Summary: A gripping account of the flawed and politically compromised attempt to bring Japan’s wartime leaders to justice.

The title of Gary Bass’s book echoes that of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg. Like the film, the book intercuts biographies of key participants—including the judges and defendants—with appalling accounts of the Japanese atrocities under consideration. These include the stories of an Australian serviceman who survived an attempted beheading and a nurse who survived gang rape and the murder of her friends and colleagues.

But, as Bass explores, the Tokyo trial was in several respects more legally and morally problematic than its Nuremberg counterpart. Opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948, it indicted 28 Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twenty-five ultimately received judgments.

For a start, the judges were deeply divided over the legal foundations of the tribunal, particularly its authority to punish individuals for waging aggressive war. The majority secured convictions, but never produced an entirely convincing answer to the charge that they were applying criminal law retrospectively.

Second, General Douglas MacArthur, the effective American ruler of occupied Japan, considered it politically expedient to exclude Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. MacArthur’s officials also sought to prevent evidence implicating the Emperor from entering the proceedings. Whatever conclusion a properly constituted court might have reached about Hirohito’s individual guilt, his exclusion prevented the tribunal from fully examining the responsibility of the person at the apex of Japan’s wartime state.

Third, Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731, responsible for biological warfare and forced human experimentation, received immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. The demands of American military science were thus placed above either justice for their victims or the tribunal’s professed commitment to individual accountability.

Fourth, the United States had itself carried out attacks involving the mass killing of Japanese civilians – not only the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the incendiary destruction of Tokyo and other cities. Whether or not these attacks were legally equivalent to the crimes prosecuted at Tokyo, their omission exposed the tribunal to the powerful charge that it represented the justice of the victors rather than the impartial application of universal law.

In his discussion of the Second World War in the Pacific, Max Hastings describes “technological determinism” as one factor behind the use of the atomic bomb: once an enormously expensive and powerful weapon existed, the impulse to use it became extremely difficult to resist. Hastings argues that Japan’s eventual defeat was already assured by the naval blockade, the destruction of its industries and cities, and impending Soviet intervention, although he also emphasises the ferocity of continuing Japanese resistance and the pressures facing Truman.

Robert McNamara, who served in the statistical machinery supporting the American bombing campaign, later recalled Curtis LeMay’s observation that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed, adding that both LeMay and he had been “behaving as war criminals.” His question – what makes an act immoral if one loses but not if one wins? – goes to the heart of the moral difficulty Bass describes.

Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that the Tokyo judgments proved considerably more controversial than those at Nuremberg. The most famous dissent came from the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who called for the acquittal of all the defendants. His opinion appalled Jawaharlal Nehru but was enthusiastically appropriated by Japanese nationalists, who treated it as vindication of Japan’s war while often ignoring Pal’s own recognition of the atrocities committed by Japanese forces.

Pal’s dissent nevertheless exposed genuine defects in the proceedings: retrospective law, selective prosecution, colonial hypocrisy and the refusal to subject Allied conduct to the same moral principles imposed upon the defeated. Yet those defects did not make Japanese aggression or atrocities imaginary, nor did the Allies’ hypocrisy absolve those responsible for them. That tension – between the necessity of judgment and the partiality of those presuming to judge – is the intellectual centre of Bass’s book.

As in his account of Bangladesh’s war of independence, The Blood Telegram, Bass takes a complex event of major global importance that has become largely neglected in the West and turns it into an enthralling narrative. He explores not only the legal intricacies and geopolitical hypocrisies involved, but also gives voice to their appalling human cost.