The Tokyo War Crimes Trial | Richard Minear | Princeton University Press

Having read [図説｜東京裁判], I was naturally curious about what the western world’s perception of the Far East International Military Tribunal, otherwise also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was.  Browsing in the library, I came across a red hardcover book catalogued four years after the book was published: Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice – The Tokyo War Crimes Trial published by Princeton University Press in 1971.

The book is divided into six chapters:

I.                    Introduction

II.                  The Tokyo Trial

III.                Problems of International Law

IV.                Problems of Legal Process

V.                  Problems of History

VI.                After the Trial

 

Minear dedicated his book “to the many Americans whose opposition to the war in Indochina has made them exiles, criminals, or aliens in their own land.”  This dedication, reading it 42 years after publication, made no sense to me.  Wasn’t the book about the Tokyo Trials?  Why had the author dedicated the book to Americans who were anti-“the war in Indochina”?  Had the publisher misprinted something?  What was this “war in Indochina” about?

 Not being in existence yet, and not taught about any Indochina War in history classes, I googled and surmised that Minear had written this book during the Vietnam War, otherwise known as the Second Indochina War between the late 1950s and 1975.  Apparently from the dedication, Minear seemed to be against American involvement in the Vietnam War.  Having done a little googling after being side-tracked by Minear’s dedication, I wondered, would Minear’s stand on the Vietnam War colour his perspective about the Tokyo War Trials?  The people from North Asia and Southeast Asia must have believed that theTokyo War Trials stood for justice, why else would they be so furious with the Japanese Prime Minister who bowed before the ashes of the Class A criminals enshrined in Yasukuni Jinja every February?

 Prefacing his book, Minear aimed “to demolish the credibility of the Tokyo trial and its verdict.”  He claimed not to “hold a brief for Tojo” but to “hold a brief for justice, even to my (sic) enemies”.  He further believed that “Tojo was legally innocent”.  I thought the book would make for a provocative read.

Despite being a history professor, Minear attempted to take on the Tokyo War Trials, which were essentially legal proceedings to try the masterminds of the Pacific War, with the Nuremburg Trials as a precedent.  This is a strange combination for me.  For a historian, the Tokyo War Trials was a relatively new event, especially at the time of Minear’s writing.  Furthermore, I couldn’t be sure if Mineaer was legally trained to comprehend the intricacies of International Law, by which the Tokyo War Trials were conducted  I took a semester of Law, and the lecturers only covered legislation, Tort and Contract Law, so the Law by which both the Nuremburg Trials and the Tokyo War Trials were conducted were baffling to me.

Minear questioned the “integrity of the tribunal and ….compelling evidence that the trial was a biased proceeding.”  He listed evidence of what he considered biasness on the part of the Allied Justice.  He refuted the assertions that the so-called Class A criminals were legally guilty, challenging the basis of the Tokyo Trials in international law.

I do not have much background knowledge about the Tokyo Trials, [図説｜東京裁判] having been my first contact with the subject matter.  Neither do I know what exactly international law constitutes.  In addition, Minear’s perception, so strongly weaved into the book, made it difficult for me to sieve out fact from Minear’s own stand on this topic.

But I did notice that for both the Nuremburg Trials and the Tokyo Trials, military trials were held by the victorious Allied forces to try the Nazis and members of Tojo and his predecessor’s Governments.  Judges and prosecutors were all from the Allied powers.  Curiously, countries which declared their neutrality during World War II, among them Sweden and Switzerland had no representatives either as Judges or prosecutors on neither the Nuremburg Trials nor Tokyo Trials.  It would not make it difficult to conclude, at a quick glance at the composition of the Judges (especially), of the biasness of the Trials.  It would not have been a difficult task for some people to interpret the Trials as Victor’s Justice.  This might be the basis of the controversy about the Trials that lingers till today in certain quarters.