The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: Protecting the Shōwa Emperor

At the conclusion of World War II in the Pacific, occupation powers convened the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, more commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. It was closely modeled on the postwar Nuremberg Trials in Germany. The idea that war was a crime stemmed from the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. So, at the core of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials was the idealistic aspiration to a world without war.

Conspiracy to Wage a War

The primary focus of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was to assign responsibility against the Japanese for a conspiracy to commit ‘crimes against the peace’. That meant planning or participating in a war of aggression.

Adolf Hitler, who held power from 1933 to 1945, and his aides convened meetings where they explicitly planned a war and war crimes. In Tokyo, the prosecution argued that in Japan, too, there had been a coherent conspiracy—starting in 1927—to wage aggressive war in East Asia.

Hirohito, the Shōwa Emperor

The problem with this legal theory is that from 1927 to 1945, Japan had been led by 16 different prime ministers. And the military was so divided that factions were murdering one another in 1936. The only single point of continuity from 1927 to 1945 was Hirohito, the Shōwa emperor. And the emperor was now deemed a victim of the conspiracy.

To push a conspiracy charge without tainting the emperor, the US prosecution managed defendants behind the scenes. They coached defendants to protect the emperor.

Nonetheless, the conspiracy charge—and the exoneration of the emperor—were incompatible. One American historian described the absence of the emperor at trial with a production of Hamlet, in which the director decided not to cast the Prince of Denmark.

The Tokyo trials come across as a second-tier touring company version of the Nuremberg prosecutions. In Tokyo, the US-lead prosecutor was as an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division, Joseph B. Keenan, who viewed the Japanese defendants through the lens of his experience targeting organized crime.

Joseph B. Keenan

Keenan had little grasp of international politics, or history, nor any particular interest in war crimes. That became obvious in his opening statement when he accused the conspirators of seeking to “destroy democracy and its essential basis—the system of government of and by and for the people”.

However noble the sentiment, it couldn’t seriously be applied to the Pacific War—as Keenan imagined. For example, when Japan invaded Indochina in 1941, it attacked French colonies, not vibrant democracies. Keenan could have abandoned the problematic conspiracy charge, and focused instead on conventional war crimes, such as Japan’s execution of prisoners of war, and its mistreatment of civilians.

Instead, he suggested dropping conventional war crime charges to conclude the trial sooner. Keenan was overruled by his staff but still the prosecution of conventional war crimes was carried out despite his lack of interest.

Keenan’s handling of the case was so poor that several of his associates quit. One American judge on the tribunal—appalled—asked to be replaced.

This article comes directly from content in the video series The Rise of Modern Japan. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Cold War Concerns

The problem of prosecuting conventional war crimes was also complicated by Cold War concerns. The US secretly granted immunity to Japan’s biological warfare unit in exchange for their data. Word spread among Japanese officers that the key to avoiding indictment was to offer some sort of anti-communist intelligence, however implausible or insubstantial.

A key figure in this tactical disaster was Charles A. Willoughby, General MacArthur’s chief of intelligence. Willoughby was such a fanatical anti-communist that MacArthur referred to him as ‘my pet fascist’.

Charles A. Willoughby

Willoughby was a fan of both Mussolini and Francisco Franco; a racist; and an anti-Semite. His sole virtue seems to have been his devotion to MacArthur, bordering on sycophancy. Willoughby helped numerous war criminals escape prosecution in Japan—including some responsible for the Bataan Death March—in return for the promise of anti-communist intelligence.

Later, the CIA later found most of his recruits to be utterly useless if not dangerous.

The Korean War

Willoughby distinguished himself further during the Korean War. Rather than displease MacArthur, he concealed intelligence indicating that Mao Zedong would intervene in the Korean War if US forces approached the Yalu River—the border separating China and Korea.

Withholding that information contributed to a catastrophic rout of US forces when the Chinese committed more than a million soldiers to drive the US back south. Truly, a distinguished career.

Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

Even setting aside Keenan’s confusion, and Willoughby’s fanaticism, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal left a toxic lasting legacy. It became impossible in Japan to discuss the role of the emperor during the war because an international tribunal had exonerated him. And perversely, exoneration made other men like Tōjō Hideki look noble because they took the rap.

Japanese military veterans knew something was amiss. The emperor had gone from being omnipotent to impotent, and nothing in the trial spoke to their experience.

The Horrors of the War

Few Japanese veterans returned home eager to talk about the horrors of war. That damper dissolved somewhat in 1989 with the death of the Shōwa emperor in 1989.

Aging Japanese war veterans—many facing their own mortality—began to talk more openly about the war. But it remains a fraught process, full of heartfelt confessions and furious rebuttals.

The supreme irony of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, however, is that it made it much harder for Japan to understand how it had precipitated a catastrophic war.

Common Questions about the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

The primary focus of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was to assign responsibility against the Japanese for a conspiracy to commit ‘crimes against the peace’. That meant planning or participating in a war of aggression.

Joseph B. Keenan could have abandoned the problematic conspiracy charge, and focused instead on conventional war crimes, such as Japan’s execution of prisoners of war, and its mistreatment of civilians.

It became impossible in Japan to discuss the role of the emperor during the war because an international tribunal had exonerated him.

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