Gary Bass’s new book takes the reader through a detailed account of the “Tokyo Trials”; court sessions held by the International Military Tribunal and the lesser known sibling of the Nuremberg Trials. The book illuminates complex personalities, conflicting national interests, and the trial’s modern legacy in Asia.

Hilary Mantel’s insight that history is what people try to bury has until recently been borne out by the scarcity of historical accounts of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo trial”), in which eleven Allied countries including Australia (Chief Justice of Queensland, Sir William Webb was President of the Court) sat in judgment on Japan’s wartime leaders in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, condemning seven to death. The Tokyo trial was shrouded by its creators because it was considered the poor relation of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Poor in design in that it was far too ambitious in scope, its conduct was tainted by stormy relations between members of the bench and prosecution, and revulsion by both for a defence who resorted to trying to take the judgement on review to the US Supreme Court.

Perhaps most telling though were the poor outcomes—the majority judgement overreached itself in its findings of a broad Japanese conspiracy to impose imperial rule in East Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile the dissent of the Indian Justice Radhabinod Pal destroyed consensus on the strength of the legal precedents for the principal charge of conspiring to commit a crime against peace and more broadly of the role of international criminal law in global affairs. All grist to the mill that the trial was simply victor’s justice.

Gary Bass’s new book, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, is a welcome addition to attempts to avoid this scholarly blindfold and make historical sense of the trial. Bass unfolds the tale of the Tokyo trial chronologically in a highly engaging and accessible fashion. He traces the origins of the trial back to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s preference for legalism rather than vengeance, which found an unlikely ally in President Harry Truman. Bass pays particular attention to Japanese deliberations about surrender. He reveals how US acceptance of the maintenance of the Emperor Hirohito, if the Japanese chose to keep him which they did, led inevitably to Hirohito not being prosecuted at Tokyo. This, together with other selective failures like the decision not to prosecute the leaders of Japan’s biowarfare program, help to explain how and why the legal response at Tokyo itself was so chaotic, as politics intruded directly into the conduct of the trial.

Bass makes good use of archival resources and interviews, and the level of detail is particularly impressive. The fact the Japanese burned a large number of official documents prior to occupation is well known, but not perhaps that the emperor’s top aid, Marquis Kido Kōichi, tore all his important documents up and threw them in the toilet at 4am on 15 August 1945. Key players are introduced through biographical portraits. Bass reveals, for example, the lack of evidence to support the view that Justice Pal was an anti-colonial activist. The book is particularly strong on the Chinese contribution to the trial. Bass’s sympathetic portrait of the Chinese Judge Mei Ju-ao captures the theatrical dimension of this kind of trial by recording how Mei privately thought of himself as playing a role in an historical production.

In his examination of the trial itself, Bass makes good use of the often neglected trial record, dipping into its more than 48,000 pages to quote from testimony such as the Last Emperor’s parroting of the prosecution’s view that the Japanese had imperial designs on Manchuria, then East Asia, then the “whole world.” The trial record is also used to show how relations between the US and Japan slowly slipped, one step at a time, towards war—a salutary warning today.

The book is particularly good at capturing the emotional register of the time, something lost in purely academic texts. One of its major structural devices is to contrast the Tokyo Trial’s grand designs with the personal stories of those caught up in it, and in the events it examined, as well as modern reactions. It comes as no surprise that the unpacking of the trial itself in Part II is called “Catharsis.” These personal views remind the reader of the horrors, some notorious like the massacres in Nanjing (which gets a whole chapter of its own) and Manila, many others are largely unknown.

When he draws the story to a close, Bass emphasises how the Tokyo Trial failed to generate a shared conception of what happened in East Asia and the Pacific before and during the war. He styles the trial as a site of conflict between imperial orders—those of the US, Russia, Europe, Japan, and China—in which it was not always clear who was on whose side. One of the themes he pursues is how racist this war, fought between opposing empires in China, South-East Asia, and the Pacific, had been and how this racism carried through into the trial itself, explicit in the judgment of Justice Pal on colonialism, but implicit in the Chinese judge’s view that the judges of the British bloc were “imperialist white supremacists.” As US enthusiasm (the US public would have preferred revenge) for the trial wanes and the Cold War burgeons, Bass records that State Department policy guru George Kennan visited the Tokyo Tribunal trial and, while he accepted that they were procedurally fair, he condemned the trials as “political” and damaging to the Allied cause in Japan. Bass, who has written elsewhere of the political functions of international criminal law, grasps the inherent hypocrisy in many facets of the trial including the fact that many of the Allies were themselves guilty of aggression (the USSR) and massive atrocities (US firebombing of Japanese cities). He is also alive to the manipulation of the trial’s legacy, with extensive accounts on its role in Japanese ultranationalist and Chinese communist politics, which he contrasts with the lack of awareness in the West.

Nonetheless, Gary Bass’s new book paints a detailed picture of the trial “in the round” and does not retreat from the Tokyo Trial’s basic ideals of universalism. It provides an engaging way into a massive subject, without ignoring its complexity. If it has a weakness, it is its tendency to demonise the USSR and its contributions to the trial (the Russian Judge Ivan M Zarayanov is said to have “chuntered that aggression was ‘an inseparable part of the overall conspiracy of the Japanese imperialistic clique against peace-loving peoples’”). There is nothing published that quite captures the full complexity of the events and around the trial. Bass eschews making a simple judgment on the trial; he illustrates, in great depth, that the Tokyo Trial is too complex for simple judgments.

This is a review of Gary Bass’s Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Pan Macmillan, 2024). ISBN: 9781509812752.

Neil Boister is a professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.