“Responsible”—that was the key issue. The question then became: who is responsible? How far up or down the command line does responsibility go? Organizations vary greatly in their fluidity: some are tightly controlled, others are very loose. Complicating this question is the confusion caused by war, where organizational discipline can fall apart, sometimes completely. It is to the advantage of prosecutors to ignore context and simply cast a wide net as if everything was going according to “plan.” “For all acts performed by any person” is standard prosecutorial language. The chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan, said: “All the accused together with other persons.” And who were these “other persons”? Keenan claimed they were “the large number of persons who might properly have been charged in this indictment.” Still, who were they? Where had this “might properly” idea come from? Why had this “large number of persons” not been indicted, too? Keenan was essentially telling the Japanese he would be indicting a lot of other people, whenever he felt like it, whomever he felt like going after. The effect, carefully calculated, was chilling. Every Japanese military commander, ever senior government official knew he could be next.
The twenty-eight defendants included fifteen senior army officers, three admirals, five diplomats, four senior government officials, and one civilian. There were so many defendants, many of them playing a small role, that the attorneys constantly had to look at the official seating diagram to identify the defendants in question. Every group trial needs “a big fish,” a man everyone loves to hate, like ancient Romans pointing their thumbs down at a fallen gladiator in the Coliseum. Nuremberg had Hermann Göring, Tokyo had Hideki Tojo. Tojo was charged with the Pearl Harbor attack and waging war in the absence of a declaration of war—a plain violation of the 1929 Hague Convention to which Japan had been a party. As the most visible leader of the war effort, Tojo had become the most hated man in the country, a convenient punching bag for Japanese to expiate their shame. Knowing what was coming, the day before he was due to enter prison and await trial, he swallowed a lethal dose of poison. Before it took full effect, American doctors got a hold of him and pumped out his stomach. Now under twenty-four-hour guard, he would be Joseph Keenan’s prize prisoner. General Eichelberger was not so sure: better Tojo had succeeded, said Eichelberger, and saved the Americans a lot of trouble. Like the Supreme Commander, Eichelberger wanted the trial over with, the sooner the better.
It was not to be. The trial went on far beyond Nuremberg. Whereas the Nuremberg trial ended in ten months (December 1945–October 1946), this one lasted almost thirty-one months (April 1946–November 1948). State Department envoy William Sebald attended the opening day and had enough of it; he never returned.
Why did it take so long? Six months into the trial, MacArthur had a meeting with one of the most respected judges, Bernard V. A. Röling of the Netherlands. MacArthur expressed his impatience: “How long do you think the trial will last?” he asked.
“If the prosecution continues to proceed as it does now,” Röling told him, “the prosecution phase will last a year and a ‘fair trial’ demands that the defense have about the same time at its disposal.”
Röling was right. When the defense got the opportunity to present its case in April 1947, a year had passed and the international political dynamic had changed dramatically. China was turning Communist. The defense lawyers stalled every way they could, filing numerous motions in the expectation that the Allies would fall out among themselves and China, the United States, and Japan would align themselves against the Soviet Union, thereby enhancing their clients’ prospects for leniency. Playing along were the defendants and defense witnesses, delivering meandering testimony. Observed Judge Röling, fed up: They responded to cross-examination “with prolix equivocations and evasions.”
MacArthur was not happy, but there was little he could do. This was an international tribunal, consisting of a difficult judge from France and an even more difficult judge from British India who had serious issues about British colonialism and this new notion of crimes against peace. Chief Judge Sir William Webb called this “the trial of the century.” Later he decided a century wasn’t long enough: There had been “no more important criminal trial in history,” he declared. For a trial so important, extra care had to be taken to ensure that all procedures were proper. MacArthur, after the flak he had gotten over the Yamashita trial, made sure everyone got the message: Leave me out of this. Frequently he was called on by the prosecutors to replace one of the judges or fire the head prosecutor (which he had the power to do). He refused every time. The trial would have to sink or swim on its own, he would do nothing to interfere or speed it along. In the meantime, as invariably happens when trials go on too long, fate intervened. Two of the defendants died and one was declared mentally unfit, reducing the number of defendants from twenty-eight to twenty-five.
The beauty of lengthy trials, however, is that one never knows what will turn up. Among the horrifying revelations to emerge in the testimony were orders to quickly execute all 30,000 American prisoners held in Japan should the Allies mount an invasion. That fact alone, thought many non-Japanese observers, was justification for using the atom bomb: a quick, massive strike.
Tokyo was not the most important trial in history—Nuremberg was—but it was certainly the biggest. The courtroom was huge: one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, a third bigger than Nuremberg. There were eleven judges. Every day there were a thousand people in the courtroom. The lengthy indictment contained fifty-five counts against twenty-eight defendants, covering the seventeen-year period from 1928 to 1945. There were 419 witnesses and 4,336 documents. Keenan’s prosecution team consisted of 340 lawyers, paralegals, and secretaries. For the defense there were 96 Japanese lawyers and 23 American lawyers. Whenever any important witness testified, nearly every defense lawyer, both American and Japanese, wanted to cross-examine him on behalf of his individual client. The days dragged on.
The trial, like all great trials, had its moments of high drama, which of course centered around the emperor. Hideki Tojo, the man with the Morse code teeth, was on the witness stand. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. In testimony under Keenan’s withering cross-examination, he blew his cover and said there was no way the Japanese would have done anything against the emperor’s wishes: “None of us would dare act against the Emperor’s will.”
Keenan had to move fast. Privately that evening, his lawyers beat up on Tojo to alter his testimony. Next day, in a carefull scripted cross-examination, Tojo sang a different tune: the emperor had always been a man of peace. The emperor’s “love and desire for peace,” he effused, “remained the same right up to the very moment when hostilities commenced, and even during the war his feelings remained the same.”
For the emperor, it was a close call. As the trial moved along and stumbled its way to the end, there was the burden of language translation. In Nuremberg, everything was done via simultaneous translation; in Tokyo, this was very difficult because Japanese as a language bears no relation to English or any other European language. “The process of translating is more like describing a picture in words—creating an equivalent, not a replica,” said one writer. “Not only is it difficult, it is also particularly time-consuming.” Time and time again the trial ground to a halt while lawyers argued over what was being said. Translating a single page sometimes took two days, and what emerged rarely satisfied everyone. “I shall return,” for example, came out as “I shall be back.” Senso sekinin sha (“war responsible persons”) does not mean “persons responsible for war” but rather “persons responsible in the course of war.” To settle these interpretation disputes, the tribunal had to set up a Language Arbitration Board, incurring more delays. The Japanese often had the advantage in communication. The lead lawyer for the defendants, Kenzo Takayanagi, spoke and wrote flawless English—to be expected of a graduate of Harvard Law School. This wasn’t the only time SCAP’s lawyers were surprised. Another graduate of that school was Yamashita’s best fr
iend and personal translator, Masakatsu Hamamoto.
Another problem for the prosecution was the absence of many official documents and records—attributed to deliberate destruction by the government and the military after the surrender. Bonfires glowed day and night burning incriminating documents. Among the documents destroyed were the transcripts of all imperial conferences, all the records of the Privy Council, all the records of the Supreme War Council, all deliberations of the cabinet, and all files relating to prisoners of war. Unlike the Germans, who obsessively saved every scrap of paper, the Japanese made sure there were no “smoking guns” lying around. From the moment the emperor announced the surrender, the Japanese had been busy destroying evidence. They may have laid down their guns, but they picked up a match.
IT IS NOT KNOWN if Douglas MacArthur, while all the deliberations were going back and forth, ever encountered the seminal 1948 book on the Nuremberg Trial, F. J. P. Veale’s Advance to Barbarism: How the Reversion to Barbarism in Warfare and War-Trials Menaces Our Future. If he had, he would have been amused to find the author saying: “It must be freely admitted that the stage management at Nuremberg was excellent. . . . In fact, it seems unanimously agreed that, if a stranger, say from Patagonia, who understood no language but his own, had visited the Court during the proceedings, he might have well imagined that normal judicial processes were in operation—provided, of course, he did not tarry too long.”
Tokyo was no different. There a reporter compared the trial to a Spanish bullfight—except that such comparison was unfair to the bull. At least the bullfight, in certain moments, was entertaining. The IMFTE was one long tedium, greeted at the end by a sigh of relief, even by the convicted.
So it was greeted by the supreme commander, relieved he had never pursued his boyhood dream of someday becoming a lawyer.
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1948, the tribunal delivered its verdicts. All twenty-five defendants were found guilty; seven were sentenced to execution, seventeen to life, and one to twenty years. The verdicts went to the supreme commander, who promptly rubber-stamped them. One of the defendants had bitter words for the supreme commander for not allowing those sentenced to death to be shot rather than hanged. MacArthur, he said, lacked “a scintilla of the so-called compassion of the warrior.” He was wrong. MacArthur had the grace to preserve the dignity of those sentenced to death: In direct violation of an order from Washington that had been signed off by President Truman, he refused to allow photographers at the executions. In his five years managing Japan before the Korean War broke out, MacArthur received hundreds of orders from Washington. He disobeyed only two: this and an order concerning breaking up the zaibatsu.
Elsewhere in Japan and the Pacific, some 2,200 trials of 5,700 people were conducted. The conviction rate was 77 percent—not as high as MacArthur hoped, but certainly enough for him to get his message across, and to dispel any cries of kangaroo courts.
For many Americans, and especially the American military, there would be no great apology for what Japan had done, no great confessions of war guilt. MacArthur understood. An avid Civil War buff (every year for his birthday his wife, Jean, gave him a biography of a Confederate general), he fully agreed with his friend Admiral Spruance:
There is nothing to indicate any feeling of war guilt on the part of either the Germans or the Japanese—only a feeling of regret at having lost. I think the most we can ever expect from them [the Japanese] is an admission that they made a bad mistake in starting the war. I never heard of a Southerner feeling that the South was in the wrong in starting the Civil War.
For what was supposed to be the most important trial in history, IMTFE’s legacy proved to be disappointing. There were no unforgettable films of massacres or concentration camps, there were no great moments of stirring eloquence like the words of the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. There was no trial of the emperor, the man to whom the Japanese army and navy were solely responsible. No one in Hollywood would make a movie. The Tokyo trial came too late, took too long, and failed to convey moral clarity.
There was no Shiro Ishii. But in the group of those convicted was the general who had blocked the infamous Ishii from attacking the United States with biological agents: Yoshijiro Umezu. His singular good deed, one of the very few instances of courage and humanity in the Japanese war machine, went unrecognized and unrewarded. The court’s verdict on him, when it came to war crimes, simply said: “There is not sufficient evidence that Umezu was responsible for the commission of war crimes.” Fair enough, but what about the fact that he had gone out of his way to prevent the commission of atrocities? It didn’t matter: Because of his high position, he must go down with everyone else at the trial. Also with him were three peace advocates, accused for not having succeeded. One was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who had opposed the Pearl Harbor attack and had sought a meeting in September 1941 with President Roosevelt to try to avert war (FDR refused to see him, even though both Ambassador Joseph Grew and British ambassador Robert Craigie strongly urged the men to meet). Konoe, before committing suicide the day he was arrested, delivered a blistering assault on Americans and Japanese alike: “The victors are too brutal, the losers too servile.” Another peace advocate who was convicted was the Marquis Koichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the man who finally persuaded the emperor to order the war brought to an end. The third was the distinguished Mamoru Shigemitsu, the man who had represented Japan at the Missouri surrender signing. After four years Shigemitsu would be released from prison and once again become Japan’s foreign minister. While in New York for a session of the United Nations in 1951, he called on MacArthur, who said to him: “I was always convinced that you were innocent and that your condemnation was a mistake.”
Then why hadn’t the supreme commander commuted the sentence when he had the power to do so?
PART THREE
WASHINGTON TAKES OVER
20
George Kennan Pays a Visit
BY MID-1947 AMERICA was comfortably ensconced in Japan. A diplomat from India, returning to Japan as his country’s new ambassador, went to present his credentials to MacArthur. He found that Tokyo’s street names had been changed. Bright new signs indicated B Avenue or 18th Street, and parks and movie theaters were now called Doolittle Field or the Ernie Pyle Theatre. Another sign pointed the way to Washington Heights, a housing settlement. “Americans,” he told his daughter, “get homesick so easily.”
Tokyo had so many movie theaters, nightclubs, and dance halls that life in Tokyo was like a perpetual Roman holiday. The country was safe from dangerous guns and arms, probably too much so. The Japanese government had successfully disarmed the military, to the point that all the samurai swords had been turned in. Even the wooden swords used in a kabuki play were confiscated, causing puzzlement among the Japanese as to why the Americans were so obsessed about security.
The legacy of the atom bomb had largely receded. The population—245,000 at the time of the bombing—was, after eighteen months, more than 250,000. Observed one journalist:
As far as the people in the city itself were concerned, [the atom bomb] was a horrible disaster to be accepted and patiently borne, like a giant earthquake or flood. Only afterwards, when they began reading the foreign press, did they learn that a crime against humanity had been committed and that the martyrdom of Hiroshima would ring down the ages. Then foreign notables, scientists and journalists all came pouring in, eager for horrors, American ladies wept in public and uttered beautiful thoughts, and the inhabitants of this modest capital of a modest province found the eyes of the whole world upon them.
Hiroshima was a growing tourist center, with an “Atomic Souvenir Shop” selling fused glassware, twisted metal, and other relics of the blast. An “Atomic Bookshop” sold Japanese literature on the bomb, and there was even a beauty salon called the “Atomic Beauty Shoppe.” On New Year’s Day 1946, a group of U.S. Marines, which included many college and pro football players (including the
1943 Heisman Trophy winner Angelo Bertelli of Notre Dame), had staged a football game in Nagasaki. They called it the “Atom Bowl.” Nobody seemed to mind. Even the emperor was nonchalant. He visited Hiroshima and addressed the people like a kindly uncle: “There seems to have been considerable damage here.”
Culture and freedom were beginning to flourish. Japan boasted no fewer than 168 periodicals in amusement and entertainment, 165 literary reviews, 132 science magazines, and 85 women’s and children’s magazines. By a margin of 58 percent, Japanese women said they preferred a love marriage (79 percent) to a family-arranged marriage (21 percent)—a major break with tradition.
The disarmament of the most heavily armed nation on earth had gone off without a hitch. In locating and eliminating all the arsenals and ordnance depots, American soldiers had stumbled on 100,000 tons of chemical warfare supplies that had been awaiting the invasion. Then they made an even bigger discovery, one straight out of Jules Verne: a mysterious, nonexistent island. It had been erased from all the Japanese maps, but still it existed—Okunoshima, off the mainland near Hiroshima—where the Japanese had constructed a huge poison gas factory. Gas manufactured at Okunoshima killed as many people in China (80,000) as did the atom bomb at Hiroshima. American soldiers found almost 5,000 tons of chemicals and quickly dumped them into the sea.
The Japanese armed forces had been totally disbanded. A purge of 180,000 military officers and 40,000 government officials, businessmen, and teachers had removed many militarists from positions of influence (and opened up job opportunities for younger people). Land reform had been accomplished. A new constitution had been installed and political rights codified. In record time—achieved in months what had taken America decades—the Japanese had in place the world’s most liberal guarantees of civil rights: freedom of thought and conscience, academic freedom, the essential equality of the sexes, social security, and the right to work. Political parties were blossoming like dandelions after a spring rain. The voting in the country’s national election had gone off without a hitch and brought fresh faces into the Diet.
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