From 1946 to 1948, representatives from eleven countries gathered in Tokyo to prosecute Japanese military and political leaders for crimes committed during World War II. The most dramatic outcome of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, known as the Tokyo Trial, was the conviction and execution by hanging of seven Japanese defendants. Subsequent legal and historical evaluations of the trial have been critical, and the “Tokyo Trial” is almost always linked with “victors' justice.” In The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II, Yuma Totani reexamines the trial record and related government documents, and she concludes that many of the criticisms are not supported by evidence. Through a source-based narrative of the trial, one that emphasizes the competence and seriousness of those entrusted to apply the law, Totani argues for a more positive reevaluation of the process. Meticulously documented, clearly written, and replete with informative photographs, this outstanding book prompts a rethinking of the accepted wisdom that has reigned for half a century.

Totani reframes the trial's history in part by assigning new importance to non-U.S. actors. Past accounts emphasize the central role of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, and the problems, including absenteeism and alcoholism, associated with the U.S. chief prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan. By giving voice instead to the active role of competent legal professionals from the Commonwealth, especially Australia, Totani reassesses the trial in favor of viability. She provides a new interpretation regarding for whom the trial was meaningful: “Perhaps what Nuremberg was for Americans, Tokyo was for Australians” (42). The book therefore supports a reconsideration of a period that is most often interpreted in terms of a U.S.-Japan bilateral relationship.

Totani's generous presentation of the Japanese-language scholarship on the trial, from the late 1940s through the present day, is another strength of the book. Well-respected Japanese historians, including Awaya Kentarô, Yoshida Yutaka, Utsumi Aiko, and Hayashi Hirofumi, have devoted their careers to understanding various aspects of the war, including the war crimes trials. Totani does tremendous public service in showcasing this research.

A somewhat puzzling aspect of the book is the argument it presents against one of the most persistent criticisms, the ex post facto character of the trial. As Totani explains, Justice Radhabinod Pal, in his dissenting opinion, argued that trying Japanese leaders for crimes against peace and criminal conspiracy amounted to the retroactive application of new law because those offenses were not covered by international law at the time they were committed (218–19). The best-known English language monograph on the trial to date, Richard Minear's Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), also makes the charge of retroactivity. Relying on the scholarship of international law expert Okuhara Toshio, Totani suggests that one of the problems with Minear's book is that he did not adequately understand developments in legal history since Nuremberg and Tokyo and the ways that the outcomes of the trials have since influenced international law (238). Totani foreshadows this line of reasoning early on, explaining that the Tokyo judgment has since been recognized as “an important precursor of international prosecutorial efforts today” (4). I have no legal training and am therefore ignorant of how precedent works. It may well be that the use of a particular trial outcome as precedent by definition means that that outcome was legitimate in the past. But it seems to me that historians view this problem differently. Although the passage of time changes understandings of past events, historians try to evaluate those events in their historical contexts, resisting the impulse to integrate present-day uses and understanding into their assessments. I was not fully convinced by the reasoning that the incorporation of some of the principles generated by the trial into international law today makes the charge of retroactivity in the past less relevant.

Quibbles aside, the book is a magnificent achievement. Informative for specialists in history, law, and Japanese Studies, it has also proven useful in the classroom. Chapter 6, “Nanking and the Death Railway,” for example, provides a nuanced historical account of Japanese actors discussing and indeed acknowledging wartime atrocities in the courtroom relatively soon after the events, one that is useful when paired with memory-based accounts that emphasize denial and amnesia in Japan. Political actors from the right to the left in Japan have found the “victors' justice” interpretation of the trial useful for projects ranging from textbook “revision” to critiques of the U.S.-Japan security arrangement. Totani's new telling of the trial changes our understanding of the past in ways that will certainly resonate in the present.