Tokyo War Crimes Trial

So Japan has apologized time and again for its past aggression and occupation of Korea, but Korea is hardly convinced. As former South Korean foreign minister and ambassador to the United States once put it – the problem is, "we do not believe that your apologies are sincere."

As Bill Emmott noted, Dr Han is right insofar as the apologies have been voiced by conservative LDP politicians. But even though Japan should shoulder much of the blame, Emmott countered that America should also be held responsible.

"At the heart of the problem lies the event that took place over 31 months from May 1946 until November 1948: the Tokyo war crimes trial (pictured). The lack of sincerity in many Japanese apologies is related directly to the injustice of that trial." (Rivals – How the Power Struggles Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, Penguin Books, 2008, 2009).

"If you read accounts of the trial now, it is hard not to feel ashamed of the way the Americans and their allies conducted the whole event."

General Charles Willoughby who was head of intelligence occupations for the leader of the American occupation described the trial as "the worst hypocrisy in recorded history."

Another American serviceman, Brigadier-General Elliott R. Thorpe who had been involved in deciding who should be put on trial, dismissed the Tokyo tribunal as "mumbo-jumbo", adding that "they made up the rules after the game was over."

George Kennan, the State Department official who later became famous as the conceptualizer of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union described the trials as "profoundly misconceived from the start."

As Emmott noted, "the central charge laid against the 28 defendants, under the special charter of the Tokyo trial, was that of committing "crimes against peace, namely the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a declared or undeclared war of aggression." In other words, using military force as an instrument of national policy. Might any other country, just possibly, ever have behaved like that before, or since?"

As MIT historian John Dower put it, it was "a white man's tribunal” which presented Japan's aggression as "a criminal act without provocation, without parallel and almost entirely without context."