Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (154 page)

Members of the imperial family, particularly Prince Takamatsu, and palace aides such as Matsudaira invited the American attorneys to cocktail parties, receptions, and imperial “duck hunts” with the aim of winning favor, nurturing collaborators, and gaining information. Hirohito personally sanctioned increases in palace spending precisely for such entertainments. His officials cooperated in the
interrogations and gave depositions because they wanted to pin responsibility for aggression on a handful of military cliques—while leaving the impression that the emperor and his people had been completely deceived. Members of the reorganized and expanded court group of the early postsurrender period succeeded in inserting into the official American version of the ending of World War II a false account that obscured Hirohito's role in delaying the surrender. These conservative elites, whom Keenan called “peace lovers,” influenced to some extent the indictment process, the court proceedings, and even the final verdicts.

The Tokyo tribunal succeeded in revealing both the deceit of the war leaders and their unwillingness to admit criminal liability for their actions while in office. It disclosed, for the first time in Japan, the facts about the assassination of Chang Tso-lin and the Kwantung Army conspiracy that led to the Manchurian Incident. It documented the mistreatment and murder of Allied prisoners of war and civilians at scores of places in Asia and the Pacific, including most famously Bataan and the Thai-Burma railway over the river Kwai.
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Evidence of mass atrocities at Nanking was admitted, and during the trial of General Matsui Iwane was reinforced for the Japanese people by press reports of the war crimes trial in Nanking, which sentenced to death Gens. Tani Hisao and Isogai Rensuke, among others, for their role in the mass atrocities of 1937–38. The Japanese killing of civilians in Manila, where indiscriminate American artillery bombardment also contributed to the high death toll, were described in detail. The introduction of evidence on the rape of female prisoners and females in occupied territories, and the prosecution of rape in an international war crimes trial, set positive precedents for the future.
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The Tokyo trial affected Japanese political attitudes in the long run. Influenced by what they had learned about war as a national enterprise, many people resolved that Japan should never go to war again, and dedicated themselves to making democratic ideals and
international norms work. Because the trial strengthened popular hatred of militarism and war, it contributed to acceptance of the new constitution. The Japanese peace movement drew on the trial's evidence to condemn the old value structure of imperial Japan. The Japanese press, at CIE's insistence, reported daily on the proceedings, and though subject to occupation censorship, presented an account of the road to war much more accurate than the story the average Japanese had been led to believe. In addition an enormous amount of documentation amassed by the prosecution and defense was preserved, and still serves today as an invaluable historical archive.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of some Japanese and foreign critics then and since, the Tokyo trial was irrevocably flawed. The tribunal had not adequately protected the rights of defendants under international criminal law. In its indictment, the prosecution laid great emphasis on the charge of conspiracy—a legal concept grounded in the European natural-law tradition and in Anglo-Saxon common law but regarded as vague, unfamiliar, and historically anachronistic by Continental lawyers.
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Keenan and MacArthur, following Truman policy, obfuscated the Japanese decision-making process by omitting the one person in power during the entire seventeen-year period of the alleged conspiracy (January 1, 1928 to September 2,1945). That person was the emperor: He alone could have validated a conspiratorial union of wills to wage an illegal “war of aggression and a war in violation of international law, treaties, agreements and assurances.”

Moreover the Allies had also committed war crimes but refused to apply the Nuremberg principles to their own conduct. Over the thirty-one months that the trial unfolded, the U.S.–Soviet Cold War steadily worsened, and that influenced the proceedings. Western colonialism in Asia remained alive and well, which meant that the Tokyo trial highlighted, in a way that Nuremberg did not, the problematic relationship between imperialism and international law. The fact that no judges from either the “Dutch East Indies” or
former colonial Korea sat on the bench was telling. Even more telling were the actions of the French and Dutch governments in seeking to restore their colonial rule in Southeast Asia, and the Americans their influence everywhere in Asia and the Pacific. The Truman administration gave economic aid to France while it was fighting against the Viet Minh. In China it permitted surrendered Japanese troops to fight on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, and provided Chiang's military forces with equipment and advisers to aid in his renewed civil war against the Communists.
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In the underdeveloped parts of Asia and the Pacific, American leaders seemed to be following Japan's example of keeping whole nations in their “proper place.”

The final indictment, together with five “Appendices” containing the particulars for all of the counts alleged against the accused, had been lodged with the tribunal on April 29, 1946. The indictment specified Japan's production and distribution of drugs; Appendix D, Section Nine, of the indictment specified Japan's poison gas operations in China, also in violation of international laws. The prosecution pursued the drug issue but dropped the toxic gas charge.
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Col. Thomas H. Morrow, the lawyer whom Keenan had placed in charge of “All China Military Aggression 1937–45,” had traveled to China in March 1946 and investigated this issue. His April 26 report to Keenan triggered a secret counterattack from the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), which insisted, on the basis of specious legal reasoning, that Japan had not been acting illegally in waging chemical warfare. Having developed the world's most advanced poison gas arsenal and been denied the chance to use its new weapons during World War II, CWS wanted the tribunal to take no action that might lead to the criminalization of poison gas, especially when it believed war with the Soviet Union to be imminent. To this day it is unclear whether MacArthur or someone else high up in the army chain of command made the actual decision not to pursue the indictment of the Japanese army for its use of chemi
cal weapons. But sometime during the first two months of the trial the issue was dropped. President Truman, who lacked the imagination to see the implications of what was at stake, in effect allowed Roosevelt's wartime policy condemning poison gas as an illegal, inhumane method of warfare to be reversed. Japanese officers involved in chemical warfare and American army leaders who did not want their hands tied by international law were the main beneficiaries. Concurrently the world lost the opportunity to prevent the spread of chemical weapons. On August 12, 1946, a disappointed Colonel Morrow resigned, probably over this issue, and returned to the United States.
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Among the numerous personal immunities from prosecution that MacArthur and the Allies granted for reasons of national interest were those to General Ishii Shir
and the officers and men of Unit 731 who had been responsible for Japan's biological warfare in China. The estimates that three to ten thousand mostly Chinese prisoners of war had been killed in Ishi's biological experiments were ignored. Access to the experimental data on the killings was considered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and MacArthur more vital than justice.
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Lingering consciousness of the “holy war” and continuation of the old sense of values among many Japanese undoubtedly shortened the period of introspection that followed the war crimes revelations. The widespread Japanese belief that war is a natural social phenomenon, something that just happens among nations through no fault of their own, blocked self-reflection on war atrocities in China; and in the view of some Japanese writers, so too did a weak sense of individual autonomy and an ethical life overly dependent on the opinion of others.
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But the main reason why Japanese war crimes were so quickly forgotten had to do with Hirohito himself. The legitimacy of Japan's wars of aggression—the belief that it had invaded various Asian and Pacific countries in order to liberate them—could not be fully discredited unless he was subjected to trial
and interrogation in some forum for his role in the wars, especially his inability or disinclination to hold Japan's armed forces to any standard of behavior morally higher than loyalty and success. Many Japanese, after all, had been complicit with him in waging war, and the nation as a whole came to feel that because the emperor had not been held responsible, neither should they.

The Japanese people began a very serious confrontation with war guilt—but the early decision of MacArthur and Truman not to distribute accountability justly, letting Kido and T
j
bear the emperor's share, cut short that confrontation; so did Truman's drastic policy changes in 1947–48. The same thing happened in divided Germany, where Truman's policy, implemented by the U.S. high commissioner, John McCloy, limited the reach of the denazification program by redefining it to apply to only a small number of German perpetrators. The Tokyo trial, and the purges that accompanied it, failed to solve Japan's many-sided problem of war responsibility; in some ways they made the problem more intractable.

Protecting the emperor and remaking his image were complex political undertakings that could be achieved only by grossly exaggerating the threat of social upheaval in Japan, rigging testimony, destroying evidence, and distorting history.
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It is not known if Hirohito was offended by this tampering with justice, or if he included it in his reports to the spirits of his imperial ancestors. We can be certain that throughout the trial, down through the execution of T
j
, Hirohito never lost sight of his larger aims, which were to stave off domestic and foreign pressure for his abdication, to preserve the monarchy, and thus to maintain a realm of stability and a principle of legitimacy in Japanese political life.