Counts 54 and 55 of the indictment related to conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Allies had the greatest reservations about prosecuting them, but with conventional war crimes they were on the firmest ground, as there was no doubt these had a legal precedent. Conventional, or class-B, war crimes were defined in the IMTFE charter as ‘violations of the laws or customs of war’.

Here the Tokyo charter was much shorter than Nuremberg’s, which added to the definition: ‘Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.’

Both charters stated that acting under superior orders was not a defence, but could mitigate the punishment. ‘This is hard doctrine, but the law cannot recognize as an absolute excuse for a killing that the killer was acting under compulsion,’ wrote Charles E. Wyzanski. ‘For such a recognition not only would leave the structure of society at the mercy of criminals of sufficient ruthlessness, but also would place the cornerstone of justice on the quicksand of self-interest.’1

The idea of laws regulating the conduct of states and armies in wartime was ancient, but the concept of a war crime was much newer. Lassa Oppenheim may have coined the term in his treatise on international law in 1906.2 A 1944 memorandum for the US judge advocate general wrote that the term had ‘no well-established meaning in military or international jurisprudence’ but would include ‘acts which outrage common justice or involve moral turpitude’. The memorandum provides a list, including ‘killing or cruel treatment of prisoners of war’, torture, rape and wanton devastation.3

The final offence tried at Tokyo, crimes against humanity, class-C crimes, was defined as ‘murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political or racial grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any or the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.’ The definition of crimes against humanity in the Tokyo charter was longer than Nuremberg’s.

At Nuremberg, crimes against humanity were written into the indictment to allow for the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust. As many of the Jews and members of other targeted groups who were killed were citizens of Germany and Austria, their murders could not be prosecuted as a war crime. The charge was morally irreproachable but still legally controversial. As Charles E. Wyzanski wrote, ‘there is no citation of any particular international convention which in explicit words forbids a state or its inhabitants to murder its own citizens, in time either of war or of peace’.4 In the Pacific, these distinctions did not matter so much. While the wartime Japanese government was oppressive and totalitarian, it did not kill large numbers of people within Japan; the mass killings and atrocities were committed in external territories and so could be considered to be conventional war crimes. In all the Pacific trials, therefore, no real distinction was drawn between conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, hence the lesser trials were referred to a class-B and -C trials collectively.5

The Tokyo prosecution had to first prove that the atrocities happened, and then that the men in the dock were responsible for them. On the first, they came in very well prepared, with each prosecution section presenting its own case. The Chinese prosecutors presented on the Rape of Nanking, war crimes committed in other parts of China, and Japan’s involvement in the opium trade. The Philippines and the United States jointly presented evidence on the Rape of Manila and atrocities committed against prisoners of war. The Commonwealth case included numerous examples of war crimes against both civilians and prisoners of war throughout the Asia-Pacific. The French prosecution team made a shorter presentation, on atrocities in Indochina. The principal charge made by the Dutch related to the mistreatment and killing of Dutch civilian internees in the Netherlands East Indies, but they also included evidence of atrocities committed by the Kempeitai and Tokkeitai (the army and navy special police respectively), the conscription of Indonesians as rōmusha (forced labourers), and sexual slavery.

The prosecution at Tokyo has sometimes been criticised for failing to fully pursue charges relating to the comfort women scheme, the systemic sexual slavery of 100,000 to 300,000 women in army and navy brothels throughout the Japanese Empire. While it did present evidence of women being forced into military brothels, it stopped short of alleging there was a single planned scheme orchestrated at the highest levels of government.

To show how the prosecution made its case, and how it sought to establish command responsibility, I will look at two examples in detail: the Rape of Nanking, prosecuted by China, and the use of prisoners of war as forced labour on the Burma Railway, prosecuted by the Commonwealth.

The Second Sino-Japanese War became very large and very brutal very quickly after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937. Up until then, Japan had been accustomed to fast and decisive victories. But while Japanese armies swiftly conquered Beijing and Tianjin, it took them over three months and tens of thousands of casualties to conquer Shanghai. China was vast, and once Nationalist forces withdrew into the interior, Japan did not have enough men to do more than hold the major towns and railways. The conflict became bogged down, with all the worst characteristics of guerrilla and anti-guerrilla fighting of the Chinese civil war.

Japan maintained it was not fighting a war in China but was enforcing order, and therefore the laws of war did not apply. On 5 August 1937, Hirohito approved a proposal by the army to cease treating captured Chinese soldiers in accordance with international law. On top of this, articles 11 and 12 of the Meiji Constitution were interpreted as giving the military virtual autonomy in the areas they controlled. Occupied China was thus under the rule of the Japanese Army rather than the Japanese government, although this distinction would matter less as the war progressed.

In occupied China, the army promoted steadily more radical measures. General Okamura Yasuji divided north China into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas, and issued increasingly extreme orders for the pacification of semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The Japanese Army adopted an approach called Sankō Sakusen, the ‘burn to ash strategy’, which the Nationalist Chinese referred to as the ‘Three Alls Policy’ – kill all, burn all, loot all. Chinese civilian deaths ran into the millions. Japan established a puppet regime in the occupied areas under collaborator Wang Jingwei and insisted it was the legitimate government of China. Unsurprisingly it received very little support.

Brutal measures became widespread in China and then throughout the Pacific theatre. One such was the use of captured soldiers or civilians for bayonet practice in order to harden the Japanese troops. As the diary of Private Tajima recorded:

One day Second Lieutenant Ono said to us ‘you have never killed anyone yet, so today we shall have some killing practice. You must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only something of rather less value than a dog or cat. Be brave! Now, those who wish to volunteer for killing practice, step forward.’

No-one moved. The Lieutenant lost his temper.

‘You cowards!’ he shouted. ‘Not one of you is fit to call himself a Japanese soldier. So no-one will volunteer? Well then, I’ll order you.’ And he began to call out names ‘Otani – Furukawa – Ueno – Tajima!’ (My God, me too!)

I raised my bayoneted gun with trembling hands, and – directed by the lieutenant’s almost hysterical cursing – I walked slowly towards the terror-stricken Chinese standing beside the pit – the grave he had helped to dig. In my heart I begged his pardon, and – with my eyes shut and the lieutenant’s curses in my ears – I plunged the bayonet into the petrified Chinese. When I opened my eyes again, he had slumped down into the pit. ‘Murderer! Criminal!’ I called myself.6

Tajima’s description of atrocities was confirmed by veterans interviewed by the BBC for a 2005 documentary on Hirohito.7 ‘If something were for the sake of the Emperor, we had to do it. So I actively took part in the killing,’ said Enomoto Masayo, who was in the Japanese Army from 1939 to 1945. ‘For the Emperor there was nothing we couldn’t do. So we raped, gang-raped women and did everything.’

Kondo Hajime, another member of the Japanese Army, from 1940 to 1945, said, ‘We’d flush out hiding villagers and ask them where they’d hid their arms. When we finished questioning them we killed them straight away. Our commander told us that of course we used our gun in combat but in other cases the gun entrusted by the Emperor was too good to kill Chinese, rocks were all they deserved.’

The change in the attitude of the Japanese military was made shockingly apparent to the world when the Nationalist Chinese capital of Nanking (modern Nanjing) was captured in December 1937. General Matsui Iwane issued orders forbidding plundering but made no orders regarding Chinese captives. When Matsui became bedridden with malaria, Hirohito’s uncle by marriage, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, was placed in command of the army. An order to ‘kill all captives’ was issued bearing his seal – there is still debate over whether the order came from Asaka himself or an ultra-nationalist officer on his staff, Lieutenant Colonel Chō Isamu.

When they entered Nanking, the Japanese soldiers disregarded Matsui’s orders and eagerly followed those issued under Asaka’s name. Prisoners were killed en masse with machine guns, then anyone suspected of being a Chinese soldier, then civilians at random. They then sacked the city and carried out what may be the largest mass rape in history. The killings became even more depraved: civilians were buried alive or impaled. The exact number of Chinese killed in and around Nanking in December 1937 is unknown, but almost certainly over 100,000 and possibly as high as 300,000 (the latter is the official Chinese figure).8

The Rape of Nanking, as it is now known, was not hidden but was carried out in full view of the world. Horrified Japanese war correspondents wrote of piles of bodies, some still struggling, being pushed into the Yangtze River. These accounts were censored in Japan, or dismissed as communist propaganda. Western journalists witnessed the event as well, and soon reports were appearing in newspapers around the globe. American journalist Frank Tillman Durdin wrote in the New York Times on 9 January 1938: ‘In taking over Nanking the Japanese indulged in slaughters, looting and raping exceeding in barbarity any atrocities committed up to that time in the course of the Sino-Japanese hostilities. The unrestrained cruelties of the Japanese are to be compared only with the vandalism in the Dark Ages in Europe or the brutalities of medieval Asiatic conquerors.’9

There was a decisive shift in feeling against the Japanese throughout the Western world. To make matters worse, the Japanese Army had sunk the American gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River and killed three sailors, although Japan did subsequently pay compensation.

General Matsui formally entered Nanking on 17 December. The next day, after reviewing the devastation, he wrote, ‘I now realise that we have wrought a most grievous effect on this city . . . I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people.’10 He called his officers together and rebuked them for the conduct of their soldiers. In Tokyo, Foreign Minister Hirota was furious when he heard the news, and apologised to the Western powers for the damage to their property (including the Panay).11 Ironically, Matsui and Hirota were the ones in the dock at Tokyo. Asaka was granted immunity as a member of the Imperial family, and Lieutenant Colonel Chō, who had been later sent to Okinawa, committed suicide after the defeat there in June 1945.

Konoe’s government went into damage control, its actions suggesting it had taken leave not just of international law but of reality itself. It denied any massacre had taken place, and insisted Japan’s armies were engaged in bringing order to lawless China. On 22 January 1938, Konoe issued a statement maintaining that ‘Japan’s immutable national policy aims at building the edifice of permanent peace for East Asia on the unshakable foundation of close cooperation between Japan, Manchukuo and China, and to contribute thereby to the cause of world peace’.12 A man of his intellect could not have possibly believed it. Nonetheless, throughout the Japanese Empire, the media took the same line. Shin Shun Pao, a Chinese-language newspaper in Shanghai published by the Japanese government, reported on 8 January 1938: ‘Men and women, old and young, bent down to kneel in salutation to the Imperial army, expressing their respectful intention . . . Soldiers and the Chinese children are happy together, playing joyfully on the sides. Nanking is now the best place for all countries to watch, for here one breathes the atmosphere of peaceful residence and happy work.’13

Nanking was at the centre of the Chinese case against the defendants at Tokyo, and the Chinese prosecutors presented numerous affidavits, witness statements and reports, and called about a dozen witnesses. This was a large number by the standards of the IMTFE, where most of the evidence was documentary, but having witnesses appear in person was extremely effective. Shang Teh-Yi, a 32-year-old retailer, described what happened when he, his brothers and his neighbours were arrested on 16 December at about 11 am:

Each two of us were bound together by a rope fastening our hands, and sent to 70 Shikawen, on the bank of the Yangtze River. More than 1,000 male civilians were there and all were ordered to sit down, facing more than ten machine-guns about forty or fifty yards in front of us. We sat there for more than an hour. At about 4 o’clock, a Japanese Army officer came by motor car, and he ordered the Japanese soldiers to start machine-gunning us. We were ordered to stand up before they did the shooting. I slumped to the ground just before firing started, and immediately I was covered with corpses and fainted. After approximately 9 p.m., I climbed out from the piles of corpses and managed to escape and go back to my house.14

Dr Hsu Chuan-Ying, a 62-year-old academic, recounted what happened when Japanese soldiers reached a house at number 7 Sin Kai Road, South Gate:

When the [Japanese] soldiers came to the door the grandfather, an old man, answered the knock on the door. He was shot on the spot and killed. His wife, over 70 years of age, came out to see what was the trouble and she was shot and killed a few steps from her husband. Their daughter with a baby at her bosom came and the soldiers killed both the mother and the child. There were two unmarried daughters in the family, ages 14 and 17 respectively, both of them were raped by the soldiers and then killed. One was left in a pool of blood on the table with a stick stuck in her vagina and the other was left in blood on the bed with a perfume bottle stuck in her vagina. Five other women were killed at this home, that is, all the persons found there by the Japanese.15

The defence did little to contest this evidence and did not cross-examine the witnesses. Unlike some revisionist Japanese historians, they made no attempt to deny that the massacre actually took place. They called three witnesses of their own and made some effort to suggest the executed Chinese men were bandits or guerrillas, or that the atrocities were committed by the Nationalist Chinese army. On the whole, though, they were confronted by the evidence in a way they hadn’t been when defending the charges of conspiracy or crimes against peace. Defence lawyer Sugawara Yutaka claimed that 80 or 90 per cent of the prosecution’s evidence was ‘false or exaggerated’. However, ‘we were compelled to accept, to our regret, that 20 percent of it did actually take place’.16 Another defence lawyer, Takigawa Masajirō, said that ‘while their testimony has some exaggeration, it is an indisputable fact that the outrages the Japanese Army committed against the citizens of Nanking after the capture of the city were dreadful’.17

Having established the scale of the atrocities, the prosecution contended that Matsui, Hirota and one of Matsui’s subordinates, Mutō Akira, were responsible for them. Counts 54 and 55 both dealt with conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, but the former accused the defendants of having ‘ordered, authorized and permitted’ war crimes and crimes against humanity, while the latter accused them of having ‘deliberately and recklessly disregarded their legal duty’ to prevent such atrocities and rectify breaches. The prosecution argued that international law placed an obligation on both senior commanders and government ministers to prevent war crimes:

. . . it is the Government as a whole which is primarily responsible for prevention of breaches of these laws of war. This casts in the first place a duty upon every member of the cabinet and their advisors, and every high officer in the chain of command directly concerned with these matters to satisfy himself that the laws are being obeyed. Ordinarily no doubt this duty could be discharged by satisfying himself that proper machinery had been established for the purpose. But when information reaches him which raises a doubt as to whether they are being flagrantly disregarded, or shows plainly that they are, then a much higher duty devolves upon him.18

This higher duty was to properly investigate the breaches and then take active steps to rectify them. This was broadly in line with the decisions made in Yamashita’s and Homma’s cases, but the prosecution at Tokyo took it further by finding the civilian government responsible as well.

The three men certainly knew of the crimes at Nanking. During the pre-trial investigation, Mutō had been asked whether the atrocities troubled him. He replied, ‘After the atrocities in Nanking and Manila, and being a member of the general staff during both incidents, I felt that something was lacking in Japanese military education.’19 However, the defence contended that holding him and the others responsible would be to take the doctrine of command responsibility too far. They argued that there were no grounds for holding Hirota, a civilian politician who wasn’t even in China, responsible for war crimes committed there. They did not deny Matsui’s overall command of the Japanese Army, but as he was in bed in Soochow, 140 miles (225 kilometres) away, he could not have known about the atrocities, and even if he did, he could not have prevented them.

Under cross-examination Matsui was not a particularly good witness. He was forced to acknowledge that his divisional commanders reported to him regularly, and that he knew the atrocities had occurred. He contradicted himself by denying knowledge of them and then speaking of action he took to prevent them.

The rest of China’s case at Tokyo did not match the impact of Nanking, although it raised public consciousness of the massacre. Japan’s stated war aim in the Pacific War was to liberate East Asia from Western colonialism and establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken). The brutality of Japanese soldiers towards civilians throughout East Asia undermined their claim. Ba Maw, the Burmese independence leader who was the head of the Japanese collaborationist government in Burma, wrote: ‘The militarists saw everything only in a Japanese perspective and, even worse, they insisted that all others dealing with them should do the same. For them there was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many Manchukuos or Koreas tied forever to Japan. These racial impositions . . . made any real understanding between the Japanese militarists and the people of our region virtually impossible.’20

Many people throughout East Asia came to the same conclusion.

Just as Nanking has come to stand for Japanese war crimes in China, so has the Burma Railway come to stand for crimes against Commonwealth prisoners of war. The Japanese attitude towards surrender in the Second World War has become notorious, and its notoriety has come to overshadow the strange fact that, up until the 1930s, the Japanese military was in fact known for its good treatment of civilians and prisoners. In the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Japan wanted to show the world that it was both more powerful and more civilised than China, and hence win the respect and support of Western countries. Japanese forces were directed to follow the laws of war. General Ōyama Iwao, for example, gave this message to the Japanese Second Army in October 1894:

Our forces act according to what is right and we fight in accordance with civilisation. Our enemy is China’s army, not individual Chinese. Those who surrender, who are captured, wounded, or offer us no resistance, must be treated gently. The utmost care must be used towards the ordinary Chinese people so that they are made to feel safe with us. No matter how slight, they must in no way be mistreated, but rather made to recognise our virtue. Each divisional commander must bear this in mind and must caution those below him so that the majesty of our Emperor and the chivalry of our Army are demonstrated to the world.21

These directions were generally followed, albeit imperfectly. Not a great deal is known about Japanese treatment of surrendering or wounded Chinese soldiers, but those who were brought into prisoner-of-war camps seem to have been treated fairly. However, it is worth noting that the total number of Chinese prisoners taken by Japan in that war is low: 1,790. Given that hundreds of thousands of troops were engaged over the course of six months, the figure suggests that orders to refrain from killing Chinese soldiers who ceased to resist were not always followed.22 And while Korean and Manchurian civilians generally had more to fear from the retreating Chinese than from the advancing Japanese, the Japanese Army did massacre the Chinese population of the city of Lüshun (Port Arthur) in November 1894, perhaps in response to finding the mutilated bodies of Japanese soldiers.

During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, however, there were no such blemishes on Japan’s record. The British were impressed by the ‘discipline and warrior spirit’ showed by their new Japanese allies.23 As British lawyers N.W. Sibley and F.E. Smith wrote at the time, ‘the Japanese observe the recommendations of the Hague Convention at least as scrupulously as the Russians . . . the Russians have learned to respect the gallantry of the Japanese’.24

The Japanese Army and Navy captured 79,367 Russian prisoners in that war.25 Japan played up its adherence to the laws of war for a Western audience in a way that was at times almost comical. Russian prisoners reported their Japanese captors being friendly and giving them cigarettes. They were then sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Japan, a number of which were opened up to Western observers. Ethel McCaul, a British Red Cross nurse, wrote, ‘I had witnessed a treatment of their enemies which would reflect the greatest credit on any nation. The Russians were being treated as guests of the country, not mere prisoners of war.’26 A special, Russian-language newspaper was printed for them, albeit one full of Japanese propaganda. The wounded were given expensive medical care, and any who died were buried with full military honours and flowers placed on their graves. The Japanese government reported at the end of the war that the prisoners had been treated so well that some did not want to go home. This claim should obviously be treated with caution, but given the abject poverty in many parts of the Russian Empire at the time it is not entirely implausible.

While both sides were implicated in looting and the summary execution of civilians, it seems that the Russians did so far more commonly than the Japanese. The Cossacks quickly developed a reputation for treating Manchurian and Chinese civilians with brutality, a reputation which would only be reinforced during the First and Second World Wars.

In the end, the diligence of the Japanese military and the public relations campaign of the government paid off. Western correspondents were impressed with both the fighting skill of the Japanese and their humanity. Theirs seemed to be a perfect army, the ‘Knights of Bushidō’: disciplined, fearless in battle, and magnanimous in victory. Many observers emphasised their similarity to Europeans. As Nurse McCaul wrote, ‘What a brave, cheery man the [Japanese] transport soldier is . . . The nearly naked Chinaman, also assisting with his quaint, squeaking wheel-barrow . . . lent the one Oriental touch to this moving mass, for in the distance the men looked European in their trim uniform.’27

On the other side, 1,626 Japanese were captured by the Russians, including twenty-six officers. The Japanese government admitted that prisoners had been taken (it never made any such acknowledgements in the Second World War), made inquiries via neutral countries about their welfare, and sent them packages of food and other goods. A number of officers evaded capture by committing ritual suicide in the manner of the samurai, cutting open their stomachs in the act of hara kiri, or seppuku, which has fascinated Western audiences since Christian missionaries first arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century. Some commentators approved of the officers’ actions, while others condemned it as archaic and wasteful, saying that captured soldiers could learn about the enemy while in captivity and then return to fight for Japan.28 Upon release, all the Japanese prisoners of the Russians were interrogated but almost all were set free. Some were even decorated when they returned to Japan. However, seven officers were court-martialled and stripped of rank and decoration.29

By the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the Japanese Army had ceased to accept surrender from its own troops and had begun maintaining that captured Chinese soldiers were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Once war with the Western powers became likely, the Japanese government intensified its anti-Western propaganda campaign directed at both soldiers and civilians. As with China, the Japanese militarists did not have completely simple views on the West. The militarists could not fail to recognise the strength of Western civilisation and its scientific and technological achievements. And, of course, Germany and Italy were now notionally Japan’s allies, although the Tripartite Pact had been signed in bad faith on all sides.

But European colonialism in Asia gave Japan a moral justification for war. Having become rich from exploiting Asians, Westerners had grown shallow and materialistic. Hollywood films depicted their obsession with wealth, sex and glamour. Unlike the Japanese, they had no self-restraint, they were spiritually dead and did not honour their ancestors. They were described in Japanese propaganda in terms like nanbanjin (‘barbarian’), kedamono (‘brute’) and yajū (‘wild beast’).30 The Allies were depicted as hypocrites, preaching democracy while oppressing their colonial subjects in Asia. Once the war started there was something of a feedback loop, where anti-Japanese racism in Allied propaganda was used by Japanese propagandists to show that all Western soldiers were brainwashed to ‘kill every Jap’ and whites could not accept Asians as human.

On 8 January 1941 the pocket-sized Senjinkun Field Service Code was published by then Army Minister Tōjō and issued to all soldiers. It began: ‘The battlefield is where the Imperial Army, acting under imperial command, displays its true character, conquering wherever it attacks, winning whenever it engages in combat, in order to spread the Imperial Way far and wide so that the enemy may look up in awe to the august virtues of His Majesty.’31 It also included Tōjō’s infamous command to every Japanese soldier: ‘never live to experience shame as a prisoner’.32 This was used to highlight another critical difference between Japan and its enemies – the British and Americans were cowardly and self-centred and would surrender to save their lives; the Japanese would take pride in dying for their comrades and Emperor. ‘To give in when beaten is the spirit of the Americans and the British, not that of the Japanese, who will fight all the harder when defeat stares them in the face,’ wrote one soldier.33

This ideology was made official. From March 1941, the army began imposing criminal penalties on Japanese soldiers who surrendered in China. Under this practice, which continued into the Second World War, any surrendered officer who was recaptured was forced to commit suicide, and other ranks were sent to labour battalions. Furthermore, the military promoted the idea that if a man surrendered, his family would be disgraced, his father would lose his job, and his sisters would never find husbands. It was probably this threat, more than any innate fanaticism, through which the Japanese Army finally succeeded in forcing its men to fight to the death in so many losing battles from 1942 onwards. And as a final incentive, the soldiers were also told that Westerners tortured and killed their prisoners.

Civilians were not forgotten, and in August they received a book called Shinmin no Michi (The Way of the Subject).34 This short publication was intended to illuminate the evils of European and American thought, educate Japanese people about the kokutai, and lead a return to the virtues of pre-modern Japan. It held most foreign ideas to be suspect. Communism was condemned for being materialistic and promoting class conflict. As for Western liberal democracy: ‘The thoughts that have formed the foundation of Western civilization since the early period of the modern age are individualism, liberalism, materialism, and so on. These thoughts . . . regard the strong preying on the weak as reasonable, unstintedly promote the pursuit of luxury and pleasure, encourage materialism, and stimulate competition for acquiring colonies and securing trade, thereby leading the world to a veritable hell of fighting and bloodshed.’

Italian fascism and German Nazism, however, were praised for ‘destroying the world domination of the Anglo-Saxon race’.

One of the book’s conclusions read: ‘Viewed from the standpoint of world history, the China Affair is a step toward the construction of a world of moral principles by Japan.’ Another read: ‘Japan has come to be keenly conscious of the fact that the stabilization of East Asia is her mission, and that the emancipation of East Asian nations rests solely on her efforts.’

This final thought led to another book, Kore Dake Yomeba Ware Wa Kateru (Read this and the war is won), issued to Japanese soldiers shortly before the attack on the United States and the British Empire in December 1941. It asked its readers to attempt to reconcile Western liberal and democratic ideas with the slave trade, the dispossession of Native Americans, racial segregation in the southern United States, and the conquest of colonial empires in Asia. In short, war was unavoidable due to the ‘selfish desire for world conquest’ of the Western powers.35

These two attitudes – racial hatred of Westerners and contempt for surrender – informed Japanese treatment of prisoners of war. They were compounded by practical difficulties. By mid-1942, the Japanese government was struggling to decide what to do with all the people, prisoners and civilians alike, who had fallen under its power. In July Tōjō addressed an assembly of new prisoner-of-war camp commanders in Tokyo, where he gave the sort of mixed message that characterised his government’s approach to international law. On one hand he told them to ‘adhere to the laws and regulations and apply them fairly and properly so it will enhance and exhibit the prestige of our Empire’.36 This was consistent with Japan’s pledge to the Allies via Switzerland in December 1941 to adhere to the principles of the Geneva Conventions (even though the Japanese government maintained it was not binding as Japan had not ratified it), and the promulgation of directions regarding prisoners dating from the Russo-Japanese War.

But Tōjō also reminded the attendees that ‘our country has a different conception of prisoners of war and consequently has different methods of treatment compared with those of American and European nations’. He told them to use the labour of POWs for the war effort, supervise them rigidly, and not leave them idle for a single day. While prisoners of the Japanese had wildly differing experiences depending on who the local commander was, commanders seem to have followed Tōjō’s harsh directions far more than his lenient ones.

Then there was the simple fact that the Japanese Army was also struggling to feed its own soldiers, let alone its prisoners. Not having expected to capture so much territory so quickly, Japan found maintaining supply lines throughout its huge empire of ocean and jungle extremely difficult. This was exacerbated when the Allies regained control of the sea and air in much of the theatre. As the Pacific War stagnated over 1943, starvation became a reality for many Japanese soldiers in distant parts of their empire.

On 11 September 1943 the Emperor said to Field Marshal Sugiyama Hajime, Chief of General Staff, ‘I understand you’re committing most of the seventeenth division to Rabaul. Just how do you intend to keep them supplied? I’m not going to tolerate another “our men fought bravely, then died of starvation”.’37

As it turned out, there would be many more examples of ‘our men fought bravely, then died of starvation’. In September 1943, the Japanese High Command established an ‘absolute defence line’, and if it was not seen as practical to evacuate the men beyond it they were abandoned. In a decision of breathtaking callousness, 140,000 men who had fought bravely for the Japanese Empire in some of the toughest campaigns of the Pacific War were left to starve in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. An army that showed such disregard for the lives of its own men naturally placed little priority on getting food and medicine to prisoners of war. Tōjō coldly observed after the war that ‘it was unfortunate that standards which a Japanese soldier would not find unbearable had apparently proved to be inadequate for western prisoners’.38 His comment reflected his view that Westerners were soft, but it was also a view common among Japanese soldiers guarding prisoners of war.

Nonetheless, on 3 March 1944 the Army Ministry was finally forced to admit that ‘the average POW’s health condition is hardly satisfactory’, and the high death rate was bad both for achieving labour targets and Japan’s international reputation.39 But little changed.

The Burma–Siam Railway is the best-known example of the fatal consequences of Japan’s use of prisoners of war as forced labour. Between mid-1942 and late 1943, the Japanese Army drove a 415-kilometre railway through brutally rugged country to link Bangkok in Siam (Thailand) and Rangoon (Yangon) in Burma (Myanmar). Built with the labour of tens of thousands of mostly British, Dutch and Australian prisoners of war and hundreds of thousands of Asian rōmusha, it was designed to supply Japan’s armies in Burma. Through disease, starvation and outright killing, some 12,300 of the 61,800 Allied prisoners of war and 42,000 to 74,000 of the 200,000 rōmusha labourers perished.40

The Tokyo prosecution held a number of the defendants responsible for the mistreatment of prisoners of war, including Tōjō and Shigemitsu. It was contended that command responsibility, up to the level of the cabinet, applied to systemic crimes against prisoners of war in the same way it applied to the Nanking Massacre. The prosecution argued that the similarity of the crimes committed against prisoners of war throughout the Japanese Empire was evidence of a single policy orchestrated at the highest levels.

Speaking before the tribunal, Tōjō accepted administrative responsibility for the treatment of prisoners, but denied using their labour to build the Burma Railway was a war crime. His defence was not particularly strong, as, like Matsui, he appeared to give contradictory information. At one point, he admitted that he knew conditions on the railway were poor and had sent medical staff to address them, then he later insisted that local commanders were responsible for caring for the prisoners. The unprepared Keenan was not able to take advantage of these inconsistencies in cross-examination.

Even so, the prosecution’s case on conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity remained powerful and compelling.