How finished business became unfinished

During their occupation of parts of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War, Japanese soldiers committed many atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the region, against Western civilians and against captured Allied soldiers. These crimes included numerous cases of summary execution, beating, deprivation of food and medicine, and the forcing of women into prostitution, as well as less common instances of cannibalism, medical experimentation on live human subjects and other egregious crimes. ² As information on these actions became available outside the Japanese empire, the official response of the Allied powers was to promise a programme of war crimes trials to identify, convict and sentence those who had carried them out. The trials ran from 1945 to 1951 in about 50 Allied courtrooms across Asia and the Pacific. The courts tried 5,677 persons, convicting just over 80 per cent of them. ³ Some hundreds – the exact number remains uncertain – were sentenced to death and executed. Other death sentences were commuted to terms of imprisonment. The majority of those convicted received prison sentences ranging from life to a few years. The judicial process concluded with the accelerated release of those convicted, an unanticipated process which concluded in 1958.