Subject to Change
I talk to the world's best historians and let them tell the stories. And the stories are wonderful! (And occasionally I change the subject and talk about films, philosophy or whatever!).
Subject to Change
The Tokyo Tribunal: War Crimes, Justice, and Geopolitics
This episode looks at the courtroom drama that helped to shape Asia after World War II with Princeton University's Gary Bass. Far more than a simple account of justice served, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal represents a fascinating intersection of international law, power politics, and competing visions of history that continues to reverberate through East Asian relations today.
The tribunal tried 28 Japanese leaders for crimes that began long before Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan's expansionist wars stretched back decades, leaving a trail of atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre where approximately 200,000 civilians were killed. Yet political calculations ensured Emperor Hirohito remained untouched, creating an enduring contradiction where his closest advisor received a life sentence while the monarch himself watched from his palace.
Three defendants embody the trial's moral complexities: defiant Prime Minister Tojo Hideki who used his testimony to justify the war; the Emperor's advisor Kido Koichi who claimed to restrain militarists yet enabled their actions; and perhaps most poignantly, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori who actively opposed the war, confronted military leadership, and later pushed for surrender—only to die in prison after conviction.
What truly distinguishes this tribunal from Nuremberg is its contested legacy. While Germany embraced denazification, some Japanese war criminals later returned triumphantly to politics—including Kishi Nobusuke who became Prime Minister in 1957. His grandson, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, continued questioning the tribunal's legitimacy decades later. Meanwhile, at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, war criminals are venerated alongside fallen soldiers, revealing Japan's unresolved relationship with its imperial past.
How do nations reconcile with dark chapters in their past? Can justice truly be served when political considerations shape legal proceedings?
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, russell Hogg. My guest today is Gary Bass. Gary is the William P Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University, and today we're going to be talking about his prize-winning book Judgment at Tokyo, which deals with the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo at the end of World War II, and I think this is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is trying to make sense of East Asian politics today. And while it's a big book and it doesn't shy away from detail, it still has a very strong narrative drive and so actually it's extremely readable and despite the size, it's actually quite pacey, so it's very highly recommended. Anyway, welcome, gary, to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, russell, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:As I say, our subject is the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo and what led up to it, and I suppose most people may be familiar with the war between Japan and America, but maybe we could start by talking very briefly about Japan's various wars that were taking place at the same time. Yeah, so this is.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a period.
Speaker 2:Certainly most Americans come into the narrative and Brits come into the narrative with Pearl Harbor, but that's really, you know, what happens in 1941 is really a final stage of an escalating Japanese imperial expansionism that's been going on since the Meiji era, where, as you've actually I mean you've done a series about Japan and the outbreak of the war previously, about this, so some of your listeners will be familiar with this.
Speaker 2:But Meiji, japan, being confronted by Western imperial powers, is trying to modernize and militarize at breakneck speed in order to withstand this outside pressure, and it plunges into a series of wars. There's a war against China in 1894, 1895, a very dramatic war with Russia in 1904, 1905, which is celebrated throughout Asia as the first moment when a Western imperial power is defeated by an Asian power, with this remarkable victory by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War and that leaves Japan sitting on top of Korea and Taiwan. The next big phase in the expansion is to move onto the mainland in 1931, with the invasion of Manchuria, and that's followed up by a full-scale invasion of the rest of China, manchuria's, northeastern China, a full-scale invasion of China starting in July 1937. There is then, in July 1941, japan marches into southern Indochina and that's what really sets the stage for where, I think, for a British, australian, canadian, american audience, where the story really starts in 1941, for that crowd, trevor.
Speaker 1:Burrus, I don't want to talk about the course of the war. Well, we will talk about to talk about the course of the war. Well, we will talk about certain aspects of the course of the war. But you sort of start your book sort of more towards the end of the war and Okinawa and the Potsdam Declaration and the atom bombs. So how does that fit into the war crimes tribunal?
Speaker 2:So it's really what the book is trying to do is write about the War Crimes Tribunal at Tokyo, which that's the prosecution of Tojo Hideki and 27 other senior Japanese wartime leaders. It's the Asian counterpart to Nuremberg. But I'm not just telling the story of the tribunal, I want to tell the story of the politics that's all around that. And for that the starting point is even before the war ends. So what you'll always hear in conversations in Japan is that the Tokyo trial was victor's justice and that's correct, right In a way, like there are no. There are no allied personnel being put on trial at Tokyo for war crimes, but it's only Japanese who are being prosecuted. But what that overlooks is the way in which Imperial Japan actually has considerable power. Even at the end of the war Japan's been under siege, it's been under a devastating firebombing campaign, but still in the summer of 1945, japan's do a ground conquest of the Japanese home islands would be very bloody, and that means that rather than go through with what the Americans at the time called a fight to the finish, as in Germany, where you go all the way to Berlin, run up the flag, truman is actually kind of relieved.
Speaker 2:Harry Truman, the US president, is relieved to get a negotiated settlement of some kind to the war, even though the New Dealers around him complained that he was sort of taking a step back from Franklin Roosevelt's commitment to having an unconditional surrender of Japan. So at the time of the Potsdam Declaration, which is the last warning to Japan to surrender before the atom bombs are dropped, there's a debate within the Truman administration about whether or not they want to quietly soften their terms for Japan's surrender and in particular about having a pledge to retain the Japanese monarchy, that the emperor won't be prosecuted as a war criminal. The emperor will stay on the throne. The Potsdam Declaration doesn't actually include that. There isn't an offer.
Speaker 2:Even after Hiroshima, nagasaki and the Soviet entries late entry into the Pacific War, the Soviets had said that they would get in about three months after they were done with Nazi Germany. So they get in and the Soviets actually entered the war in between the first and the second atom bombs. Even after those sort of three gut punches, the Japanese government still insists that they have to keep the emperor and Truman quietly decides to spare Emperor Hirohito from overthrow or from being prosecuted as a war criminal. So there's an enduring presence of the emperor and also Japanese see it in broader terms that within the Japanese government they're talking about it as the preservation of the kokutai, of the national polity, so that there's going to be a real continuity between wartime Japan and post-war Japan in a way that's not as present in Germany.
Speaker 1:And I think in the Potsdam Declaration and I'm slightly, my memory is failing me here, but I think there is something where they say that justice will be done to war criminals.
Speaker 2:That's right. There's a line within the Potsdam Declaration which says it's actually put in a way that it's sort of a combination of reassurance, but in a very threatening way. It says that we're not going to enslave the Japanese as a race or destroy them as a nation the Japanese as a race or destroy them as a nation I don't have the exact term, but it's close to that to enslave the Japanese race or destroy the Japanese nation. So we're not going to do that right. So we won't actually enslave or annihilate you as a nation. But stern justice. Stern justice is the exact language. Stern justice will be given out to all the war criminals, and it specifically mentions war criminals who had abused prisoners of war. So by signing, by agreeing to the Potsdam Declaration, japan is Imperial. Japan is agreeing to the prosecution of war criminals.
Speaker 1:And why are war crimes an issue at all? And so I mean I guess my question is what have the Japanese done which has caused such outrage? And in a sense that's an obvious question. So I mean there's a lot we could talk about there, but maybe talk about particularly about Nanjing and maybe Bataan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the war is really, you know, for people in allied countries they think of Japan's war as a fundamentally brutal, barbaric, violent, criminal campaign. So people have uppermost in their minds the Bataan Death March, which is the march you know, marching, a group of American and Filipino prisoners of war at Bataan and marching them and you know they're dropping dead or being killed by guards throughout. So that's at the very beginning of the war. In December 1937 is the fall of the Chinese capital of Nanjing. So this is the Republic of China under Shanghai's shack and it falls. So July 1937 is the start of the full-scale invasion of China. In December 1937, the capital falls to Japanese forces. So that's shocking and traumatic. And quick Western estimates at the time, based on the number of people who were buried, are estimating something like 200,000 people killed at Nanjing, and that's civilians. It's also Chinese troops who had given up their weapons. There's also mass rape in Nanjing. Rana Mitter, who's sort of the definitive historian, hans von Wendt, these are sort of the great historians of China in World War II, but Mitter writes about 20,000 cases of rape in the first month of the Japanese occupation of Nanshang.
Speaker 2:So it's not nobody in China or the Philippines, or Britain or the United States is thinking about this as sort of an honorable contest or an honorable war. But it's also important that these are the war crimes, like when. When we talk about war crimes today, then we're mostly thinking about war crimes committed in the conduct of the war, but at the time of Nuremberg and Tokyo what people are talking about is the first war crime. The fundamental war crime is aggression. That Japan's waging of aggressive war is the crime that leads to all the other crimes. Right, wars always escalate. Wars are a contest between two living forces, each side sort of scrambling for advantage against the other, and that means that they're, you know, tempted to more and more devastating means and therefore, you know the sort of allied theory of the case is. You know, the basis for all of the war crimes is the attack on China, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1:But I guess my question is without the atrocities I mean you know in your book you're talking about soldiers competing to see how many civilians they can murder I mean it's quite extraordinary. But without these kind of crimes, do you think that they would have pushed through the war crimes tribunal in the way they did had the campaign been fought in a China American fury about Pearl Harbor? And there's a racial overlay to all?
Speaker 2:of this I suppose right, if there had been less war crimes, there would have been less of a drive towards punishing war crimes. But really, for you know, as it unfolded, the issue of Japanese criminality is sort of central to the way that the public in allied countries, as well as the governments, in allied countries are thinking about the war, so there's no the thought of like, well, let's just let bygones be bygones and move on.
Speaker 1:That's nowhere in public opinion of any of the countries. And you had a couple of anecdotes I thought just asked you to tell people about. There was one where there was eight airmen are captured and there seemed to be cannibalism involved. Is that right?
Speaker 2:So this is a astonishing episode. So there's a sort of remote island stronghold, you know, out in the ocean south of Japan called Chichijima, and from time to time they'll manage to shoot down US flyers. And in late 1944, there are nine US flyers who were shot down and one of them has the good luck he's on a life raft and the life raft is drifting towards the island but he has the good luck to be rescued by a US submarine. But the other eight of these American airmen are captured and they are executed and some of the people who had been, some of the Americans, were shot down at various times at Chichijima, were not just executed but partially eaten. They thought that human livers had medicinal benefits had medicinal benefits.
Speaker 2:And the one guy so there's a discussion of this you know this cannibalism in the Tokyo war crimes trial. You know it's a particularly lurid, grotesque part of the trial. But they don't say it because there's no reason to the name of the one US Navy flyer who escaped in 1944 because nobody would have known. Well, escaped in 1944 because nobody would have cared at the time. But today you will notice the name. His name was George Herbert Walker Bush, who goes on to become president of the United States and in 1989, actually as president he attends the funeral of Emperor Hirohito and Bush very politely says how moved he is by all the pageantry. But it's this astonishing story that's amazing, that's just amazing.
Speaker 1:And then the other anecdote which I thought you know, which really stood out to me anyway, was and maybe we can talk about, you know, the lack of evidence in a second, but there's a sense that, well, dead men tell no tales. But somebody is produced at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and he sort of takes off his shirt and he shows the cut in the back of his neck where somebody has tried to behead him on the march and left him for dead, and he manages to crawl off and survive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is another astonishing moment where he's a young Australian who's brought before the court to testify, and the phase of the trial where they're talking about the abuse by Imperial Japan of Allied personnel, and Australians are particularly furious about this. There are more Australians who died from being taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War II than died in combat against the Japanese in World War II, and this one young guy stands there and describes what it's like to have somebody try to cut off your head, that he was captured and they attempted to behead him with a sword and left him for dead and he managed. He somehow, you know, managed to survive. It was actually a story that I went to, you know. I went and consulted with a friend of mine who's a doctor just to say how could this possibly happen? And I was, you know. She reassured me that this was actually possible.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, this guy stands in front of the court and they ask him before the court if he can show the the wound on his neck from having somebody swing a sword. There were, you know, there were many prisoners chinese and um, allied prisoners of war who were killed by beheading with swords and this guy was, you know he was incredibly unlucky in that he got hit, hit in the neck with a sword, but but incredibly lucky that he managed to survive it. We have a little picture of him in the book, so a very sort of thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent face. We wanted to include that in the book just to sort of try and give an individual, human face to these horror stories.
Speaker 1:And, as I say, the lack of evidence is a bit of a problem in the trial, isn't it Because the Japanese have been pretty thorough, haven't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know, there's an inherent problem in producing evidence for war crimes trials, which is that countries that are in the middle of fighting a war are very hard-pressed and are not necessarily spending a lot of time gathering evidence. But in this case the problem goes beyond that, which is that there's a pause at the end of the war when it's clear that Japan is on its last legs and they're starting to destroy documents, which is even more accentuated. So Japan finally surrenders.
Speaker 2:The emperor says we're surrendering, accepting the terms of Potsdam Declaration in a radio broadcast on August 15th 1945, just shy of, as we're recording this, we're just shy of 80 years since then. And then there's a pause while you're waiting for the occupying forces to arrive, which they're getting there throughout the course of September. In that period, the Japanese government goes through what is basically one of the biggest efforts at evidence, tampering in the legal history, that they're burning vast numbers of documents, and some of the documentation is being destroyed along with everything else by American fire bombing. But so, for instance, like the Japanese garrison at Nanjing, they burn their papers. So that's one of the worst atrocities of the war. It's one of the things where you'll get Japanese nationalists making kind of denialist claims, saying that nothing really ever happened.
Speaker 2:And one thing that actually makes it a little easier for the denialists is that so much of the paper was destroyed. So the official records of about more than 70% of the Japanese military units that took Nanjing still haven't been found or published. Japanese military units that took Nanjing still haven't been found or published. They also destroy. There's a secret bio-warfare program in China which tests, you know, these plagues and toxins on living Chinese subjects. As well as trying, you know, they actually fly planes over China and try and use this stuff. So they are actually trying not very effectively, but trying to use their own weapon of mass destruction. This in no way excuses the allied use of the atom bomb, but it is, you know, a worthwhile reminder that japan was trying to, was also trying to use terrible technologies for mass destruction. It's part of the army, it's called Unit 731. It's very secret. So they have a headquarters in Manchuria which they blow up. They destroy, you know, hundreds of kilograms of dried anthrax. They get rid of evidence about the germ warfare attacks that they've done on a couple of Chinese cities. They wreck labs and centers that they also had in China and Burma and Singapore, and they also have they're not. You know, destroying evidence isn't just destroying paper. As you said, dead men tell no tales, right? So they had a lot of. They had several hundred Chinese who they were still holding as experimental subjects and workers. And they give them the choice and they kill them all. They give them the choice of either suicide by hanging or taking cyanide, but all of these Chinese are killed, and that means that some of the most incriminating evidence has already been burned.
Speaker 2:So allied prosecutors wind up relying more heavily on what a legal doctrine called command responsibility, which is that showing that these war crimes were widespread and systematic and that the accused leaders had known about them and had the authority to stop them and did it. So you're not saying for some of them, including Tojo Hideki, you're saying he directly ordered this. But in a lot of cases they're saying well, the Japanese leaders knew that there were systematic, widespread war crimes, they knew about them, they had the authority to stop them, but they didn't. And that's what you do when you don't have the evidence. And for you know, for Japanese nationalists, you'll sometimes hear them say well, it proves that the Imperial Japanese Army really wasn't that bad. And I think the reality is that, the reason why you're leaning so heavily on command responsibility is because so much of the evidence has been destroyed.
Speaker 1:And I guess we should move on to tribunal. And, as I understand it, General MacArthur, his view was well, let's just have a quick military trial in front of military judges and hang who we want to hang and move on, and the decision is taken not to do that but to set up the tribunal. So what's the debate here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's exactly right. I mean there are. So there's a precursor debate, which is whether or not you're going to have war crimes trials in the first place, that the original British and American policy is to just shoot German war criminals and Japanese war criminals. And there's an argument about this within the US government. Eventually the Secretary of War manages to win over Franklin Roosevelt and says we have to give them sort of the fundamentals of a fair trial. It's still going to be a military trial in front of allied judges. So it's not, you know, in the US or British context it's not a jury trial, right. So it's a different looking kind of trial, but it is still a trial. So that's the first argument. And then, from MacArthur's point of view, when he's told, well, you know, the president, franklin Roosevelt, and then when Roosevelt dies, his vice president, harry Truman, takes over, you know, in the last days of World War II, tells MacArthur the Supreme Allied Commander he's going to be the potentate running the American-led Allied occupation of Japan. Macarthur is told there's going to be a war crimes trial. And MacArthur thinks the last thing I need is a whole bunch of lawyers running around. The last thing I need is a whole bunch of lawyers running around MacArthur. He certainly wants to punish Japanese enemies but he prefers to do it with. He does. You know.
Speaker 2:Macarthur orders his own punishments of Japanese generals who had fought in the Philippines. Macarthur is very dedicated to the Philippines and these are really pathetically flimsy trials with minimal standards of evidence. It's in front of all US military judges. These are pretty scandalous. But for MacArthur that's more.
Speaker 2:The model is we're going to do really, really quick trials and then we're going to get on with the business of rebuilding Japan. So he proposes let's just do a quick trial only for the members of the Pearl Harbor cabinet, so Tojo Hideki, who was prime minister, and everybody else who was in his cabinet at the time of the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. And he's overruled by the Truman administration who says no, we fought this war along with allies. Our allies want to have a wider airing of what was done in China and in the Philippines, and to Australians and to Brits. So we're going to do a broader trial. Macarthur is throughout really frustrated that this thing is sort of. You know, he's like I'm trying to rebuild Japan, I'm trying to run an occupation here and I've got all these lawyers. You know I have to keep tripping over all these lawyers.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I can't remember exactly how many defendants there were, but it was something like 50 defendants in the end, so presumably that goes wider than the cabinet it's 28, although a few of them die of health reasons during the trial and one of them is ruled insane and incompetent to stand trial.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's a lot less than.
Speaker 1:I thought it was 15, and maybe there was a second trial that was going to take place, but then never did.
Speaker 2:Yes, so they had a bunch of people who they were holding for a second round, including one of the leaders in Manchuria who is also a member of the Pearl Harbor cabinet, a man named Kishi Nobusuke, who you know, hopefully we can come back to. There will be. Some of your listeners will immediately say wait, you know, we'll recognize that name, but for those who don't, well, you know, maybe we can loop back to him. So they're going to have a second round and the fact that the first round takes two and a half years, that they decide they're just going to release them all, but it's, it's ultimate, it's 28 um who are who are put on trial okay, and then I wanted to, because obviously we can't talk about 28, but I but I thought we might focus on on three of them, and the first was kido koichi, who's the keeper of the privy Seal.
Speaker 1:Then there was Shigenori Togo, who is the foreign minister, and then the last one, of course, is Hideki Tojo. So I just thought, you know, maybe we could start with the keeper of the Privy Seal, because, as I understand it, he's effectively the representative of the emperor, he's sort of his right-hand man, if that's the right way to put it. And yet it's been decided not to put the emperor on trial.
Speaker 2:So that's just quite interesting job of being lord keeper of the privy seal, which means he is the top advisor and right-hand man to emperor hirohito. So he's by the emperor's side throughout the war, throughout all of the, all the major decisions. Um that japan has cabinet government. They go through 17 different cabinets in the course of the war, but one figure who's there for all of it, right? So in that sense Imperial Japan is very different from Nazi Germany where it's Hitler's government, hitler's regime throughout the war and there are changes in personnel, but it's still basically the same. Whereas Imperial Japan they go through a whole series of governments, so Tojo Hideki, he's prime minister and army minister throughout much of the war, but not all of it. And the one figure of real continuity is the emperor.
Speaker 2:The emperor is never put on trial, never prosecuted. He kind of watches this from the palace, but his right-hand man is put on trial and you know Mark Ikito's line in court is that he was against the militarists, he was against the army. You know I was sort of trying to hold it back. It could have been a lot worse without me. But he in the end is convicted and given a life sentence, convicted as a class, a war criminal. And there is this very strange juxtaposition of you know, your number one guy is convicted and given a life sentence as a class A war criminal, but you you know the emperor are, you know, enjoying a peaceful life in the palace. So that's a kind of little hard to square, do you?
Speaker 1:think the emperor does bear responsibility. Do you think it was? Well, there's two questions. One is how much responsibility you know, when you looked into this, do you attribute to the emperor. Could he have said no? Was he in any sense a leader? And then the second question is was it the right thing to do? You know, regardless of what the answer to that is, was it the right thing to do not to put him on trial?
Speaker 2:That's a great way of framing it right. So part of what I'm trying to do in the book is I want, I'll, I try to give the facts, but I, I'll, I, I don't want my, so I'll give narrative voice when it's things like explaining, explaining a legal doctrine, or explaining Japanese cabinet government or things where, like it may be, you know, it might be helpful for people. But on questions that, like, are just hard questions that people would grapple with, I kind of want readers to make up your own mind. Right, like there's an agonizing dilemma about what you do with the emperor In terms of his responsibility. Clearly he bears some responsibility. He doesn't bear responsibility in the sort of if you kind of like naively read the Meiji constitution and said wait, you know, wait, the emperor is in charge of everything and the emperor is the ultimate source of authority and the you know commander in chief of the armed forces. The emperor, you know, the emperor is everything. Right, that's not his actual role, right, the army is dominant, he, he. But he's not a figurehead. He has some authority and the way that I think he really figures is that he's an establishment figure. So is Kido.
Speaker 2:Who knows better? Who knows that the militarists and extremists in the army are dangerous and that they're dragging the country towards disaster. But they're also scary and it's hard to stand up against them. You know, in the 1930s if you in Japan civilian politicians who stood up to the army, you can get killed right that they try their assassinations, including assassinations and coup attempts. There are all these sort of really radical junior officers.
Speaker 2:So it's a scary thing to find yourself at cross purposes with the army in this period and a lot of the time establishment civilians, you know kind of mainstream conservatives or reactionaries like the emperor, like Kido, think maybe it's better to let the army kind of blow off some steam in Manchuria or some foreign adventure, rather than confronting them and having to, you know, to deal with them at home. But Hirohito does occasionally make direct interventions in politics and one of which is to help put down an army insurrection. So he will, you know he can do it. But he also, you know he chooses the prime minister. He's the guy who appoints General Tojo Hideki as prime minister right before Pearl Harbor and that is, you know, that is held up by the Tokyo trial Youido. You know that's part of why Kido is faulted. But it wasn't just Kido who made that decision. It was also the emperor.
Speaker 1:But I guess they would argue I'm sure they did argue that that was their way to control the military, because if they had had a weak prime minister they would have had no influence over the army, which would have gone its merry way. But it went its merry way anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they say. I mean, it's actually two things right. One is, as you say, we want to have somebody who's got credibility with the army, and certainly Tojo has. You know who's a career hardline army guy. He certainly has credibility with the army. The problem is, you know, the reason why he has credibility with the army is because he agrees with the army and he's going to do the things that you'd be nervous about the army doing.
Speaker 2:There's also an issue that they're talking about when they choose Tojo. There's a prince, a member of the imperial family, who's also army. He's a military guy. There's a bunch of people within the imperial family who are in the military and they consider putting him on the throne, and both Kido and the emperor are very nervous about that because they're afraid that that could. You know, if there's, either you have a prince telling the army you can't have a war, which might mean a coup that overthrows the monarchy, or you have a general who brings the country into a war and that could start a revolution. So they actually prefer to have Tojo, not just because he has credibility with the army, but because they are, in that sense, more concerned with preserving the monarchy than they are with saving the country.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess that you can see that what you were talking about at the start, about the surrender discussions, where they keep the war going, you know, so long because they want to make sure that the role of the emperor is protected. So let's move on to the next defendant, which was the poor old foreign minister, shigenori Togo, and he did stand up to the military and much thanks he got for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I actually the name Tojo Hideki is much more familiar.
Speaker 1:I do, by the way, in the book. I do the names in the order that Japanese actually do the names. Okay, you do them. Togo Shigenori Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do it that way, I'm just if people are. But there, you know, there's always wild confusion about this because the in most Western newspapers and magazines there's still the convention of inverting them them. So Togo is the family name, togo Shigenori, who is a much less well-known figure. He's foreign minister at the time of Pearl Harbor, but he goes into the cabinet hoping to try and pull Japan back from a war that he thinks will be a disaster. He's a very worldly, well-traveled, seasoned diplomat who has devoted his life to trying to have Japan be kind of a bridge between West and East. He's very cosmopolitan. His wife he's married a German woman. He hates the Nazis, he hates the Axis, he wants to see Japan on decent terms with the Soviet Union and he's horrified by the thought that, at a time when Japan is sort of still bogged down in a quagmire war in China, now you want to take on the United States and the British Empire and the Dutch Empire. So he is throughout, you know, as foreign minister he's going toe to toe with the army in really kind of you know, like epic, you know multi-hour confrontations in a way that you know, as we talked about earlier. This is, you know, this is. It's not like, that's not just an act of like, of moral courage or political courage, it's an act of physical courage, right, that he's doing things that will in Japan. At that time you can get killed for doing that. I think he's an, you know, he's kind of an extraordinary figure and he's saying the Americans say we got to pull our troops out of China. Okay, let's get our troops out of China. He tells the army don't worry, the Americans are not going to attack Japan, so there's no need to rush to war. He says a victory is impossible to war. He says a victory is impossible and he's doing you know, he's doing that in front of the emperor. He's doing that in front of, you know, all these military guys with chests full of medals and so yeah, I mean he, so Kito and the emperor are saying, well, we tried to hold back the rush to war and they did a little right. They, the emperor voiced some concerns in a very sort of decorous way, but he's not like standing there screaming. This is, you know, this is a catastrophe. Togo is the guy who's screaming. This is a catastrophe and, as you said, his reward for it is that he was part of the Pearl Harbor cabinet, which is true. He didn't resign. He thought that if he resigned they'll just replace me with somebody more extreme. You know you can debate whether that was, whether it was right for him to stay or not, but he really is, more than anyone, the voice calling for peace, and his reward for that is he's convicted as a as a class A war criminal and is sentenced to a substantial jail term and winds up dying in jail. He's in poor health when he goes in.
Speaker 2:I interviewed his grandchildren for the book. I was recently one of his grandchildren. Togo Kasuhiko himself became an ambassador, had a very distinguished diplomatic career. I was just in Japan and interviewed him and sort of sat and talked for a long time about his grandfather's legacy. Really remarkable, remarkable story. I'd like people to know the name of Togo Shigenori. He also was the one who he comes back as foreign minister at the very end of the war and is pushing hard that Japan needs to accept a surrender. And you know this has gone on way too long. We got to quit.
Speaker 1:So it really is a case of no good deed goes unpunished. It is an extraordinary, extraordinary part of the story. So okay, so we should move on to Tojo Hideki then, who I guess was the great villain of the trial, at least so far as the Allies were concerned. I mean, I say as far as the Allies were concerned. I mean I picked up in your book that his fellow defendants weren't very keen on him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's certainly Togo and Kido are very wary of him and he's remarkable to write about because he's completely unrepentant, right. He thinks that trial is a joke and they're just going to hang me. And he does get hanged, right, he's not wrong about that. So he's totally defiant, right. And when he testifies on his own behalf he's very effective. It's at a time of censorship. The allies are censoring what's being said in Japan, but his testimony goes out largely uncensored so he gets to speak directly to his own people in full justification of the war effort.
Speaker 2:We were pushed into this. We were, you know, we were right to join the Axis, we were right to ally ourselves with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. We were being surrounded, we were being pushed, we were provoked into the war. And he actually the American chief prosecutor, who's a crony of Harry Truman, does a terrible job. So Tojo is really very effective. So he is a very dramatic figure. He's on the cover of the book. The cover of the book is him for people who are getting their two. Actually, in both the us edition the cover art is done by this amazing graphic designer, who I just love, who's a wonderful human being, whose name is chip kid, who's, like you know, just phenomenally good graphic designer. He's the guy. If people know the jurassic park logo, that tyrannosaurus that's, that's Chip. He did that, but he did a sort of Tojo. So, like my, you know, other people get a Tyrannosaurus on the cover, but I get Tojo. But it's a very, very dramatic image of Tojo defiantly testifying this real showdown.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned a bit about the fact that the prosecutor, when he came to confront Tojo, maybe wasn't particularly effective. So just tell us a bit about how the trial was conducted and the chief prosecutor, the defense lawyers, tell us a little bit about who the players were.
Speaker 2:So it's a very big outfit right that you have. There are 11 allied countries involved plus Japan. So it's very unwieldy for people who are used to thinking of, you know, a Supreme Court of nine judges. This has 11. So it's even more unwieldy and there's a real clash. You know, people are coming from a bunch of different countries that have different views of the war and different objectives and are trying to do different things there.
Speaker 2:So the chief judge is an Australian, pretty blustery, quite rude guy, but with a real conscience, named Sir William Webb, and he is not very effective at dealing with all these other judges, but it's hard. I mean, some of them are, you know, they're at the peak of their professions. You know it's hard to order around judges at that level. It's hard to tell them no, this is the way we're going to do it. The one guy who's no trouble, by the way, is the Soviet judge, who's always game for whatever. You know maximum punishment is. The only question for him is he just needs to consult with Moscow. But other than that, you know he functions completely as judges did in the Soviet system. He functions completely as a tool of Stalin. The prosecution the chief prosecutor is a buddy of Harry Truman named Joe Keenan. But the person who's really keeping the prosecution functioning is a Brit, the associate prosecutor, arthur Comyn's car, who has total contempt for Keenan, thinks that Keenan is hopeless, stupid, doesn't know very much about Asia Kenan.
Speaker 2:Was everybody at the court talked about his alcoholism? Right, they talked about it. It's actually, it's something that's interesting, right, that it is one way in which you sort of feel I mean there are many ways in which you feel the passing of time here I mean most prominently like just the overt racism towards Japanese people. But the way that people talk about alcoholism and addiction is very different, right, like in 1945, people talk about it as a punchline and a moral failing rather than like a disease or something that you know requires treatment and compassion. So people are really mean about his alcoholism. But it's certainly, you know, it's certainly holding him back.
Speaker 2:And the prosecution they're confronting they're very interesting Chinese prosecutors, filipino prosecutors, so this, you know it's a very international group and they're confronting defense lawyers who are some very good Japanese lawyers. So Tojo Hideki, his defense lawyer, is a former member of the Diet, the Japanese parliament, who later goes on to be education minister and speaker of the House of Representatives. So his name is Kiyoshi Ichiro. He's a sort of quite you know, quite impressive, very conservative figure, but the defense lawyers are so overwhelmed that MacArthur winds up appointing a bunch. The Japanese defense lawyers are so overwhelmed that MacArthur appoints a bunch of Americans to help them out, so you'll have people standing there in US Army uniforms defending the senior leadership of Imperial Japan.
Speaker 1:And how hard do they try?
Speaker 2:So here's the thing there's a lot of people in this book who behave really, really badly. The American defense lawyers are amazing. They work incredibly hard. There is a guy named Ben Bruce Blakeney. He's a major in the United States Army. He's from Oklahoma City. He is super smart, speaks fluent Japanese, knows Asia backwards and forwards, harvard educated. Blakeney is so forceful in his defense, like he's up there saying you know, if we want to talk about responsibility, we know who was responsible for dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima, referring directly to Harry Truman.
Speaker 2:The Japanese are. You know, the Japanese defendants are stunned. They're like wait, what is this? Wait, we thought we were in a show trial. Did this guy not get the memo trial? Did this guy not get the memo? Like, and people you know, other Americans in Tokyo are giving him a hard time. They're saying like so, so you're, you know, you're the guys who have to defend these monkeys. That was it was. This was a standard revolting thing to refer to Japanese as Simeons and. But Blakeney, like he really sticks with it and gives a powerful defense. They, you know. So, yeah, they really do full credit. There's a lot to be cynical about in this trial, but the American defense lawyers are really quite impressive. And the other judge that I think you were very interested in, you know today we would call the global south.
Speaker 2:So probably my two most important characters in the book are the Chinese judge and the Indian judge. So Mei Ruowu, who's the Chinese judge, is this you know he's grown up in poverty in rural China, is the only one in his family to get an education, winds up doing so well that he goes to Stanford University and the University of Chicago. May comes away from his experience in California and Chicago as incredibly pro-American, goes on to become a sort of rising star in the Republic of China as a modernizer but also somebody who's got a kind of flexible conscience that he manages. He's in favor of rule of law and constitutionalism. But he kind of learns to live with the authoritarianism of Chiang Kai-shek.
Speaker 2:And he's very smart, very formidable at the trial and then at the end of the trial, having sort of successfully made sure that Japanese atrocities against China become a core part of the trial, having sort of successfully made sure that Japanese atrocities against China become a core part of the Tokyo judgment, the trial ends in 1948 and the Republic of China which sent him to Tokyo is collapsing right. The civil war is raging and the Chinese communists are about to take over. And May makes the decision the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek says come into exile with us on Taiwan and he decides no, he goes to the mainland and signs up in the foreign ministry in communist China and this is a disastrous choice. I mean, like the guy you know, he is literally a bourgeois, american-educated lawyer who used to work for the KMT right.
Speaker 1:This is not a great.
Speaker 2:CV, not a great right Not going to go. Yeah, I was talking to a great China specialist, one of my teachers, ian Johnston, and Ian Johnston said I'm surprised it didn't go worse for him and I spoke very generously. His children spoke to me. I went to China and spoke to them about their dad. But he winds up getting targeted in the anti-rightist campaign and targeted in the Cultural Revolution and winds up sort of smoking and drinking himself into despair and finally dies. And winds up sort of smoking and drinking himself into despair and finally dies during the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 2:And he's been revived, His reputation was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping and today he's kind of a nationalist, a sort of anti-Japanese hero in China. But remarkable, amazing figure.
Speaker 1:And so before we come on to the Indian judge, who I think is probably very interesting in all sorts of ways, shall we just talk a little bit about the verdicts? And I get a bit confused, because not just Pal who is the famous dissenting judge, but there are other judges who dissented in various ways and I don't quite understand how do the dissents work in the context of the sentences that are handed out, Because if you've got all the judges sort of disagreeing with each other, well, they don't all disagree. Who actually decides what the sentences are?
Speaker 2:They all decide on the sentences. Those who are dissenting are presumed to be. You know, they have already made their statement. Some of the dissents say that specific defendants should be acquitted. The dissent by the Indian judge, radhubinad Pal, says that all of them should be acquitted. So if you're a judge and you voted for acquittal, then you don't think there should be any sentence at all. But there are. There's kind of a core block of a majority which is made up of it's China, the Philippines, the chief judge from Australia, a block of judges dominated by the Brits, so that's the British judge, the Canadian judge, the New Zealand judge, and they kind of they always function as a block and finally the American and the Soviet judges who are cooperating.
Speaker 2:For once right that this is, the verdict is being handed down in 1948. So it's sort of, you know, basically a time of the Berlin Airlift, early Cold War. But this is one sort of last moment of cooperation. But there's, as you mentioned, there's a, you know, the French judge dissents, the Dutch judge dissents, says some of them shouldn't be convicted. The Dutch government actually tries to muzzle the Dutch judge but he, you know quite, he's a sort of principled, admirable guy won't go along with it and the Indian government under Nehru. You know, they know that their judge, paul, is gonna dissent from the whole thing. Here is this epic thousand page dissent, yeah, thousand plus page dissent. And nero is absolutely horrified and said you know, he's embarrassed and they kind of, you know, they're sort of the indian government is sort of secretly kind of apologizing to the british and saying we're sorry, what can we do? You know it's, we have an independent judiciary. We can't, we can't shut the guy up. It's actually quite admirable.
Speaker 2:Nehru hates Japanese imperialism, right? Nehru's line is always that we have to resist British imperialism, but we also need to resist Nazism and fascism and there's no real point in India becoming. We don't want India to become independent from the British empire, only to fall under the Japanese empire. So Nehru is horrified by. He sees what Paul has done as kind of an apology for Imperial Japan and he's really shocked by it. But he says he's an independent judge. You know what are we going to do? We're not going to. They make no attempt and it's. You know, this is India's just become independent, right? You could have set a very different direction for the Indian judiciary and said look, dude, shut up, you can't, and they don't even try.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's very much to their credit. I mean I haven't read the thousand-page opinion. I gather it makes actually pretty good reading. I have, but reading about it in your book I mean some of the arguments seem very reasonable. And there are other bits you thought this is a bit unhinged where he's almost denying that the crimes took place at all. Or if he's not doing that, he's saying look, we have no evidence, so it just seemed a bit too much in places.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's a really, it's an extraordinary document and it's something you know there's a lot of international lawyers who are very interested in it for a good reason, right, I mean, it's really remarkable. So it is so one thing that I think it deserves lots of credit that in a trial where one of the big themes of my book is the way in which debates about empire and racism play into this and Paul is the only person who directly considers empire and race in his opinion, he also very forthrightly says aggression is, it hasn't been criminalized. Yeah, that you can't. You know, and I think there's. You know there's a real like. His arguments there, I think, are not bad, right, he says, well, if we're arresting this on the Potsdam declaration, that's Japan surrendering in the Pacific War. But that doesn't cover China, right. So these are serious arguments.
Speaker 2:There are other things that are, I think, trickier. So one is that he doesn't accept the idea of individual criminal responsibility. He says that even Tojo is, he says, just working the machinery of government that they're, you know, they're just running their government. These are active state. They can't be judged as crimes, they're just doing. You know, statecraft is usually that. It's a sort of you know that it's treated as a kind of academic tract and that it's this legal. You know that it's a very legalistic thing and actually a lot of it is a retelling of political history in order to exonerate Japan and say that Japan was really pushed into a series of defensive moves.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes there's, you know, generally in international relations we have, you know, sort of spirals of tension where one side does something and the other side responds and then you respond, you know, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So there is some of that right. I mean, you definitely do see spiraling. But Paul goes to, he takes that, you know, to a pretty substantial extreme and is, you know, he's defending the invasion of Manchuria, he's defending the invasion of China, he's defending Pearl Harbor. Hear in Japan, often from Japanese conservatives.
Speaker 2:Paul is a real nationalist hero in Japan to this day.
Speaker 2:And what his admirers in Japan will say there's a monument to him at the Yasukuni War Shrine where I was there most recently in June in Tokyo They'll say his Japanese admirers of Justice Paul will say he never denies any Japanese atrocities, he's just making a legal judgment.
Speaker 2:And in fact his dissent is avowedly skeptical about the evidence about the slaughter of civilians at Nanjing, the slaughter of civilians in the Philippines, civilians in the Philippines. And he uses some of the same language that he uses to doubt the facts of the Nanjing massacre, where there's a lot of places where the Chinese evidence is not that good On Nanjing. The evidence is excellent. Paul uses the same language that he uses to doubt the facts of Nanjing, to deny some of the facts of the Holocaust in the 1950s, right when there's newsreel evidence everywhere. So he's a really complicated figure. I'm struck by people who kind of want to defend him but will leave out the fact that he actually ends up as a Holocaust denier, Although, to be fair, I kind of saved that for like the very end of the book and, as you mentioned, it's a very long book, so maybe people just never got to that part.
Speaker 1:That's my fault. Before we sort of go on to sort of the aftermath, if you like, I mean we should just say what were the sentences that were handed down. I mean, did anyone escape conviction? I mean, did anyone escape?
Speaker 2:conviction? No, nobody. There are people who are acquitted on particular counts, but everyone is convicted and the lightest sentence is seven years. Togo Shigenori gets a longer sentence and there are others who are sentenced to life imprisonment and seven including.
Speaker 1:Tojo Hideki are sentenced to death by hanging, and I believe that MacArthur is quite careful about the way the executions are carried out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so MacArthur is very keen not to generate.
Speaker 1:Did I say McCarthy, I beg your pardon, I meant.
Speaker 2:MacArthur Oops aspects, although in some of his domestic, some of his reform within japan like land reform and enfranchising women and rights, rights for labor unions like for a very, very right-wing guy, some of what he does in japan it's very, very progressive. He's a complicated anyway. But um, the macarthur doesn't want tojo and the others who are sentenced to hang to come out of it as martyrs, so he doesn't want to allow. You know there aren't going to be photographers, they're going to be. He has four witnesses from the allied governments who go there so that you know who can say publicly like we saw it done, we saw the hangings, but he, he doesn't want.
Speaker 2:There is something that was actually I when I was writing about it. Like there is inherently when you're writing about people being hanged, which is very gruesome, there's a certain like sympathy, that like you feel bad for the people who are being executed. Yeah, no matter what they did, right. So it's quite difficult to. You want to, on the one hand, like you obviously need to write about it. It is crucial to the narrative and you want to do it in a way that sort of tell, tells honestly what happened so that people can, if it changes how people think about the death penalty, but you also don't want to think. Well, that makes Tojo a good guy. I mean, tojo is responsible for vast numbers of people being killed, but they say no press, no photography.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they'll. You know they'll tell the press when it's happened, yeah, when it's happened. But there's not going to be. We're not going to allow there to be any images that will, because they're afraid it'll sort of gin up. Sympathy for Tojo and the others.
Speaker 1:I was interested that you had been to the Yasukuni recently, because so have I, and it's not the shrine I find terribly interesting. Actually it's the museum. I think they call it the Yashukan.
Speaker 2:The Yashakan.
Speaker 1:And I just find that such an interesting place and I gather I didn't actually find the statue probably right there, but I missed it of Judge Powell, but I gather there's a quote there that isn't actually a quote from Powell at all, it's actually from the Confederate leader and white supremacist, jefferson Davis, but I think it says sort of what Paul was arguing, which is something like I wrote it down when time shall have softened passion and prejudice, then justice will require much of past censure and praise to change places. So in other words, history will reverse its verdict over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that is that's right, it's how Paul ends his descent and, as you said, it's a quote from Jefferson Davis and it does, you know, on the one hand, like Paul, it's the only opinion that really directly talks about racism as a feature of the Pacific War, which is absolutely essential to it. So on the one hand, you sort of you know like he deserves huge credit for taking that on, and then you kind of get to the end and you're like, oh, please, you know, and he, you know, he ends the very, you know, the dissent is impressive in many ways. But you are, you're like, really, you had to end it with Jefferson Davis. I'm like like, well, if you had, you know, if you wanted a, a call for reconciliation or moving past things, like you couldn't, I don't know, like gandhi, right, there were, um, there were, there were people you could have gone with. But yes, so that's what's enshrined it, that that's what's inscribed on the monument to him at yasukuni.
Speaker 2:It is so the Yushikan, this very right-wing nationalistic museum at the Yasukuni Shrine. So Yasukuni is the it's there's. No, it's not an official shrine, it's a private Shinto shrine, but it has the status of a kind of the semi-official. It's certainly by far the most famous. I mean, there are other monuments and memorials around Tokyo, but none of them are as prominent as Yasukuni, this very beautiful Shinto shrine where the spirits of the dead are enrolled, including Tojo, including 14 Class A war criminals. But, as you say, there's this, so that's kind of problematic in itself. They were put on the rolls in 1978, the Class A war criminals. But there's also this very right-wing museum attached to it that has mementos from Tojo and explicitly treats Tojo as sort of a, you know, a martyr of the war. And this is not somebody who died fighting in the war. He died, he had a criminal trial in front of 11 judges, one of them, admittedly, was a Soviet judge. So that's, that's a joke. But, um, he got a trial.
Speaker 1:He's not the same as, like some young soldier who was sent off to fight in the philippines I would just say to people do go to that museum if you get the opportunity, because one it's extremely well done. I mean, the exhibits are are terrific and and I made this point to jonathan clements when we were talking about j Japan's wars and I value the museum partly because I sort of see it as a museum of attitudes, because there you're seeing the attitudes of the right-wing nationalists and you kind of get a chance perhaps to slightly sit in their heads and what they were thinking at the time. So I think it's well worth a visit, although it does occasionally slightly take your breath away with some of the exhibits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think many people will find it it's very interesting. Some people will find it extremely offensive in places. So they have, for instance, they've got a locomotive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was the one that really smacked me in the face. You walk in the door and there's the locomotive. And not only do they have the locomotive, there's a photo beside the locomotive of them finding it in the jungle and they're all smiling away and really I mean because that is the symbol for British people and, I guess, for Australian people. You know of all these, you know terrible things that happened, but nonetheless, you know, I really recommend going. Anyway, just moving on from that, I mean we talked about what happened to May, sort of his disastrous ending to his career. But Chinese attitudes, you know, shortly after the war they seem to be almost let bygones be bygones and you've got Henry Puy who is the last emperor of China and then he finds a new job of being emperor of Manchukuo and he's kind of allowed to sort of rehabilitate themselves and the Chinese don't seem so, the communist Chinese don't seem so bitter towards the Japanese, but I think that's changed over time, that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean, after the creation of the People's Republic of China, Mao was looking towards some kind of normalization of relations with Japan.
Speaker 2:And that means he'll, first of all, he will sometimes tell, you know, say to visiting Japanese that you guys actually kind of helped us because your invasion helped to destroy the Republic of China, so, and how you know, helped to speed along our revolution, which is a very Mao kind of thing to say.
Speaker 2:But looking towards reconciliation, you have this sort of strange, which I think you get, this strange dynamic where Mei Ruowu is. He's saying look, we need to remember the terrible things that Japan did to us, did you know, did to Chinese during the war, and that actually gets him in trouble in Maoist China. So I think that's, you know, it's quite an unfamiliar dynamic from China today, where you know anyone who was saying something publicly that was, you know, oh, bygones, be bygones, let's forget about World War II, let's not talk about it. You do that in Japan today. That's what will get you in trouble. But part of how Mei fall, you know, is in disfavor in Maoist China, is because he's saying, rather bravely, he's saying, look, we need to remember, you know, atrocities at Nanjing and elsewhere at a time when Mao's regime, that's they don't want to hear about that at all.
Speaker 1:So they're trying to shut Mei up for that, and they don't want to hear about that at all. So they're trying to shut me up for that. Okay, so my sense, certainly before I read your book. I mean, I was aware that there was a war crimes tribunal in Tokyo, but it wasn't big in my consciousness. And yet Nuremberg, the trials at Nuremberg, I sort of felt I knew all about. So why is Nuremberg? Is it the case that Nuremberg overshadows Tokyo?
Speaker 2:And if so, why is that, do you think? I mean, I think it's definitely the case that Nuremberg overshadows Tokyo. Part of the reason why I wanted to write the book, I think you know, in the first instance, it's that people still in the United States and Britain and Australia actually not Australia, but in the United States, britain, france there's still just shockingly little attention paid to Asia and there's, you know, I feel like there's a sort of understanding that Asia is important but yet people are there's not that much interest. I also think that the story of Nuremberg, at least as we remember it, is a somewhat more morally satisfying and uplifting story and I think that a lot of the you know human rights advocates, what they want are things that are uplifting. So, like when Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International does press releases, they're way more likely to mention Nuremberg and very rarely will mention Tokyo. That Nuremberg is sort of held up as a moral metaphor and we also, I think we have our version of. I have a chapter about Nuremberg in my first book, version of. I have a chapter about Nuremberg in my first book and the version we have of Nuremberg is quite different from what Nuremberg actually was.
Speaker 2:That Nuremberg is really a trial about German aggression. Today we remember it much more as a trial about the Holocaust, whereas in fact I mean the allied countries were not very interested in publicizing or trying to stop the Holocaust as it was happening. And that same disinterest in Jewish suffering carries on into Nuremberg. So there were 139 witnesses at Nuremberg who testified about crimes against humanity. Only three of them were Jewish. The Nuremberg who testified about crimes against humanity only three of them were Jewish. The Nuremberg indictment when it talks about the massacre at Babi Yar and that part of the indictment is written by the Soviets, they write about it as the killing of Soviet citizens, not about the killing of Jews. So that's really left out of Nuremberg. But we tend to remember Nuremberg today as being a Holocaust trial and valued for that reason, whereas the reality is that Nuremberg, like Tokyo, is primarily a trial about aggression.
Speaker 2:And that leads you into all these sort of controversies about is aggression a war crime? What is the meaning of war crimes? Uncomfortable issues you know, as it's being talked about in Japan. If you're talking about Japanese aggression, it's Japanese aggression against, you know, bits of land that have been colonized by Westerners. The Japanese defense lawyers say look, you're just trying to convince my clients. You're trying to convince my clients for doing the same thing you did, but they did it later, right? So it's all these complexities which are what, for me, makes Tokyo really interesting, and I think Nuremberg is seen as much more simple than it was, and what I like about Tokyo it is this subject is that it's an invitation to really complicated debate and I kind of you know, I want readers to make up their minds.
Speaker 2:But, like at a time of hot takes and arguments on social media, like this is intent. Like this is intentionally kind of a long book with complicated issues. It's a book written for, you know, for grownups. That's what I was really, that's what I was going for, so that's that's what kind of drew me to it.
Speaker 1:And sorry, I do have one last question, because I'm just looking at my notes and I had something about Kishi Nobusuke, who is one of the defendants and he ends up as prime minister, and I guess that goes to what you're saying about the complexities of the Tokyo Tribunal and the complexities of the subject. And the point I wanted to make about Nuremberg or maybe about the denazification program afterwards, is there's this sense that they kind of wipe German society clean of Nazis and there's a sense that that doesn't really happen after Tokyo.
Speaker 2:Denazification doesn't wipe Germany free of Nazis either and there are just way too many Nazis for that to be possible and there are way too many supporters of imperialism within Japan for that to be possible. That war crimes trials can at best go after a sort of symbolic slice of senior leadership and some lower level people and then kind of make a moral judgment. But you can never. I mean there were between 100,000 and half a million hands-on murderers during the Holocaust and only a tiny fraction of those are ever prosecuted. So there's something inherently always symbolic about that that, like the murderous imagination of criminal states goes way beyond what legal states can follow up with. But as you say, I mean during the early Cold War, there's a rehabilitation of right-wing people in Japan in a way, and they come forward to sort of promote a narrative that what Japan did during the war was basically patriotic.
Speaker 2:And Kishi, who you mentioned he was an important leader in Manchuria when it was being run. There was a puppet state there run by the Japanese, and he's a member of Tojo's cabinet at the time of Pearl Harbor. He's held in jail by the Americans for more than three years as a Class A war crime suspect, released because they decided we're not doing another round of trials and he goes back into politics. He becomes prime minister in 1957 and actually a quite pro-American prime minister.
Speaker 1:He's got a lot to be grateful for, yeah.
Speaker 2:He's the guy who rams through the ratification of the revised US-J-Japan Security Treaty, which is very controversial. They're huge demonstrations. Something like a third of all Japanese go out to protest and people may not some people may not have heard of Kishi, but every one of your you know, all of your listeners will have heard of his grandson, who was Abe Shinzo. Oh yeah, who's another staunchly nationalist prime minister of Japan who also wanted to amend the peace constitution. So there's a really remarkable lineage. And Abe got from his grandfather a lot of his resentment of the Tokyo trial and Abe said things about questioned the judgment of the Tokyo trial in a way that you couldn't imagine a present know, a present-day Chancellor of Germany, ever doing for Nuremberg.
Speaker 1:It seems like history's never over, huh, no, okay, I think I've taken up so much of your time, gary. I'm sorry, but that was absolutely terrific, and thank you so much, that was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. That was a pleasure, thank you.