Book Talk: “Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia”
A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.
For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.
From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.
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Professor Gary Bass, the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University, is the author of Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf); The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf); Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf); and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press).
Judgment at Tokyo was named one of the year’s 10 best books by The Washington Post, 12 essential nonfiction books by The New Yorker, 100 notable books by The New York Times, and 10 essential books by The Telegraph; a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice; a best book of the year by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail; and the book of the week in The Observer and The Sunday Times.
The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction and won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bernard Schwartz Book Award from the Asia Society, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Ramnath Goenka Award in India. It was a New York Times and Washington Post notable book of the year, and a best book of the year in The Economist, Financial Times, and The New Republic.
Professor Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA School of Law and Director of the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA.
Professor Hannah R. Garry is the Executive Director of The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law.
UCLA Law Room 1314