ABSTRACT
After the Second World War, the victorious Allies brought nearly 5,700 Japanese suspects to trial for war crimes, in two different categories of proceedings. 1 Twenty-eight military and political leaders were presented to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo, in the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials in which senior Nazis were prosecuted between 1946 and 1948. The Japanese were charged with crimes relating to the planning, initiating, or waging of aggressive war. Using the principle of command responsibility, all except two defendants were also charged with conventional war crimes, which mostly concerned murder and ill-treatment of Allied prisoners of war and local civilians in areas occupied by the Japanese military. 2 Between 1945 and 1951, thousands of Japanese military personnel were also prosecuted in military courts for conventional war crimes under the separate national legislation passed by governments of seven countries – Australia, Nationalist China, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States – plus the newly independent Philippines. The prosecutions took place in fi fty-three locations throughout Southeast Asia, the Pacifi c, China, and in Darwin and Yokohama. The great majority of defendants were convicted. About a thousand people were condemned to death (though not all death sentences were carried out); others were sentenced to life imprisonment or other jail terms. 3 Those convicted were generally executed or imprisoned in the territory in which they had been tried. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China also prosecuted Japanese military personnel whom they designated as war criminals, though these trials took place outside the system created by the other wartime Allies, as also analyzed by Sherzod Muminov in Chapter 8 .
