Occupation

Author(s):  
Andrew T. McDonald ◽  
Verlaine Stoner McDonald

Rusch returned to Japan to find destruction, despair, and starvation everywhere. Rusch began his work for the Civil Intelligence Section in Tokyo, uncovering evidence for the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Rusch hoped that the Allies would bring justice to postwar Japan, but the Americans had an agenda. As part of the effort to facilitate a peaceful occupation, Rusch secured evidence supportive of American policy, absolving Emperor Hirohito of blame for the Pacific War. Rusch was instrumental in acquiring the Saionji-Harada Memoirs, volumes of notes cataloguing the imperial family’s resistance to militarism. Rusch also recovered evidence of an international Communist conspiracy in Japan, a development that greatly enhanced his standing among his anti-Communist superiors. Rusch soon discovered the level of compromise and corruption in the Occupation government as he saw innocent Japanese being purged while some war criminals, such as the biological warfare mastermind Shiro Ishii, received immunity. During this time, Rusch met a former kamikaze pilot, Ryo Natori, a teenager he hired as a houseboy. Natori became a surrogate son and was a key figure in the rest of Rusch’s life. Rusch also used his considerable power to punish those who sold Seisen-Ryo and stripped Rikkyo University of its Christian identity.

Author(s):  
Kirsten Sellars

Of the postwar trials convened in Tokyo to try Japanese leaders for crimes relating to the war in Asia and the Pacific, by far the longest and most far-reaching was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo Tribunal”). There, the eleven Allied prosecuting powers charged twenty-eight Japanese defendants—former prime ministers, cabinet ministers, military leaders, diplomats, and ideologues—with being members of a militarist clique that had purposefully perpetrated a huge conspiracy, dating from 1 January 1928 to 2 September 1945, to secure “the military, naval, political and economic domination of East Asia, and of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.” This trial, much criticized at the time, and still much criticized today for its retroactive charges and procedural shortcomings, concluded with the handing down of Sentences in November 1948. Yet the Tribunal was not the only one convened in Tokyo dealing with crimes relating to the war. In the months before the proceedings opened, the Japanese ran their own trials, hoping to settle accounts on their own terms before the Allies took over. And in 1949, after the Tribunal had closed, the Americans convened two more trials in Tokyo, Tamura and Toyoda, also presided over by Allied judges. By this time, though, new Cold War priorities had taken hold, and the Allies’ appetite for prosecuting the Japanese had diminished: the Toyoda trial was the last of its kind to be convened in Japan.


1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-186 ◽  

In November 1948, the final verdict against 28 accused Japanese war criminals was delivered in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The Tribunal, established on January 16, 1946, had begun hearings on May 3, 1946, and had been continually in session since that time. The reception of evidence had terminated on February 10, 1948, the tribunal having admitted 4,336 exhibits and 779 depositions in evidence and having heard 419 witnesses testify in court. Hearings had been in English and Japanese, with translation when required into Chinese, Russian, and French; the tribunal noted that language difficulties had materially delayed its work and had even made necessary the establishment of a Language Arbitration Board.


Author(s):  
Anton Evgen'evich Lestev

The U.S. lawyers played the leading role in organization and arrangement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) intended for trial of the main Japanese war criminals. Tribunal was established by a charter issued by the U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed as a Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan. Therefore, prevalence of Anglo-Saxon legal family is evident in the practice of tribunal. One of them is the use of affidavit in the Tokyo International Military Tribunal. The article applies the method of comparative legal studies; conducts analysis of the legal norms stipulated in decrees of the tribunals. Dogmatic method is employed for interpretation of legal norms presented in the decrees. The author examines the practice of presenting and usage of affidavit in the course of judicial procedure in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Affidavits were provided into the tribunal by prosecution witnesses, as well as by defendants themselves. The article also demonstrated the use of affidavits by the U.S. administration for political purposes.  


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 1229-1254 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES BURNHAM SEDGWICK

AbstractThe spectre of the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’ continues to haunt China and Japan. Sixty years ago in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) announced its definitive ‘judgement’ of what happened in Nanking. This judgement purported to be intractable. The legal process used to reach it produced a disputed picture instead. The resulting narrative confusion continues to inform how memory of Nanjing is shaped, used and contested. This paper explores the construction of ‘Rape of Nanking’ narratives at the IMTFE. By demonstrating the inherently contested nature of narratives produced by adversarial legal proceedings, it argues that using courts as a panacea for postwar restoration and as validators of traumatic narratives is both short-sighted and ineffective. The IMTFE exemplifies the inadequacy of trial-based post-conflict reconciliation. It is hoped that the lessons learned from Tokyo's limitations will benefit the ongoing quest for tenable models of international justice.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-333
Author(s):  
Masako R. Okura

This article, an elaboration on The Desperate Diplomat (2016), reexamines Japanese Special Envoy Kurusu Saburo’s mission to the United States before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, presenting a new “concurring opinion” in support of his innocence. The u.s. government firmly believed that Kurusu had been informed of the impending attack prior to coming to the United States and thus acted as a smoke screen. And so, the myth of the deceitful ambassador was born. Nevertheless, Kurusu insisted that he had no prior knowledge of Japan’s military action. Misunderstanding of his role in the Pearl Harbor attack and harsh remarks about it upset him. Utilizing Kurusu’s unpublished and previously unused materials in both Japanese and English housed in the National Diet Library in Tokyo, records from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and The Desperate Diplomat, based on his original memoir, this article helps Kurusu tell his side of the story to initiate scholarly debate on this insufficiently researched diplomat. This reassessment also presents excerpts from Kurusu’s unpublished personal correspondences with E. Stanley Jones, Bernard M. Baruch, and Joseph C. Grew.


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