First in the area of food, second in the region of life style, especially in male-female relationships, and lastly in the region of the sense of justice, the shift to the new values set by the United States was felt to be a necessity which had to be accepted. But the idea that the new values were the only universally acceptable ones, as the Occupation seemed to assert, was something the Japanese would not readily accept, although they did not openly criticize them.
The ordinary Japanese view of the conquerors was quite different from the conquerors’ view of themselves. All the major cities, except Kyoto, had been practically burned down. In Tokyo, the horizon, hidden for many years, could be seen in all directions. Many were living in air-raid shelters; others used drainage pipes to
1 Marunouchi, October 1949 (photo Kimura Ihei)
store their kitchen utensils and even to sleep in.
During the last stage of the war, a novelist recruited for compulsory labour service commented that his way of carrying earth in a crude straw basket seemed like a return to the age of the gods as told in the legend. Our manner of living at the outset of the Occupation had much in common with the ancients.
Lancelot Hogben entitled his history of human communication From Cave Painting to Comic Strip (1949), which exactly describes the change in the mode of communication of the Japanese people from 1945 to 1960.6
2
Occupation: on the Sense of Justice
The Japanese view of the War Tribunal during the period of its existence differed from their view of it 30 years later. Without confusing these two historical dimensions, one prospective and the other retrospective, as they are called by the sociologist Robert Redfield in The Little Community, 7 shall try to assess the place of the War Tribunal in the mind of the Japanese people.
From the prospective viewpoint, the Japanese had no preconception of the War Crimes Trial. In the discussion over whether Japan should accept the Potsdam Declaration, cabinet ministers and military leaders were given a commentary by Shimoda Takez (1907–), then the chief of Section One in the Bureau of Treaty of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Written on 9 August, it stated that the term ‘war criminals’ would not refer to the men who had been responsible for causing the war by exerting their power and influence but to those who had violated international law by actions such as ill-treating prisoners of war.8 The Potsdam Declaration made provision for prosecuting only war criminals of this kind. Taking this memorandum at its face value as the testimony of an expert in foreign affairs, the war leaders of Japan did not consider the possibility of their being prosecuted by the international court in front of the Japanese people.
In a way, in the prospective view, the War Crimes Trial began with a misunderstanding. Among the Japanese people, only a small minority had dissented from the war, and only a still smaller minority of the dissenters had held a plan for the trial of war criminals. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, formally the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, was set up by General MacArthur in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration. It was a trial of 28 wartime leaders of Japan by eleven Allied nations: the U.S.A., China (Kuomintang), the Philippines, Britain, France, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the U.S.S.R., India and Holland. The court was opened on 3 May 1946, and closed on 12 November 1948. The death sentences pronounced were carried out on 23 December 1948.
Both prosecution and defence gathered voluminous documents. A total of 4,336 exhibits were admitted as evidence; 419 persons testified in court; 779 persons testified by letter. The transcripts of the court proceedings amounted to 48,412 mimeographed pages in 113 volumes.9
Not all of this could have reached the ears of the Japanese people at the time, when newspapers were printed on one sheet of paper, half the size of a modern news-sheet. Although radios were popular, in major cities they had been destroyed with the burning down of homes, and there was no television. Thus the Japanese people heard of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial mainly through gossip. Even so, it presented a mural of the Fifteen Years’ War with some highlights. The massacre of Nanking in 1937 and other atrocities committed by the Japanese, well-known to the soldiers who had carried them out, were for the first time revealed to the people at large. They were informed, also, that Joseph B.Keenan (1888–1954), the chief prosecutor and an American, accused the former leaders of Japan in the name of civilization. They were informed that seven of the leaders were hanged and that the Emperor was not called to the court. It was these four things which remained in the memory of the Japanese people.
According to Keenan, in Crimes against International Law, written with B.F.Brown, the main purpose of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was to defend peace and international law, and the punishment of the accused was only a subsidiary purpose.10 In pursuit of this main purpose, it tried to establish a new category of war crime, which would include the conspiring and carrying out of the invasion of other countries. This was a revolutionary concept, which entailed retroactive law—that is, the labelling as ‘criminal’ acts which were not criminal when committed. The trial itself had therefore a certain illegality, which it had to disregard.
Many questions arise at this point. In the first place, even granting the need for legal sanctions against invasion, can we expect a trial carried out by representatives of the conquerors to be fair? According to the natural tendency of social psychology, such a trial would probably serve as an outlet for the long pent-up hostility of the war, a modern legal cover for a primitive form of retaliation. This was the general feeling of the Japanese people at the time of the Tokyo Trial, who accepted the justice imposed by the conquerors as a physical necessity.
2 The accused sit in the dock at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 3 May 1946
In the second place, if the main purpose of the War Crimes Trial was the defence of international law and peace, the sentences given to the accused should have been only a subsidiary product of the trial. But was this distinction between the main objective and subsidiary objective preserved throughout the trial? Did not the subsidiary objective replace the main objective in the end? The idea of the defence of international law and peace did not make a strong impression on the contemporary Japanese public. What impressed them were the sentences, especially the death sentences pronounced upon the seven war leaders. The Japanese felt that these seven had died as scapegoats; some thought that they had died for the Emperor, some thought for the great many respon sible for the war, and some thought for the Japanese people as a whole. As the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was coupled with B class and C class War Crimes Trials conducted in other parts of Japan and outside Japan, the Japanese had the definite impression that the accused were chosen and sentenced to death at random.
The absence of the Emperor at the War Crimes Trial was a relief to most Japanese. At the same time, it was considered a denial of the very logic of the trial for war crimes. This ambiguity is the most important aspect of the Japanese reaction. It was universally understood throughout the war that all orders were given in the name of the Emperor. In the Imperial Instructions to the soldiers, the Emperor admonished: ‘Consider an order from your superior as an order from myself.’ This instruction was so consistently used in military training that it became a truism that an order given by an immediate superior was understood as an order from the Emperor and was therefore above criticism.
This was reflected in the proceedings of the military court. Orders were ascribed to superior officers, and the highest in command understood the orders to have come from further above, but the Emperor, the source of all orders, was not present at the military court and was above legal indictment. Indicted Japanese military leaders did not hold themselves responsible for the conduct of war. They seldom said that they themselves had decided on any action individually. This was not a subterfuge but a subjective truth, quite true to the practice of Japanese military officers during the wartime. In this, according to Maruyama Masao, the Japanese war leaders differed from those of Nazi Germany.11
For political reasons, the Emper
or was not called to the court. That gave the War Crimes Trial the character of an offering of scapegoats to the altar of the conquerors in the view of the Japanese people both at the time and today.
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial must be studied in the context of the war crimes trials conducted simultaneously elsewhere in Japan, in Soviet Russia, China, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Malaya, North Borneo, Hong Kong, Australia, French Indo-China, the Philippines and Guam. The documents were carried away to the respective countries after the Occupation. Of the trial records 30 per cent remain with the Correction Bureau of the Department of Justice. They contain many instances of unfair trials: for example, Captain Tarumoto Shigeharu, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and later returned to Japan, testifies to the case of Petty Officer Kaneko. Kaneko was told in court by the presiding judge that he had no involvement whatever with the crime of which he was accused but because he had been involved in another case he was to be condemned to death by hanging. The other case, for which he was hanged, was not in his letter of indietment.12 The many trials conducted in various parts of the Pacific needed a large number of interpreters to deal with the Japanese, and as even today few outside Japan are adept in the Japanese language, we may infer the poor quality of interpreting that the accused must have endured. No wonder so many were indicted and executed for reasons unknown to them.
Another instance is cited by the same Captain Tarumoto. In a courtroom in Singapore, the prosecutor asked the witness, ‘Who is the man who ill-treated you?’ The man pointed to a man sitting on the third seat in the row. Then the prosecutor asked, ‘How do you recognize him?’ The witness answered, ‘Because he is wearing the number three label.’ The answer reveals the collaboration before the trial, in which the prosecution had told the witness to point to the man wearing label number three, a number which he wore only for the purposes of the court. It is well known that there was much ill-treatment of prisoners in Singapore, and that there was even a mass slaughter by the Japanese soldiers. But whether these criminal acts were traced by the War Crimes Trials to the real perpetrators is a matter of doubt.
The total number of Japanese arrested as war criminals at the end of World War II was 10,000; 4,253 were found guilty; 1,068 sentenced to death; 422 were sentenced to life imprisonment; and 2,763 were imprisoned for a limited time. Many of the 1,068 executed wrote final testaments. Although some must have been lost before they reached relatives in Japan, 701 have been collected and published in a volume entitled Last Testaments of the Century.13 Tsurumi Kazuko, who made a cumulative classification allowing overlapping categories, found that 62 out of the 701 letters contained anti-trial sentiment. Of these 62, 13 specifically protested that the charges against them were false.14 The dominant tone of these last letters may be classified as follows:
3 War Crimes Trial in a Singapore court-room, August 1946
See Table
The sociologist Sakuta Keiichi classified the same 701 letters according to the attitudes expressed toward death, and found four types which are, in order of predominance:
4 War Crimes Trial in Rangoon City Hall, 22 March, 1946
1. death as a sacrifice,
2. death as the achievement of solidarity with the dead,
3. death as atonement for sin,
4. death as natural death.
Those who saw death as a sacrifice viewed their executions as an incident in the war. The idea of death as the achievement of solidarity with the dead is based upon the ancestor worship that lives on in Japan as the basis of Japanese religious consciousness.15
In sum, the War Crimes Trials, even in the most unfair cases, have seldom met with tenacious resentment from the Japanese people, even from the victims themselves. This seems to reveal an aspect of the Japanese tradition and mentality. The trials were accepted like some unavoidable physical calamity. This does not mean, however, that the criterion of justice asserted in the trials was fully accepted.
The immediate reaction to the news of the hanging of the seven wartime leaders tried in the Tokyo Tribunal included the following comment recorded in the Yomiuri newspapers on 13 November 1948, by Kimura Gor, a 48-year-old physician:
I hope that trials like this will not be repeated anywhere in the world. For that, however, the equal treatment of races, freedom of trade, and freedom of migration must be established. Without these three principles, a war of invasion will begin again.16
This comment stands alone in the Japanese newspapers and magazines of the time, which were monopolized by leftist and progressive opinion leaders who deemed the hanging as a just punishment. A poem by Tsuboi Shigeharu entitled ‘Seven Heads’ is more representative of the opinions expressed in publications during the Occupation.17
In the process of the Tokyo Tribunal, the Indian member, Radharinod B.Pal (1886–1967), wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, in which he questioned the legitimacy of a tribunal conducted by the victorious power alone. He asserted that the charter of the tribunal did not adequately define war crimes and that the tribunal could try the accused only on charges of war crimes in the strictest sense, such as the mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilians, not on charges of endangering peace and promoting aggression. According to Pal, the prosecution had failed to produce convincing evidence that a conspiracy existed among the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians to achieve world domination. Pal’s conclusion was that all the accused be acquitted. He strongly condemned President Truman of the U.S.A. for his decision to use the atomic bombs against Japan, comparing this action to Hitler’s policy of genocide. Pal’s dissenting opinion at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was translated into Japanese and published as an independent book.18
Among the judges of the Tokyo Trial, Pal alone represented the view of the Third World on the Pacific War of 1941–1945, free of the influence of the Western imperialist countries. The Japanese were living in Third World conditions and would have welcomed Pal’s dissenting opinion, had they been able to formulate the problem at the time. But the Japanese political leaders and opinion leaders took sides with either the U.S.A. or Soviet Russia, and their views, as reflected in newspapers and magazines published during the Occupation, did not show a marked appreciation of Pal’s dissent in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial.
In 1952, the Occupation was over. In response to the Korean War, the U.S.A. began to support the return of wartime leaders to the arena of politics, economy and defence. As a result of the Korean War, the Japanese economy was able to achieve a recovery undreamt of at the time of the surrender. Japan pulled itself out of the conditions of the Third World, although leaving behind Okinawa which remains today a vital link between the Japanese and the Third World, with the most important portion of the island still under occupation in the form of U.S. military bases.
Looking back over the War Crimes Trials from the age of plenty —that is, from 1960 to the present—we may say that the constitution originally chartered by the Occupation has taken root in Japan during the three decades since the end of the Occupation, in spite of pressure from the U.S.A. to dissolve the pledge which ceded the right to wage war. No poll in the past 30 years has shown a predominant wish on the part of the Japanese people to erase this article from the constitution.19
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, on the other hand, has dwindled into a mere interlude of the Occupation period, between surrender and independence. Its irony has been highlighted by the Vietnam War, which the Japanese viewed as the trial of those who sat in judgment on Japan’s Fifteen Years’ War in Asia, themselves now trapped by their own ten-year war in Asia. U.S. Ambassadors and other official representatives sent to Japan since the Occupation have made it a custom never to refer to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial in their speeches and public statements. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial has come to be seen as a sort of moral debt to Japan by the U.S. government, which since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 has consistently supported a more dominant role for the wartime leaders of Japan in Japanese and Asian politics.
The moveme
nt to not not only acquit all of the wartime leaders but even to praise what they did produced a book entitled In support of the Greater East Asian War, by Hayashi Fusao (1903– 1975) in 1964. This book, written by a former influential member of the Association of Tokyo University New Men, asserted that Japan had helped to liberate nations in Asia from the yoke of Western Imperialism. It received wide acclaim in the Japan of the sixties which was regaining confidence amid spectacular economic growth.20
In terms of historical causation, Japan’s war was one of many factors which brought about independence for the colonial nations in Asia. That does not give us reason to say that Japan worked for the liberation of these colonial nations, for, in the light of Japan’s wartime policies and administration in these countries, it is clear that Japan tried to dominate these countries and rule as an imperialist power. It was Japan’s defeat by as well as its earlier victory over the Western powers that brought about better opportunities for independence.
A Cultural History of Postwar Japan Page 3
