Serious errors of fact marred Pal’s historical analysis of Japan’s actions—the second element of his dissent. He asserted, for example, that Chang Tso-lin had not been assassinated by the Japanese military, and that the “Hull note” was an American ultimatum. “Even the contemporary historians,” he wrote, “could think that ‘[a]s for the present war, the Principality of Monaco [and] the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg would have taken up arms against the United States on receipt of such a note as the State Department sent the Japanese Government on the eve of Pearl Harbor.’”68 Pal contravened the political purpose of the trial and one of the occupation’s main educational goals: namely, to make the Japanese people understand the criminality of war. Despite his professed intention, he ended up arguing the innocence of Japan and strongly endorsing the official Japanese view of wartime history.
Although CIE’s “war guilt program” prohibited the publication in full of the dissenting opinions in the Tokyo trial, Judge Webb noted in open court the dissents by nearly half the judges on the tribunal.69 The independence of the foreign judges and the existence of minority verdicts impressed the Japanese public and contributed to acceptance of the trial results.
VII
The Tokyo trial, despite its defective procedures and complex political nature, had a deep, many-sided impact on the Japanese people and their view of the lost war.70 Some right-wing opinion was highly critical, resentful, and angry, and never reflected on Japan’s aggression. Kishi Nobusuke, in his Sugamo Prison diary described the war crimes trial as a “farce” and devoted the rest of his political life to trying to undo its effects.71 Other rightists, feeling that Japan, stripped naked, had been shamed before the world, tried to ignore the trial, put it out of mind, block the transmission of any positive political and cultural lessons. Former conservative prime minister Ashida predicted that the trial would not cause great domestic repercussions.72
The Communists had been virtually the only ones vigorously to demand pursuit of war responsibility and harsh punishment for convicted criminals. But in academia, intellectuals of Marxist persuasion tended to dismiss the trial as a lost opportunity for deepening Japan’s democratization, and as historically insignificant. The charter for the tribunal had been revised to allow heads of state to escape responsibility, they noted, and the judicial process had been corrupted by MacArthur’s grants of total immunity to the emperor and the nation’s business and financial leaders. Some Marxist historians also pointed out, correctly, that the Tokyo tribunal had promoted an elitist view of history insofar as it made the course toward war “pivot on the conflict between extreme militarists and moderate political leaders.”73 Outside the universities, however, according to American State Department and military intelligence reports prepared in November 1948, the majority of Japanese took a “passive” attitude toward the Trial and the accused national leaders, but also felt they had received a fair trial under the circumstances.74 After the verdicts were handed down, popular reaction to the trial was expressed positively in continued efforts to reconstruct, improve, and make Japan a genuine “peace state.”
To this one may add: It is doubtful the defendants would have been treated as fairly if they had been judged in a Japanese court for defying the emperor’s “spirit of peace” as envisioned in an undated document—a draft emergency imperial decree that provided for trials and the death sentence—found in the Makino Nobuaki papers and believed to have been written during the Shidehara cabinet.75
More important, the Tokyo trial was never a straightforward adversarial proceeding, pitting victors against vanquished. The charge of “victors’ justice,” leveled most vehemently by Pal, was and remains extremely simplistic, and has impeded understanding of what really happened. The proceedings at Tokyo amounted, in fact, to a joint—American-Japanese—political trial.76 During its preparatory stage Hirohito and those closest to him participated behind the scenes, helping to select and influence the persons charged with war crimes. Imperial aides Terasaki and Matsudaira served as informants for members of the executive committee of the IPS, which drew up the list of indictees. So too did other members of the entourage, who sought to protect both the emperor and the senior statesmen. Palace aides and Foreign Ministry officials instructed the Class A suspects in Sugamo Prison on what to say; at the same time they cultivated relations with Keenan and many of the lawyers for both defense and prosecution.
Members of the imperial family, particularly Prince Takamatsu, and palace aides such as Matsudaira invited the American attorneys to cocktail parties, receptions, and imperial “duck hunts” with the aim of winning favor, nurturing collaborators, and gaining information. Hirohito personally sanctioned increases in palace spending precisely for such entertainments. His officials cooperated in the interrogations and gave depositions because they wanted to pin responsibility for aggression on a handful of military cliques—while leaving the impression that the emperor and his people had been completely deceived. Members of the reorganized and expanded court group of the early postsurrender period succeeded in inserting into the official American version of the ending of World War II a false account that obscured Hirohito’s role in delaying the surrender. These conservative elites, whom Keenan called “peace lovers,” influenced to some extent the indictment process, the court proceedings, and even the final verdicts.
The Tokyo tribunal succeeded in revealing both the deceit of the war leaders and their unwillingness to admit criminal liability for their actions while in office. It disclosed, for the first time in Japan, the facts about the assassination of Chang Tso-lin and the Kwantung Army conspiracy that led to the Manchurian Incident. It documented the mistreatment and murder of Allied prisoners of war and civilians at scores of places in Asia and the Pacific, including most famously Bataan and the Thai-Burma railway over the river Kwai.77 Evidence of mass atrocities at Nanking was admitted, and during the trial of General Matsui Iwane was reinforced for the Japanese people by press reports of the war crimes trial in Nanking, which sentenced to death Gens. Tani Hisao and Isogai Rensuke, among others, for their role in the mass atrocities of 1937–38. The Japanese killing of civilians in Manila, where indiscriminate American artillery bombardment also contributed to the high death toll, were described in detail. The introduction of evidence on the rape of female prisoners and females in occupied territories, and the prosecution of rape in an international war crimes trial, set positive precedents for the future.78
The Tokyo trial affected Japanese political attitudes in the long run. Influenced by what they had learned about war as a national enterprise, many people resolved that Japan should never go to war again, and dedicated themselves to making democratic ideals and international norms work. Because the trial strengthened popular hatred of militarism and war, it contributed to acceptance of the new constitution. The Japanese peace movement drew on the trial’s evidence to condemn the old value structure of imperial Japan. The Japanese press, at CIE’s insistence, reported daily on the proceedings, and though subject to occupation censorship, presented an account of the road to war much more accurate than the story the average Japanese had been led to believe. In addition an enormous amount of documentation amassed by the prosecution and defense was preserved, and still serves today as an invaluable historical archive.
Nevertheless, in the eyes of some Japanese and foreign critics then and since, the Tokyo trial was irrevocably flawed. The tribunal had not adequately protected the rights of defendants under international criminal law. In its indictment, the prosecution laid great emphasis on the charge of conspiracy—a legal concept grounded in the European natural-law tradition and in Anglo-Saxon common law but regarded as vague, unfamiliar, and historically anachronistic by Continental lawyers.79 Keenan and MacArthur, following Truman policy, obfuscated the Japanese decision-making process by omitting the one person in power during the entire seventeen-year period of the alleged conspiracy (January 1, 1928 to September 2,1945). That person was the emperor: He alone could have validated
a conspiratorial union of wills to wage an illegal “war of aggression and a war in violation of international law, treaties, agreements and assurances.”
Moreover the Allies had also committed war crimes but refused to apply the Nuremberg principles to their own conduct. Over the thirty-one months that the trial unfolded, the U.S.–Soviet Cold War steadily worsened, and that influenced the proceedings. Western colonialism in Asia remained alive and well, which meant that the Tokyo trial highlighted, in a way that Nuremberg did not, the problematic relationship between imperialism and international law. The fact that no judges from either the “Dutch East Indies” or former colonial Korea sat on the bench was telling. Even more telling were the actions of the French and Dutch governments in seeking to restore their colonial rule in Southeast Asia, and the Americans their influence everywhere in Asia and the Pacific. The Truman administration gave economic aid to France while it was fighting against the Viet Minh. In China it permitted surrendered Japanese troops to fight on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, and provided Chiang’s military forces with equipment and advisers to aid in his renewed civil war against the Communists.80 In the underdeveloped parts of Asia and the Pacific, American leaders seemed to be following Japan’s example of keeping whole nations in their “proper place.”
The final indictment, together with five “Appendices” containing the particulars for all of the counts alleged against the accused, had been lodged with the tribunal on April 29, 1946. The indictment specified Japan’s production and distribution of drugs; Appendix D, Section Nine, of the indictment specified Japan’s poison gas operations in China, also in violation of international laws. The prosecution pursued the drug issue but dropped the toxic gas charge.81
Col. Thomas H. Morrow, the lawyer whom Keenan had placed in charge of “All China Military Aggression 1937–45,” had traveled to China in March 1946 and investigated this issue. His April 26 report to Keenan triggered a secret counterattack from the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), which insisted, on the basis of specious legal reasoning, that Japan had not been acting illegally in waging chemical warfare. Having developed the world’s most advanced poison gas arsenal and been denied the chance to use its new weapons during World War II, CWS wanted the tribunal to take no action that might lead to the criminalization of poison gas, especially when it believed war with the Soviet Union to be imminent. To this day it is unclear whether MacArthur or someone else high up in the army chain of command made the actual decision not to pursue the indictment of the Japanese army for its use of chemical weapons. But sometime during the first two months of the trial the issue was dropped. President Truman, who lacked the imagination to see the implications of what was at stake, in effect allowed Roosevelt’s wartime policy condemning poison gas as an illegal, inhumane method of warfare to be reversed. Japanese officers involved in chemical warfare and American army leaders who did not want their hands tied by international law were the main beneficiaries. Concurrently the world lost the opportunity to prevent the spread of chemical weapons. On August 12, 1946, a disappointed Colonel Morrow resigned, probably over this issue, and returned to the United States.82
Among the numerous personal immunities from prosecution that MacArthur and the Allies granted for reasons of national interest were those to General Ishii Shir and the officers and men of Unit 731 who had been responsible for Japan’s biological warfare in China. The estimates that three to ten thousand mostly Chinese prisoners of war had been killed in Ishi’s biological experiments were ignored. Access to the experimental data on the killings was considered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and MacArthur more vital than justice.83
Lingering consciousness of the “holy war” and continuation of the old sense of values among many Japanese undoubtedly shortened the period of introspection that followed the war crimes revelations. The widespread Japanese belief that war is a natural social phenomenon, something that just happens among nations through no fault of their own, blocked self-reflection on war atrocities in China; and in the view of some Japanese writers, so too did a weak sense of individual autonomy and an ethical life overly dependent on the opinion of others.84 But the main reason why Japanese war crimes were so quickly forgotten had to do with Hirohito himself. The legitimacy of Japan’s wars of aggression—the belief that it had invaded various Asian and Pacific countries in order to liberate them—could not be fully discredited unless he was subjected to trial and interrogation in some forum for his role in the wars, especially his inability or disinclination to hold Japan’s armed forces to any standard of behavior morally higher than loyalty and success. Many Japanese, after all, had been complicit with him in waging war, and the nation as a whole came to feel that because the emperor had not been held responsible, neither should they.
The Japanese people began a very serious confrontation with war guilt—but the early decision of MacArthur and Truman not to distribute accountability justly, letting Kido and Tj bear the emperor’s share, cut short that confrontation; so did Truman’s drastic policy changes in 1947–48. The same thing happened in divided Germany, where Truman’s policy, implemented by the U.S. high commissioner, John McCloy, limited the reach of the denazification program by redefining it to apply to only a small number of German perpetrators. The Tokyo trial, and the purges that accompanied it, failed to solve Japan’s many-sided problem of war responsibility; in some ways they made the problem more intractable.
Protecting the emperor and remaking his image were complex political undertakings that could be achieved only by grossly exaggerating the threat of social upheaval in Japan, rigging testimony, destroying evidence, and distorting history.85 It is not known if Hirohito was offended by this tampering with justice, or if he included it in his reports to the spirits of his imperial ancestors. We can be certain that throughout the trial, down through the execution of Tj, Hirohito never lost sight of his larger aims, which were to stave off domestic and foreign pressure for his abdication, to preserve the monarchy, and thus to maintain a realm of stability and a principle of legitimacy in Japanese political life.
16
SALVAGING THE IMPERIAL MYSTIQUE
As the fifth month of occupation came in with the new year, 1946, the Japanese nation seemed to be torn in half. On the one hand demobilized veterans and displaced civilians continued to be repatriated from the Asian continent; millions remained homeless; food rationing had broken down; and black markets were flourishing everywhere. Farmers had begun political struggles for the democratization of local village government. Land reform had not yet begun, but tenants and small owner-cultivators were demonstrating their grievances against the landlord class—a social pillar of the prewar monarchy ever since Meiji. On the other hand the confusion and demoralization so noticeable earlier were starting to give way to intellectual ferment and excitement. It appeared to many, not all of whom were leftists, that defeat and occupation might soon result in radical, thoroughgoing reform. Major institutional change was in the air and could be imminent.
On January 13, 1946, one Reginald Blyth, a teacher at the Peers’ School who was also, informally, an adviser to GHQ’s Civil Information and Education Section, sent Hirohito’s Grand Chamberlain a letter. Taking cognizence of the near collapse of the food rationing system, Blyth proposed that the emperor counter this serious problem:
The Emperor alone has the chance to…provide the emotional motive power for the proper distribution of food without a black market. He should make a trip round Japan, visit the coal mines and farming districts. He should listen to them, talk to them, ask them questions. On his return he should issue a statement concerning e. g. the hoarding of food, the necessity of sacrifices now, just as in war time. He should uncork some feeling, pull out the vox humana stop, and appeal to the Japanese to share their stocks.1
Hirohito began his travels to shore up the endangered status quo by means of “blessed visitations” (gyk), actively supported by MacArthur and his public relations advisers in GHQ, who wanted him to show that he
was “really interested in the people.”2 On his part extreme awkwardness marked the initial encounters, and on the people’s part, shock and uncertainty.
On March 26, 1946, journalist Mark Gayn met the touring emperor at a hospital for the war wounded in Takasaki City, Gumma prefecture. Hirohito was then in an early phase of being “humanized,” and wanting to help the process along, Gayn left this unforgettable description:
I had had a good look at the emperor, or “Charlie,” as we called him. He is a little man, about five feet two inches in height, in a badly cut gray striped suit, with trousers a couple of inches too short. He has a pronounced facial tic and his right shoulder twitches constantly. When he walks, he throws his right leg a little sideways, as if he has no control over it. He was obviously excited and ill at ease, and uncertain of what to do with his arms and hands.
At first, he shuffled past the men, stopping occasionally to read the charts. Then he apparently decided the moment called for a few words. He tried several questions, but they all seemed out of place. At last he settled on the simple “Where are you from?” He now walked from man to man, asked his question, and when the patient answered, the emperor said, “Ah, so!” He sounded as if he was surprised to learn that the man had come from Akita or Wakayama or the Hokkaido. His voice was high-pitched, and as time passed it grew thinner and higher.
The irreverent Americans were now all waiting for the inhuman sound of “Ah, so,” and when it came they nudged each other, and laughed, and mimicked the sound. But the joke wore out. We could now see the emperor for what he was: a tired, pathetic little man, compelled to do a job distasteful to him, and trying desperately to control his disobedient voice and face and body. It was hot and hushed, and there were no sounds other than the emperor’s shrill voice and the heavy breathing of his escorts.3
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 63
