyo Tribunal, contributed a statement to that article, writing: "As one of the judges in the International Military Tribunal, it is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the Court by the U.S. government."

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Forty-two suspects who had been imprisoned in anticipation of a second Tokyo trial, including Nobusuke Kishi and Yoshisuke Aikawa, were released in 1947 and 1948 without ever being charged. Kishi later became Prime Minister of Japan. In 1952, a campaign to free the imprisoned war criminals attracted the support of ten million people. A 1955 survey by the Japanese government found that nearly two-thirds of respondents disapproved of the Tokyo Trials. On the 7th of April 1957, the Japanese government granted clemency to all those convicted. In 1978, the kami of 1,068 convicted war criminals, including 14 Class A criminals among them Hideki Tojo, Kenji Doihara, and Iwane Matsui, were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine. That decision transformed the shrine into a diplomatic flashpoint between Japan, China, and South Korea. A survey of 3,000 Japanese people conducted by Asahi News as the 60th anniversary of the trial's opening approached in 2006 found that 70% were unaware of the trial's details, a figure that rose to 90% among those aged 20-29. International war crimes courts would not meet again until the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994, a gap of nearly half a century.