In her most recent book, Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions, Yuma Totani provides an impressive analysis of fourteen trials of senior Japanese military personnel prosecuted by the Allies in the aftermath of the Pacific War.Footnote ¹ These fourteen trials were part of a massive number of trials conducted by the Allies throughout the Asia-Pacific region from 1945-1952. Those who were convicted of war crimes received either a lengthy jail sentence, or were executed.

Although not a stated objective, and perhaps more unwittingly conveyed by Totani, is the inescapable notion that the Pacific War was a collision of colonial interests between Japan and the Allies. Japan belligerently seized territory and resources from the Dutch, the US, the UK, the French, and the Australians to feed its massive war machine in northern China. This rapacious conquest caused a great deal of humiliation for the Allies whom themselves had been the colonial masters throughout the Asia-Pacific for many years. When it came time for the trials, no doubt this humiliation influenced the way the trials were conducted.

Each of the Allied nations that prosecuted Japanese soldiers had its own colonial cross to bear, however, despite this, Totani’s primary focus of the book was “to bring to light a large body of relatively underutilized oral and documentary history of World War II contained in the trial records” (4). Totani’s second objective was to “undertake a systematic analysis of the trial records with the view to bring out the Allied courts’ findings on criminal liability of individuals accused of war crimes ... particularly in those persons in authority in the wartime Japanese Government, the Imperial Japanese Army, and the Imperial Japanese Navy” (5). Totani’s second objective is centred on the legal concept of “command responsibility”—that is, how the Allied tribunals dealt with questions of criminal responsibility for high-ranking Japanese government officials or military commanders for atrocities committed by subordinates, even when there was no clear evidence that orders to commit such atrocities existed.

Totani states that the corollary of these two objectives is to “shed light on the Allied courts’ complex, and at times contradictory, findings on theories of criminal orders and knowledge, the Japanese system of command and control, organizational versus individual responsibility, and guilt or innocence of accused persons” (5). The benefit of which, according to Totani, is to better understand the “jurisprudential legacy of the Allied war crimes trials [which] will enable one to begin developing useful conceptual tools with which to tackle issues of Japanese institutional and individual responsibility for WWII-era mass atrocities” (5).

Totani first turns to several high-profile trials conducted by the US in the Philippines—the Yamashita (i.e., “Tiger of Manila”), Honma and Kuroda trials (21-55). By deconstructing the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, she is able to examine the evidence and legal analysis that was used to try and ultimately convict each of the accused. Chapter 2 examines the trial of Lieutenant General Tamura Hiroshi for his criminal responsibility as chief of Prisoner-of-War Information Bureau and as chief of the Prisoner-of-War Administration Section of the Army Ministry (57). This trial involved the mistreatment of tens of thousands of Allied Prisoners-Of-War (POWs). Chapter 3 examines three trials held in Singapore by the British of Lieutenant General Ishida Eiguma, Colonel Banno Hiroteru and Major Kudo Hikasaku for their criminal responsibility for the deaths and mistreatment of Allied POWs in the construction of the “Burma–Siam Death Railway” (77). Chapter 4 examines the Australian-run trials of four senior-ranking Japanese Army soldiers: Major General Hirota Akira, Lieutenant General Adachi Hatazo, Lieutenant General Kato Rinpei and General Imamura Hitoshi, for their responsibility in the deaths and mistreatment of several thousand Allied nationals of mostly Asian background. The victims—both civilian and combatants—comprised those who suffered as a result of forced labour as part of Japan’s “Asian Co-Prosperity” policy during Japan’s colonial occupation. Chapter 5 examines the trial of Major Ichikawa Seigi and Lieutenant Nishimura Takuma by the British for their role in the murder of more than 600 civilians in Kalagon—a border area between Burma and Thailand (131). Chapter 6 examines the trial by the US in Tokyo of the chief of the Navy General Staff of the Imperial General Headquarters, Toyoda Soemu for atrocities that the Imperial Japanese Navy committed during the Pacific campaign (156).

What is clearly evident is the fact that Totani has engaged in an extensive analysis of archival and secondary sources and this is demonstrated by the 60 plus pages of comprehensive notes accompanying the text (191-250). As part of her research, Totani has relied on numerous archival sources from a number of archival institutions such as the National Archives and Records Administration in the US, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the British, Australian, and Japanese National Archives, and the National Institute for Defense Studies-Centre for Military History Archive in Tokyo. One distinct advantage that Totani has over her Anglophone counterparts is her apparent ability to engage with Japanese language sources and, arguably, this provides her with a unique insight unavailable to most non-Japanese speakers.

One possible limitation of Totani’s book is due to the fact that Totani has not engaged with trial records of other Allied nations. She states that there were “practical limitations” to extending the analysis to non-English sources: these being the unavailability of archival sources and the various languages used at the trials (10-11). Totani makes the point that Chinese and Russian trial documents, for the most part, remain closed to researchers—and even if such documents were available, Totani argues that it may not be desirable to compare non-common law legal systems. Totani also makes the point that given that the trials were conducted in a range of languages other than English, such as French, Dutch, Russian, and Chinese, unless someone has an intimate understanding of these languages, engagement with these records is near impossible. For these reasons Totani concedes that her research was limited to mostly “Anglo-American” sources.

However, that being said, Totani’s research is important for a number of reasons. As Totani clearly articulates: “[I]nquiring into these historical trials is about taking ownership of our historical heritage of war crimes prosecutions, and drawing lessons from them. Such an endeavour will make it possible for one to build on it and strengthen one’s commitment in the twenty-first century to furthering the principle of justice, accountability, and the rule of law” (186).

It is my view that Totani has clearly achieved what she set out to achieve with this book and, furthermore, has significantly contributed to the literature in relation to a topic that, surprisingly, has mostly eluded scholarly attention since the trials.