Book R & R: Judgment at Tokyo

This Book Review and Recommendation is for "Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" by Gary J. Bass.

(Disclosure: I borrowed this book from my local library and there are no affiliate links on this page.)

Remember when Amazon wouldn’t let you just rate a book, you had to write a review? I used to hate it when occasionally (actually more times than I care to remember) someone would one-star a book and comment “This book was not about what I thought it was.” Totally not fair to the author or potential readers. Way uncool.

I picked up this book because I was looking for something else. Collectively, we know about war crimes committed by the Japanese during WWII. Conditions in POW camps, summary executions, killing of civilians, and similar war crimes are commonly depicted in documentaries, books, and movies. I wanted to know about the trials of front-line perpetrators. The people who did these things. Their capture, trials, and punishments. This book was not so much about that. Rather, “Judgment at Tokyo" is about the prosecution of those men at the top.

The book goes into great detail on the trial of twenty-eight of the most visible war criminals captured in Japan, including Hideki Tojo. They were to be tried by an International Military Tribunal, consisting of judges representing the Allied Powers that fought the war against Japan. The standard for charges was based on whether the defendants ordered the crimes or knew about crimes and did nothing to either stop them, or investigate charges by the Allies during the war.

What were some of the crimes? A few mentioned include the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, the Burma-Thailand Death Railway, and specifically the mistreatment of POWs which includes beheadings. During the war the Japanese took 132,134 prisoners, mostly from Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and the Holland. Of those, 35,756 died in captivity. That’s a mortality of 27 percent. Compare that to 4% for those POWs held by Germany and Italy. There is even a charge of cannibalism. Eight downed American Navy fliers picked up and taken to the island of Chichi Jima were murdered and ritualistically eaten by Japanese officers there. One Navy flier rescued before drifting to the island was nineteen-year-old future President George H.W. Bush. After the trial, seven of the defendants were sentenced to hang. Sixteen others received life in prison, the remaining had lesser sentences.

Author Gary Bass thoroughly covers the two-and-half-year trial, including background on the judges, the charges, and the events that have anything to do with the trial. As you can imagine, it is lengthy at just under seven hundred pages, excluding front and back matter. But the book is very readable and I found it interesting. My only criticism is that the author tends to view the past through the lens of today’s values. Particularly so when it comes to the dropping of the atomic bombs. So, the book didn't cover exactly what I was looking for, but overall, it was worth the time.

And the answer to my question is that it looks like most of the low-level offenders were captured and tried in the country where they committed the crime. Some where noteworthy, like the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita in the Philippines (Read “Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott for an excellent coverage of the Manila Massacre and Yamashita’s trial). Rough totals: an estimated 5,000 Japanese were tried for war crimes. Half the total charged received prison sentences. As many as 900 were put to death. (Ref: PBS American Experience website.)