ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates chronologically the attitude of the Japanese towards the Tokyo Trial from 1946 to 2006. The general view held by the Japanese now, and then, is that the Tokyo Trial was ‘victor’s justice’. It was, and is, perceived as ‘a display of power’ rather than of morality or justice. B. V. A. Röling, the Dutch judge at the tribunal, reflected his experience in Japan during the trial:
I sometimes had contacts with Japanese students. The first thing they always asked was: ‘Are you morally entitled to sit in judgement over the leaders of Japan when the Allies have burned down all of its cities with sometimes, as in Tokyo, in one night, 100,000 deaths and which culminated in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those were war crimes’.1
