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Book Review
| Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War Two, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. Pp. 335. $33.95 (ISBN 978-0-674-02870-8).
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| The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials have attracted surprisingly few systematic historians. The extant scholarship (more abundantly on Nuremberg) is the product largely of historical jurisprudents working from published source materials. As a result, the historiography is not only thinly developed, but suffers from a confusion of purposes. The historian of the war crimes trials wants to know what happened, and why it did. The jurisprudent wants to know whether "justice" was done, and why it was (or was not). These are properly understood as disparate lines of inquiry, informed by disparate questions and methodologies. |
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Yuma Totani's first book, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II, is a welcome, if not deeply argued, addition to an under-realized historical literature. A Japanese historian trained in the United States, Totani is admirably positioned to delve into the English and Japanese source materials generated by the multiple parties who prosecuted, adjudicated, or were accused before the Tokyo-based International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) from 1946 to 1948. The nine far-ranging chapters of the book include studies on the impact of the Nuremberg precedents on the Tokyo prosecutions, the highly politicized process by which twenty-eight Japanese civilian and military personnel (but conspicuously not the Emperor Hirohito) were selected for indictment and trial, and on the development of the criminal offences of "aggressive war" and "command responsibility." Totani's book also examines prosecutions arising from the infamous "Rape of Nanking" and the construction, with forced labor, of the Burma-Siam "death railway." This is followed by a study of how the separate national prosecutorial teams set about to document and prove cases before the IMTFE, and the diverse legal and political imperatives which shaped these actions. The book then considers the critical assessment of the trials by postwar Japanese intellectuals. "As the Allied occupation [of Japan] ended in 1952," Totani contends, "those who had been sympathetic to the defendants at the Tokyo trial began to spread the view that the victor nations had wrongfully punished the Japanese leaders for crimes they had never committed" (218). In the book's final chapter, Totani considers how Japanese conservatives and nationalists seized on a dissenting opinion written by the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, to discredit the work of the IMTFE. |
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As the introduction explains, the book's nine chapters are based mainly on the published record, supplemented by limited excavations of archives in Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. To be sure, historians of the IMTFE face formidable challenges. The relevant source material—eleven countries participated in the Tokyo prosecutions—is vast, multilingual, and widely dispersed. Some records (those held by the Imperial Household in Japan, for instance) either have only recently been opened or remain under embargo. While the Tokyo trials—and the more than two thousand additional non-IMTFE prosecutions in the postwar Pacific region—await a more comprehensive, even multivolume treatment, Totani's book provides a good start to a number of lines of inquiry. There is original and interesting material to be found in every chapter. |
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But this brings us to a major drawback. While the chapters abound in interesting empirical detail, they are not unified by a controlling historical thesis. The problem here is twofold. First, the analytical content of chapters is neither carefully framed nor forcefully argued. Second, Totani's analysis seldom pertains to the historical dimensions of the Tokyo trials. We learn too little about the competing notions of "justice" held and advanced by the actual participants. Instead, the book is preoccupied with a contemporary story line. It seeks to vindicate the quality of justice dispensed by the IMTFE from (what are viewed as) the misinformed and distorted criticisms both of Japanese "right wing nationalists and conservatives" (129) and left-leaning detractors of imperialism in Asia. The Tokyo trials might have been selective and one-sided, Totani contends, but the trials also had too many commendable features and, especially, commendable effects, to be casually dismissed as "victor's justice." To its great credit, so it is urged, the IMTFE "has become an integral part of the historical development of the international justice system" (4). Maybe it has. But here we encounter a confusion of purposes. The claim that the IMTFE contributed importantly to international criminal jurisprudence might be as right as rain, but it is not a historical claim, one that purports to explain how and why the trials and punishments unfolded as they did in 1946–1948. For that book, a fully realized historical treatment of the IMTFE, we continue to wait. |
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| Rande Kostal
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| University of Western Ontario |
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