Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited | International Humanitarian Law Series

Published in 2011 and edited by Yuki Tanaka, Time McCormack and Gerry Simpson, Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited brought together 22 essays in eight parts of a book with a foreword by Sir Gerard Brennan, the tenth Chief of Justice of Australia.

Part One	A Retrospective
1	The Tokyo Trial: Humanity’s Justice v Victors’ Justice
2	Writing the Tokyo Trial
3	Japanese Societal Attitude towards the Tokyo Trial: From a Contemporary Perspective
Part Two	The Accused
4	Selecting Defendants at the Tokyo Trial
5	The Decision Not to Prosecute the Emperor
Part Three	The Judges
6	Justice Northcroft (New Zealand)
7	Justice Bernard (France)
8	Justice Patrick (United Kingdom)
9	Justice Röling (The Netherlands)
10	Justice Pal (India)
Part Four	The Trial Proceedings
11	The Case Against the Accused
12	Command Responsibility for the Failure to Stop Atrocities: The Legacy of the Tokyo Trial
Part Five	Forgotten Crimes: China and Korea
13	Reasons for the Failure to Prosecute Unit 731 and its Significance
14	The Legacy of the Tokyo Trial in China
15	Forgotten Victims, Forgotten Defendants
Part Six	Forgotten Crimes: The Comfort Women
16	Knowledge and Responsibility: The Ongoing Consequences of Failing to Give Sufficient Attention to the Crimes against the Comfort Women in the Tokyo Trial
17	Silence as Collective Memory: Sexual Violence and the Tokyo Trial
18	Women’s Bodies and International Criminal Law: From Tokyo to Rabaul
Part Seven	Forgotten Crimes: Atomic Bombs, Saturation Bombing and the Illicit Drug Trade
19	The Atomic Bombing, the Tokyo Tribunal and the Shimoda Case: Lessons for Anti-Nuclear Legal Movements
20	The Firebombing of Tokyo and Other Japanese Cities
21	Punishing Japan’s “Opium War-Making” in China: The Relationship between Transnational Crime and Aggression at the Tokyo Tribunal
Part Eight	Tokyo Today
22	Tokyo’s Continuing Relevance

 The collection of 22 essays were based on “papers presented at … the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law conference” in November 2008 on the 60^th anniversary of the delivery of the Judgement in the Tokyo Trial.  Perhaps it was the passage of time, I felt that the writers differed from Richard Minear in his book “Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial” in that there was much less angst in the writing and they were not as critical of the Tokyo Tribunal as was Minear.

The material collated in this book is not comprehensive, I’m sure, as each essay could easily be the topic of shelves of books.  However, for a primary understanding of the Tokyo Tribunal , the Justices on the Trial and the omission of crimes from the Tribunal, this book made a very decent effort, and is a good starting point for further reading.

Of particular interest to me is essay no. 13 “Reasons for the Failure to Prosecute Unit 731 and its Significance”.  Atrocities committed in the name of medical research appear to be a painful topic in history classes, so much so that while Auschwitz, Birkinau and Dachau were well introduced in history classes, Josef Mengele was, for me, a “surprise find” when I picked up the “I was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant” by Miklos Nyiszli at the Auschwitz bookshop.  Unit 731, was of course, totally alien to me prior to Minear’s book.

Written by Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi, who does research at Kanagawa University on Japan’s chemical and bacteriological warfare, essay no. 13 gave an overview of Unit 731, listing four other units set up by Lt Gen Ishii Shiro.  Three of the units were located in China (Unit 1855 in Beijing, Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 8604 in Kwantung).  Surprisingly, there was a Unit 9420 set up on 26 March 1942 in Singapore.

It appears that Unit 731 was not successful in the deployment of bacteriological weapons in China.  What was chilling were the human experimentation and vivisections carried out on the Chinese population around Pingfang in Harbin.  Surprisingly, the Americans, who investigated the Ishii Organisation, decided against prosecuting them. 

It is not clear in Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi’s essay why Unit 731 was not prosecuted.  The extent of human experimentations is still a mystery to me.  I will have to hunt down some books specific to this topic to find out more.  Seventy years after World War Two ended, it is a mystery to me, why the aggressors (Germany and Japan), had among their populations, medical doctors with strange fascination with the human bodies and did not seem repulsed with the pseudo-scientific experiments they conducted on humans.