Dr Ann Waswo

As in Germany, so too in Japan were war crimes trials held in the aftermath of World War II. This represented a quantum shift in the management of war endings, as Tim Garton Ash reminded us last week. Before 1945 the emphasis was on forgetting and leaving it to the defeated military force to apportion such local punishments as it deemed necessary. At and after 1945 the emphasis was on remembering, on the basis of a formal accounting by the victors, with a view to achieving justice in the present and preventing war in future. There would be imperfections aplenty in that quest for justice, but given the unprecedented scale of modern warfare and the widespread atrocities that had occurred during World War II, it is not difficult to appreciate the impulse. Clearly, something had to be done.

There were two levels to the quest for justice in the Japanese case: extensive (and sometimes patently vengeful) military tribunals held in various Asian theatres of war for those accused of class B and C war crimes and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East [IMTFE] against class A war criminals held in Tokyo. The field trials merit greater attention than they have been given to date, but here I will focus on the IMTFE, the Tokyo Trial, and its legacies.

Only one round of the several that had been planned actually took place, with 28 political and military leaders of 'wartime Japan' originally in the dock and charged individually with crimes against the peace, conventional war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. The trial went on for 31 months, and all of the defendants who survived to the end were found guilty on at least one count. Seven of them were sentenced to death, sixteen to life imprisonment, one to 20 years and one to 7 years imprisonment. The remaining class A suspects who had been arrested after Japan's surrender, some 50 or so bureaucrats and industrialists, were then released from imprisonment without trial. The IMTFE was over.

Three important observations can be made about it. First, that the Japanese emperor was excluded from its purview, owing to his presumed powerlessness under the Meiji Constitution and his utility in achieving other aims of the Allied Occupation. Second, that such activities as the chemical and biological weapons experiments carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria and the ianfu (comfort women) practices of the Japanese military throughout Asia were also excluded, the former because the U.S. military was interested in learning the results of those experiments and the latter because no one, Allied or Asian, thought the matter merited attention as a war crime at the time. Third, that the prosecution focused from start to finish on a Japanese conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Apparently, some thought had been given by the prosecution to dating that conspiracy from the 1870s onward, but in the end its starting point was identified as 1928. The conspiracy was portrayed as on-going thereafter, and by definition anyone who participated in high-level decision making up to 1941 was deemed to be a party to it.

A master narrative of the origins of the war and war responsibility that reflected wartime views of the Japanese enemy was thus validated by painstaking judicial process. Respectable historians both Western and Japanese have challenged that narrative in important ways since the late 1950s, doing so not to exculpate Japan but to understand the war in all its complexities. Their research has shown, among other things, how deep the divisions were within the policy-making establishment in Japan throughout the 1930s and on into the early 1940s, putting paid to the notion of a concerted 'conspiracy' to wage war, and has raised not a few questions about the thrust and tone of American policy toward Japan at the time, not to mention reminding those willing to listen that Western as well as Japanese imperialism had de-stabilized much of Asia during the early 20th century. But the master narrative of the 'Tokyo Trial' still prevails in Western - and Asian - public memory.

Beginning in the 1980s or thereabouts, various accusations began to surface that Japan was guilty of a new offense: forgetting its clear-cut guilt, or in Tim's formulation, veering toward amnesia. How is one to account for these accusations at that time? In Britain and elsewhere in the West, chagrin at Japan's economic superpower status was certainly a factor. Had Japan remained a fairly poor country, as befits a nation defeated in an unjust war, I rather doubt that British POW claims for compensation would have materialized, or if they had, they might well have been directed to the appropriate target, the British government, from the outset. New agendas and new autonomies within Asia also played a part, breaking the enforced silences of colonial and Cold War pasts. Last but not least, Japan was very clearly distancing itself from the war by that time, its establishment having decided - prematurely, it would seem - that all dues had been paid and that the war was 'history'.

It is not true that Japan never accepted the verdict of the Tokyo Trial and never apologized for the war, as some have claimed. One has only to examine the statements of its leaders in the early postwar decades, especially those directed to China and other Asia countries, or read the school textbooks in use during the 1950s and early 1960s to appreciate that. Japan's 'low posture' in international affairs at the time was also a humble posture, reflecting contrition as well as the 'crafty' pursuit of economic advantage. That said, it cannot be denied that public memory of the war in Japan increasingly focused on how the war ended, rather than on how it started. Attention to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was something on which Japanese progressives and conservatives could agree, and the war's ending had assumed centre stage domestically by the 1970s. The emphasis was now on Japan as the victim of unprecedented horror, rather than as the aggressor.

Subsequent attempts in state-authorized textbooks to normalize Japanese imperialism from the late 19th century onward, contextualizing it as a response to Western imperialism and using much the same language as employed in Western studies of imperialism in East Asia, merely added insult to injury so far as other Asians were concerned. The longevity of Emperor Hirohito served to further dampen discourse about the war and the war responsibility issue within Japan, and only since his death in 1989 has fairly unrestrained discussion been possible. To date, only the most extreme (and historically unjustified) views of the revisionist right have received much media attention outside of Japan, but the currents of reflection and debate run deeper than that and merit both attention and encouragement.

In sum, Japan, the rest of Asia and the West are still far from the ideal state of 'meso-nesia' that might have been expected by now, almost 60 years after Japan's surrender in 1945. Further grappling with the issues on all sides, not merely on Japan's part alone, will be required to achieve that outcome.