You would think there is not much more to say about the second World War. This book proves there are still untold stories, the most notable of which is the Japanese counterpart to the Nuremberg trial of the Nazis. This saw 28 of Japan’s military leaders tried in a Tokyo courtroom, with seven executed 2½ years after the end of the war. In Gary J Bass it has found the ideal story teller. Bass, combining elegance of language with wonderful forensic skill, brings out how different the war was in Asia.
It began not in 1939, but with Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. And while waging war against the European powers whose colonies it invaded, Japan was just as racist as the Europeans. But at least the war did spell doom for Europe’s Asian empires. As Lee Kuan Yew, then a university student, exclaimed, while watching Japanese soldiers, whom the British had mocked as cross-eyed, bow-legged, inept cowards, humble the whites: “That’s the end of the British empire.”
Horrible as the suffering was of the captured white soldiers, it was much worse for the Chinese, Filipinos, and Asians in general, with the massacres and rapes at Nanjing among the worst atrocities in history.
Yet, as Bass says, the Tokyo trial became a case of “mostly white men sitting in judgment over Asians”. Eight of the 11 judges were white and the British made sure they controlled the judges’ panel. Amazingly, one of the American judges left after the trial commenced and was replaced by another. The Indian judge produced a dissenting judgment in which he absolved Japan of all crimes. He has long been a hero of the Japanese right, who deny Japan’s war guilt.
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Despite mass rapes by Japanese soldiers, the trial saw only one mention of rape, and no defendants were indicted for the sexual coercion of women who were euphemistically called “comfort women”. Nor was anyone indicted for Unit 731, Japan’s top-secret bioweapons programme, as both the US and Soviet Union wanted to tap into that grim knowledge.
All this makes this book essential reading, all the more so as the events described are still shaping politics in that part of the world.
