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Bibliographic Data: Totani, Yuma. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
Main Argument: Totani assesses the actual proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) against the myths that later sprung up in the discourse around the trial, as well as surveying the history of criticism and historical analysis around the Tokyo Tribunal since its conclusion. Many of the myths about the trial, such as the idea that Gen. MacArthur alone kept Hirohito from prosecution, that prosecutors did not address Japanese war crimes in detail, and that the law applied at Tokyo was without precedent, do not match the historical reality of the Tribunal.
Historiographical Engagement: Totani's major innovation, aside from a thorough review of the Japanese-language sources on the Tribunal since its conclusion, was to travel to Australia and to review the court exhibits of the trial, which are vastly longer even than the transcript of the Tribunal's proceedings (which runs to 23 volumes in quarto) and which contain a wealth of additional information that materially affects the understanding of what the Tribunal did, and was trying to do.
( The pursuit of justice )
Critical assessment: This is a strong, beautifully researched study that richly deserves to supplant Richard Minear's jeremiad Victor's Justice as the standard work in English on the Tokyo Tribunal. I could wish for many things about this book--that Totani had more clearly articulated her project, that she had explicitly noted that the first generation of Tribunal analysts were writing during the Occupation, that she took less of a narrow focus on the Tribunal itself in favor of the discourse on it in popular culture--but these quibbles cannot detract from its manifest strengths.
One of the key, and fairly subtle, things that Totani does is to completely downplay, deconstruct, or altogether neglect the key tropes and figures of the Tribunal discourse. She (rightfully) makes Tôjô look like a morally bankrupt weasel, leaves figures like B.V.A. Röling and the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal almost entirely out, and rightfully portrays MacArthur as a megalomaniac who had little personal influence over the fate of Emperor Hirohito, who was spared by a conjunction of Allied inaction and delay. She even, while rightfully exposing the true degree of Joseph Keenan's flaming incompetency, deliberately declines to quote the trial's single most well-known exchange, in which Tôjô blamed the Emperor for the war under Keenan's cross-examination, and declines to condemn Keenan in so many words.
All these choices are deliberate, and the picture Totani paints is stronger for it.
Meta notes: I've done a fair amount of research on the Tokyo Tribunal, and had I fully digested this book before publishing my paper on it last spring I would have substantially rewritten the section concerning Pal in particular, who from an ethical standpoint seems to have totally abandoned any defensible ethical principle in his increasingly fervent propounding of pan-Asianism (!), even to the point of telling convicted B and C war criminals in the 1950s that they had not committed any crimes (!). I also came away with even less respect for Richard Minear, who failed the basic standard of scholarship by declining to base his claims about the Tribunal in its actual historical realities. We all write history for our own times and from our own viewpoints; we must abide by certain basic standards of the practice of history, or everything we write will be, in the end, so much hot air, and just as vain.
Main Argument: Totani assesses the actual proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) against the myths that later sprung up in the discourse around the trial, as well as surveying the history of criticism and historical analysis around the Tokyo Tribunal since its conclusion. Many of the myths about the trial, such as the idea that Gen. MacArthur alone kept Hirohito from prosecution, that prosecutors did not address Japanese war crimes in detail, and that the law applied at Tokyo was without precedent, do not match the historical reality of the Tribunal.
Historiographical Engagement: Totani's major innovation, aside from a thorough review of the Japanese-language sources on the Tribunal since its conclusion, was to travel to Australia and to review the court exhibits of the trial, which are vastly longer even than the transcript of the Tribunal's proceedings (which runs to 23 volumes in quarto) and which contain a wealth of additional information that materially affects the understanding of what the Tribunal did, and was trying to do.
( The pursuit of justice )
Critical assessment: This is a strong, beautifully researched study that richly deserves to supplant Richard Minear's jeremiad Victor's Justice as the standard work in English on the Tokyo Tribunal. I could wish for many things about this book--that Totani had more clearly articulated her project, that she had explicitly noted that the first generation of Tribunal analysts were writing during the Occupation, that she took less of a narrow focus on the Tribunal itself in favor of the discourse on it in popular culture--but these quibbles cannot detract from its manifest strengths.
One of the key, and fairly subtle, things that Totani does is to completely downplay, deconstruct, or altogether neglect the key tropes and figures of the Tribunal discourse. She (rightfully) makes Tôjô look like a morally bankrupt weasel, leaves figures like B.V.A. Röling and the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal almost entirely out, and rightfully portrays MacArthur as a megalomaniac who had little personal influence over the fate of Emperor Hirohito, who was spared by a conjunction of Allied inaction and delay. She even, while rightfully exposing the true degree of Joseph Keenan's flaming incompetency, deliberately declines to quote the trial's single most well-known exchange, in which Tôjô blamed the Emperor for the war under Keenan's cross-examination, and declines to condemn Keenan in so many words.
All these choices are deliberate, and the picture Totani paints is stronger for it.
Meta notes: I've done a fair amount of research on the Tokyo Tribunal, and had I fully digested this book before publishing my paper on it last spring I would have substantially rewritten the section concerning Pal in particular, who from an ethical standpoint seems to have totally abandoned any defensible ethical principle in his increasingly fervent propounding of pan-Asianism (!), even to the point of telling convicted B and C war criminals in the 1950s that they had not committed any crimes (!). I also came away with even less respect for Richard Minear, who failed the basic standard of scholarship by declining to base his claims about the Tribunal in its actual historical realities. We all write history for our own times and from our own viewpoints; we must abide by certain basic standards of the practice of history, or everything we write will be, in the end, so much hot air, and just as vain.
