Judgment At Tokyo World War Ii On Trial And The Making Of Modern Asia Gary J Bass by Gary J. Bass 9781101947104, 9781101947111, 1101947101, 110194711X instant download after payment.

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end WWII, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage & destruction. For Truman, MacArthur, & Chiang Kai-shek, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried & punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, & elsewhere; & rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes & prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law & U.S. hegemony. 

For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from U.S. hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism & that the court was victors’ justice.

For more than 2 years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, & Australia, as well as the U.S. & European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality & the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity & unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, & divisions that provoke int’l discord between China, Japan, & Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions & contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence & partition.