Every lawyer, politician and historian in Europe and America remembers Nuremberg, the trial of surviving Nazi leaders after the second world war. Few remember Tokyo, the international tribunal that arraigned the surviving Japanese leadership. And yet Tokyo lasted for more than two years (1946-8), as against Nuremberg’s brisk 11 months (1945-6), produced a far taller mountain of documents and – in contrast to the German trial – found every single defendant guilty. The Tokyo judges intended to build on Nuremberg’s achievement, laying wider foundations for the code and practise of international law. But almost the only living and active memory of their efforts today is one dissenting opinion: the astonishing rejection of the tribunal itself and much of its evidence by the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal. His views, in recklessly distorted and exaggerated versions, remain holy writ for Japan’s extreme nationalists to this day.
Pal was not the only dissenting judge. The verdicts and sentences (seven of the 28 defendants were hanged) rested on a fairly precarious majority, cobbled together by the short-tempered Australian court president, William Webb, in alliance with the “British and Commonwealth bloc” of judges. The prosecution team was headed by a blundering American alcoholic, Joseph Keenan, whose performance embarrassed everyone. (His British deputy, the “brainy” hardliner Arthur Comyns Carr, fumed at having to “act as an inebriate house attendant”). The defending advocates were an under-equipped mixture of Japanese lawyers and Americans flown in to cover their lack of English. The Soviet judge, in the usual Russian manner, treated the defenders as if they were defendants, and scolded them as propagandists for fascist imperialism. There were times when the trial seemed close to breakdown, as judges and prosecutors squabbled, and the Scottish judge, William Patrick, despaired over this “long collieshangie” (Scots dictionary: “noisy dispute, uproar, a dog-fight”). But when the British bloc proposed sacking Webb and Keenan, they collided with General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander in Japan, who “stopped the British cold”. For him, their plan was “a dastardly act to stab a man in the back”.
