The United States took the lead in the Far East war criminal trials. MacArthur, as supreme commander for the Allied powers, had the authority to convene the proceedings and largely controlled their progress. America’s allies were content to have it so. The United States had carried the major burden of the war against Japan and had emerged by far the strongest power in the Pacific. Americans prosecuted more defendants than anybody else and considerably influenced the Allies’ trials as well. From the beginning, however, the Allies agreed on one basic premise: The trials should be both public and fair, so that not only the world but also Japan herself should see how evenhandedly free nations dealt with evil.

Immediately after the shooting stopped, the Allies began work on an international military tribunal of the sort established at Nuremberg. The chief prosecutor would be Joseph B. Keenan, a well-known New Deal politician and adviser to President Roosevelt. Keenan turned out to be an able organizer and prosecutor, who worked well with the other Allies. Over time, more than 70 associate prosecutors worked within Keenan’s International Prosecution Section. All contributed.

Their targets would be the major Japanese leaders, accused of ‘crimes against peace,’ that is, the planning and execution of aggressive war. Other defendants, less prominent and accused of more mundane crimes, would face courts-martial and other lesser tribunals. As at Nuremberg, the Tokyo defendants were to be accorded counsel, assistance in procuring evidence and witnesses, and adequate time to prepare.

The rules of procedure were otherwise relaxed because of the immense difficulty in locating witnesses. As one Englishman put it, this trial and others to follow should ‘be bound simply by ordinary opinions of fairness and justice.’ That was a pretty fair yardstick and accorded well with President Harry S. Truman’s directive that the trials determine guilt substantially as was done at Nuremberg.

The Tokyo defendants were the politicians and generals, leading war makers in the eyes of the free world, headed by Hideki Tojo, premier of Japan through most of the war. This proceeding was staffed with attorneys in the same manner as the trials at Nuremberg. On the bench were judges from most of the nations whose citizens had been brutalized by the Japanese, led by the court president, Sir William Webb of Australia.

There were 25 defendants. Two more died during the trial. A third defendant deteriorated mentally so far that he could not stand trial. They were all officials of high rank, among them four prime ministers, four foreign ministers, five war ministers, two navy ministers and four ambassadors. Fourteen had been army generals. Another three were admirals.

Tojo was the best-known of the accused, for he had been a symbol of Japanese aggression in the West throughout the war, and had been prime minister during and after the time of Pearl Harbor. The wartime foreign ministers–Koki Hirota, Mamoru Shigemitsu and Shigenori Togo–held roughly the position occupied by Joachim von Ribbentrop in Nazi Germany. Perhaps ominously for the Tokyo defendants, he had been hanged at Nuremberg.

The accused faced a 55-count indictment, an extraordinary document drafted mostly by Arthur Comyns-Carr, the British prosecutor, with advice from many of the other national prosecutors. Comyns-Carr had to compromise, as one American lawyer put it, ‘between the eleven legal systems involved,’ but in the end he managed a coherent document that ‘fairly apprised the accused of the offense with which they were charged.’

Every nation’s prosecutor signed the indictment, which charged the accused with ‘crimes against peace’–36 counts; ‘murder’–16 counts; and ‘other conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity’–3 counts. In broad outline, the defendants were accused, somewhat imprecisely, of conspiring between 1928 and 1941 to wage ‘aggressive war,’ in order to gain ‘domination and control of East Asia.’ As in Yamashita’s case, the prosecution argued that they either knew or should have known of widespread atrocities and did nothing to stop them.

One obvious defendant would be missing from the dock. Emperor Hirohito would not be tried, in spite of widespread demand that he be prosecuted. The ostensible reason was that he had been only a figurehead, overridden by a military cabal. In fact, the probable reason was MacArthur’s insistence that conviction of the emperor would end whatever stability remained in Japan.

The Tokyo prosecution began in May 1946; after hundreds of sessions, it closed in November two years later. The trial was held, perhaps symbolically, in the auditorium of the Japanese War Ministry building, and in the audience were 100 correspondents, both Japanese and Allied, and several hundred spectators. Before it was over, the prosecution had produced more than 400 witnesses, almost 800 witness affidavits and about 1,000 other documents.

The trial was conducted under one serious handicap not present during the Nuremberg prosecutions. In spite of the presence of more than 150 Japanese staff, effective simultaneous translations could not be managed. Counsel was therefore limited to short questions posed in elementary language or written interrogatories submitted in advance. This restriction undoubtedly handicapped lawyers for both sides in getting at the truth.

As symbolically important as the Tokyo venue were the opening remarks of Sir William Webb. The tribunal would deal fairly, he said, without prejudging: ‘To our great task we bring open minds both on the facts and the law….The onus will be on the prosecution to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.’

That set the stage. Whatever abuses of justice Japan and the Japanese had committed, there would be no abuses here. Defense counsel were both Japanese and American. Although most of the defendants chose men of their own country to represent them, including some of the finest legal minds in Japan, the Americans were able to help their Japanese counterparts with Western legal concepts and procedure. In any event, counsel from the two recent enemies produced a tough and outspoken defense.

Defense counsel asserted that there could have been no conspiracy to make war. Fifteen Japanese cabinets had come and gone between 1928 and 1941. Moreover, the accused had often disagreed among themselves; some had opposed certain decisions of the Japanese leadership; some had opposed the war itself. Where there was neither continuity nor agreement, argued the defense, there could by definition be no conspiracy. It was a powerful argument.

Moreover, Tojo himself took responsibility, as premier, for anything either he or his country had done. He asserted, however, with the other defendants, that they–and Japan–had made war only in’self-defense,’ relying for defense on the West’s freezing of Japanese assets, the provision of military assistance to China, and ‘inflexible and unsympathetic’ demands that Japan withdraw from China.

The judgment at Tokyo was not handed down for seven months after all the evidence was in. When it appeared, in November 1948, it was 1,218 pages long, more than 1,000 of which were devoted to findings of fact. The judgment itself took a mere seven pages; the verdicts required 82 more. All defendants were found guilty, and the sentence was death by hanging for Tojo, Foreign Minister Koki Hirota and five generals (Kenji Doihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Hyoturo Kimura, Iwane Matsui and Akira Muto). Sixteen others got life. Two sometime foreign ministers, Shigenori Togo and Mamoru Shigemitsu, were sentenced to periods of years. Togo died in prison; Shigemitsu, a phoenix from the ashes, would again serve Japan as foreign minister.

The commission rejected Japanese self-defense claims out of hand. Prewar Western measures, said the opinion, were only in reaction to Japanese aggression begun years before. Japan had certainly waged aggressive war against the Western nations, said the tribunal, and had begun it by ‘unprovoked attacks.’ Those killed by Japan in the course of such an unlawful, aggressive war had therefore been murdered. Perhaps more damning, the commission found Japan had consistently violated the laws of war. Only 4 percent of American and British prisoners of war held by Germany and Italy had died during the war. Of those held by the Japanese, a shocking 27 percent had not survived. A good many had been murdered; most had died of disease, mistreatment and malnutrition.

The judgment was not unanimous. Eight of the judges, including the American Myron Cramer, judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, concurred in the judgment and sentences. Sir William Webb dissented, at least to the degree that he thought the offense of conspiracy had no basis in international law. He also thought that some of the sentences were excessive and suggested that Hirohito might well have been prosecuted with the rest.

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