Japanese War Crime Trials » HistoryNet - From the World's Largest History Magazine Publisher

By contrast, Delfin Jaramilla of the Philippines disagreed only in that he thought some of the sentences too lenient. H. Bernard of France found fault with the procedure of the tribunal, and therefore with the resulting judgment. B.V.A. Roeling of the Netherlands dissented in part, urging that Foreign Minister Hirota be acquitted since he could neither have known of atrocities nor prevented them. For similar reasons, he also voted to acquit four other defendants. At the same time, Roeling argued that three defendants who had been sentenced to life should have been given the death penalty for conventional war crimes.

The only complete dissent came from Radhabinod Pal of India. He had joined the tribunal quite late, after the British decision to grant independence to India. Pal’s long dissent argued that all the defendants should have been acquitted on all counts. Japan had acted in’self-defense,’ he said, ‘really driven to take action.’ The thousands of atrocities had been ‘all stray incidents,’ he continued, along the way attacking the American decision to drop the atomic bomb. Pal’s somewhat vitriolic dissent was generated by his complete commitment to ‘Asia for the Asians.’ In fact, he was a member of the Indian puppet army that served with the Japanese at a time when the vast majority of Indian soldiers remained true to their salt. One of the other judges believed Pal had come to the trial determined to vote for complete acquittal.

Before the curtain finally fell on the Tokyo trial, a final act was played out before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two defendants, Hirota and General Doihara, petitioned for review of their convictions. On December 20, 1948, the Supreme Court replied that it had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal; the International Military Tribunal was not a court of the United States, and therefore was beyond the Supreme Court’s power to review. Three days later, the Tokyo death sentences were carried out.

It is almost impossible to accurately compare the results of the Tokyo trial to those reached at Nuremberg, although some have charged, on no particular evidence, that the results at Tokyo were more severe toward the accused than the verdicts at Nuremberg. For what it’s worth, here are the numbers: 25 men were tried at Tokyo, all convicted; of 22 Nuremberg defendants, three were acquitted. There were 16 life sentences at Tokyo, only three at Nuremberg; but 12 Nazi defendants (including Martin Bormann in absentia) were sentenced to death, as against only five Japanese.

So the Tokyo prosecutions passed into history. If they had held center stage in the public eye, they were only a tiny fraction of the war crimes trials. The rest took place all across the Orient and did not end until 1951. These defendants–those who committed the acts and those who ordered them–were accused of more conventional crimes, violations of the laws of war and ordinary civilian crimes of rape, murder and maltreatment.

American military commissions required at least three members, almost always officers. One member ruled on evidentiary matters as ‘law member’; the law member was not required to be a lawyer, and usually was not. The accused–sometimes several of them–were entitled to counsel and to the production of evidence for the defense. All proceedings and sentences were reviewed by a staff of lawyers before approval.

Defense counsel, mostly American, worked hard and faithfully for their clients, and the American government expended many millions of dollars in finding documents and witnesses requested by the defense. Many trials turned into down-home dogfights between prosecution and defense. And if adversary trials took a little longer, they preserved the American tradition of fair play in the eyes of most observers. Commenting on the conduct of the trials, one American law professor paid the ultimate compliment: ‘The legal profession will say of defense counsel–’well done.”

The Yamashita case was the most famous of the American trials, but there were hundreds of others. One defendant was Lt. Gen. Matsaharu Homma, author of the Bataan Death March and the bombing of undefended Manila. Homma’s headquarters was less than 500 yards from the road down which suffering American and Filipino prisoners were marched; Homma admitted he had even driven down the road himself. From the evidence Homma had to have known what his men were doing on that blood-soaked road, and little criticism accompanied his hanging in April 1946.

In 1947, American authorities turned over to Filipino prosecutors the conduct of the remaining trials, including successful prosecution of Yamashita’s predecessor, General Shigenori Kuroda, charged with more than 2,800 deaths. In spite of the long and ugly occupation of the Philippines, this trial and the rest showed the same dedication to fairness that had characterized most of the American prosecutions. The chief defense counsel, a Philippine army captain, put it pretty well. ‘I am duty bound to see that every Japanese accused of atrocities is given a fair trial…,’ he said. ‘No right-thinking citizen would like to see the Philippines commit a historical blunder through its courts by allowing conviction of innocent people just because they were former enemies.’

The tribunals were scrupulously fair, and defense counsel fought as hard for their clients as they had under American administration…sometimes too hard. In one hotly contested case, the Filipino prosecutor and Japanese defense counsel came to blows in the courtroom. It is a testament to Filipino fair play that the defendant was acquitted in spite of the antics of his counsel.

In one spectacular display of generosity, Philippine President Manuel Roxas formally appealed to China’s Chiang Kai-shek to spare a Japanese officer accused of war crimes in China. This officer, wrote Roxas, had saved several Filipino lives, including Roxas’ own. Chiang Kai-shek granted the Philippine president’s request.

By the time trials in the Philippines were over, 215 Japanese had faced military commissions. Twenty had been found not guilty; 92 had been sentenced to death. But those proceedings were only part of the work. There was a great deal more to do.