War Crimes Trials in Occupied Japan: Their Meaning and Legacies

Part I of this paper examines the American military commissions that punished approximately 5,700 Japanese soldiers and civilians accused of war crimes in so called “lesser” (BC) trials held before, during, and after the Tokyo Trial (IMT-FE) that followed World War II. The latter, based on Nuremberg precedents, established the U.S. position on the validity of the laws of war and Japan’s responsibility for aggression. But where the Tokyo Trial punished only a small number of top Japanese civil and military officials for waging aggressive war and sanctioning war crimes, the BC trials, presided over by American military officers, raised the issue of command responsibility, examined the treatment of downed U.S. airmen, and of POWs more generally. Other Allied nations who had been main belligerents, such as Britain, The Netherlands, and France, also conducted national trials as extensions of their governments’ policies toward Asian peoples, whom they intended to continue holding in colonial subjugation. China and the Soviet Union did likewise.
Part II compares U.S. and Japanese war crimes in different phases of their respective imperialisms, focusing on the outrages against human dignity perpetrated by U.S. forces, and by military and CIA interrogators, mainly against the populations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Aiming to differentiate current U.S. practices from Japan’s behavior toward Chinese prisoners in the 1930s and toward Asian captives, interned civilians, and Allied POWs swept up in Japan’s six-month drive through colonial Southeast Asia and the Pacific subsequent to Pearl Harbor, it asks: How do America’s acts of brutality toward helpless prisoners compare with Japan’s treatment of prisoners? If there are differences in how the two countries waged war, where do they lie? And why do well-established legal benchmarks for the punishment of war criminals tend to be systematically ignored whenever the U.S. uses force against other countries?