Histories of Warfare, Volume 117. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018. xvi. 314 pp. (B&W photos) US$159.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-35997-0.
The trial of major Japanese war criminals at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946–1948; hereafter, “the Tokyo Trial”) was a complex undertaking given, among other reasons, the sheer number of Allied nations involved in the proceedings. In addition to four powers that had participated in the trial of major German war criminals at Nuremberg (France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States), seven other nations (Australia, Canada, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the Republic of China) assumed the joint responsibility of making policies on the postwar Allied war crimes program in the Asia-Pacific region, and also of supplying to the Tokyo Trial a prosecutor and a judge each. These were nations with varied legal traditions and criminal-law practices, however, and they did not always share views on the ultimate legal, political, diplomatic, or ideological goals and purposes of the Tokyo Trial. To complicate the picture, there were imbalances as to qualifications, talents, and aptitude among those individuals whom the respective Allied governments named to serve in either the prosecuting agency or the tribunal. How did participants from 11 nations reconcile the differences among them concerning competing national priorities? How did the views and opinions unique to certain individual members of the prosecution and the tribunal shape the substance of court proceedings and the outcomes of the Tokyo Trial? These are precisely the questions the present edited volume, Transcultural Justice at the Tokyo Tribunal, seeks to address, and it does so by pooling the knowledge and expertise of the contributing scholars, who take a deeper look at relevant archival materials that are scattered across the globe.
This edited volume has a straightforward organizational structure and argument. The opening piece sets the tone for the volume by outlining the personality clashes and discord that brewed among the 11 justices from early on, and that set the stage for the eventual split judgment between the majority opinion and five separate concurring and dissenting opinions. Eleven ensuing chapters are tasked to make a close study of key personalities—mainly the prosecutor, the judge, and their assistants, and at times government and military personnel who were represented in occupied Japan—of 11 participating Allied nations each. The last chapter of the volume discusses the reception of the Tokyo Trial in the Japanese legal communities. In this manner, the edited volume “aims at restoring [the] agency of all eleven national teams, judges and prosecutors, and thus better situating the significance of individual contributions to verdicts, and thus bringing back to the centre the national positions of countries which had been sidelined as ‘minor’ players in the Tokyo trial” (2).
As a representative piece, Narrelle Morris’s “Sir William Webb and Beyond: Australia and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East” investigates the circumstances of the Australian government’s decision to nominate as a judge for IMTFE Sir William F. Webb, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland (1940–1946) and a judge of the High Court of Australia (1946–1958), and also discusses the predicaments Webb faced in Tokyo in dealing with ten other Allied justices who were prone to discord and disunity. The main contribution of this chapter is that it documents Webb’s thought process with which he overcame his initial hesitation to accept the nomination, regardless of his prior service as three-time chairman of the Australian war crimes commission (1943–1945). Morris herself is not entirely convinced of Webb’s rationale in accepting the nomination as documented in archival records, but she perceptively writes: “The conclusion that can be drawn from his acceptance is that Webb thought that he would be able to, as an experienced judicial officer, manage any bias; that is, he would be able to appropriately distance himself from the (limited) views on major war criminals he had already formed and expressed so that he would not impact unfairly on the issues to be determined at trial” (53).
How did Webb do in the end? Did he manage to stay above biases and weigh the case fairly and impartially? It is known today that Webb produced a 658-page typescript draft judgment and circulated it in the last months of the trial with the view to submit it as a separate opinion in the case of continuing differences with the majority. Yet he withdrew it at the end of the day, and instead filed a small extract from it as the “Separate Opinion by the President of the Tribunal.” The bulk of the draft judgment he discarded, however, contained detailed and reasoned analyses of all the relevant prosecution and defense evidence that supported his verdicts on every count against each accused, a task that seven majority justices neglected to fulfill. What does this fact tell us about the quality of those justices, who disparaged Webb as someone “in whom no one has any trust or confidence: his lack of experience and ability, we know, and his sincerity, we suspect” (154)? This question remains unexplored in the present volume.
This book is not the first to treat the multinationality of the Tokyo proceedings as a subject of scholarly inquiry or to use joint research as its method. However, it contains a number of important revelations regarding the professional attributes of those individuals who were named to join the prosecution or the tribunal, their behind-the-scenes communications with their respective home governments, and their individual contributions to the making of the Tokyo Trial. It also hosts shining examples of deep archival research, based on which the volume contributors present new perspectives to broaden our understanding of the trial. In sum, this edited volume is recommended to all future students of the Tokyo Trial and, more generally, the history of international justice in Asia and the Pacific.
Yuma Totani
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA