Abstract
In the years following the Second World War in Asia, the victorious Allied powers undertook an immense program of war crimes trials, charging Japanese political and military leaders, military personnel, and associated civilians with crimes against peace and with breaches of the laws and customs of war. The actions that were prosecuted included massacre, murder, torture, ill treatment, and withholding of food and medicine. The vast majority of trials were conducted in the immediate aftermath of war by individual Allied powers according to their own legislation and regulations. However, two features emerged. First, they were tightly bound to the issue of treason, which was not universalist at all but rather was embedded in the notion that each individual owes loyalty to a specific state. The distinction, however, between innocuous engagement, which amounted to no more than sustaining daily life, and collaboration, which actively assisted the enemy, was nowhere clear or certain. Second, the timing of an atrocity was crucial in whether it could be considered a war crime; also crucial was the nationality of perpetrators and victims. In the end, these limits led to profound dissatisfaction with the trials process, despite its vast scale and ambitious intentions.
This volume draws on papers presented at the conference “Rethinking Justice? Decolonization, Cold War and Asian War Crimes Trials” held at Heidelberg University, 26–29 October 2014. For this chapter, we also draw on the results of intensive discussions with 2014’s visiting fellows Sandra Wilson and Kirsten Sellars to the Research Group “Transcultural Justice” on Asian war crimes trials, Milinda Banerjee, Lisette Schouten, Anja Bihler, Ann-Sophie Schoepfel, and Valentyna Polunina, at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University, whom we would like to thank for their valuable input.
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Notes
- 1.
Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2005), 5.
- 2.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). For an overview with national case studies, see Norbert Frei (ed.), Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik: Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 3.
See Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation 1940–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Gregor Joseph Kranjc, To Walk with the Devil: Slovene Collaboration and Axis Occupation, 1941–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
- 4.
Konrad M. Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953” (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2012), 22.
- 5.
István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.
- 6.
Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
- 7.
Norbert Frei, José Brunne, and Constantin Goschler (eds), Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung: Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009); Hans Günther Hockerts, Claudia Moisel, and Tobias Winstel (eds), Grenzen der Wiedergutmachung: Die Entschädigung für NS-Verfolgte in West- und Osteuropa 1945–2000 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).
- 8.
Kerstin von Lingen, “Germany as a Role Model? Coming to Terms with Nazi War Deeds, 1945–2015,” in: Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov (eds), The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017).
- 9.
Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2005); and a general overview by Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
- 10.
Xia Yun, “Traitors to the Chinese Race (Hanjian): Political and Cultural Campaigns Against Collaborators during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2010); Lo Jiu-jung, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian or War Criminals and the Postwar Search for Taiwanese Identity”, in Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, ed. Chow Kai-wing et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 279–316; Margherita Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post-World War II Discourse on Collaboration”, American Historical Review 113 (2008): 731–751.
- 11.
Gerald E. Bunker, The Peace Conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China War, 1937–1941 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 285.
- 12.
Eyal Benvinisti, The International Law of Occupation (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1993, 2nd edition, 2012), 3.
- 13.
Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land. The Hague, 29 July 1899; Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land. The Hague, 18 October 1907.
- 14.
Eyal Benvenisti, “The Origins of the Concept of Belligerent Occupation,” in: Law and History Review Vol. 26, No. 3, Law, War, and History (Fall, 2008), 621–648, here 622.
- 15.
Eyal, Benvenisti, “Occupation and Territorial Administration,” in: Rain Livoja andTimothy McCormack (eds), The Routledge Handbook for Armed Conflict, 2016, 435–454, here 436.
- 16.
Benvenisti, Occupation and Territorial Administration, 437.
- 17.
The Issue had been debated since the French-Spanish War in 1808 and again during the Brussels Conference of 1874, which ultimately rejected the right of the occupied to defy the invader (franc-tireurs), see Benvenisti, “Origins of the Concept,” 628.
- 18.
See here Theodor Meron, Human Rights in International Law: Legal and Political Issues (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Jean S. Pictet, Humanitarian Law and the Protection of War Victims (Leiden: Sijthoff 1975).
- 19.
Benvenisti, Occupation and Territorial Administration, 454.
- 20.
Prasenjit Duara, “Introduction: The Decolonization of Asia and Africa in the 20th Century,” in: Prasenjit Duara (ed), Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge 2004), 1–18, here 2.
- 21.
See, for instance, “Soekarno is Quisling like Laurel and Bamaw, says ‘Washington Post’,” Cairns Post (Australia), 31 October 1945, 3.
- 22.
Paul Kratoska, “The Second World War and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia,” in: Franz Knipping, Piyanāt Bunnāk, and Vimolvan Phatharodom (eds), Europe and Southeast Asia in the Contemporary World: Mutual Influences and Comparisons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 125.
- 23.
Sandra Wilson, Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt, and Dean Aszkielowicz, Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice after the Second World War (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
- 24.
United Nations War Crimes Commission, History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War (London: HMSO, 1948).
- 25.
Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 58–105; Jürgen Matthäus, “The Lessons of Leipzig: Punishing German War Criminals after the First World War,” in: Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus (eds), Atrocities on Trial (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 3–23. Fifteen other German soldiers were tried for crimes against prisoners of war and at sea. Gerd Hankel, Die Leipziger Prozesse. Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 103.
- 26.
“Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties,” American Journal of International Law 14, no. 1/2 (1920), 95–154.
- 27.
XVth International Conference of the Red Cross, Draft International Convention on the Condition and Protection of Civilians of enemy nationality who are on territory belonging to or occupied by a belligerent (Tokyo, 1934), https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/320?OpenDocument (accessed 28 Nov. 2016).
- 28.
Daniel Marc Segesser and Myriam Gessler, “Rafael Lemkin and the International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes (1919–1948),” in: Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds, The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–12.
- 29.
For an early discussion of this doctrine, see Walter Wheeler Cook, “Act, Intention, and Motive in the Criminal Law,” Yale Law Journal 26, no. 8 (1917), 646 [645–663].
- 30.
The sole exception was General Sakai Takashi, who faced charges of war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity in a court convened by the Republic of China. See “Trial of Takashi Sakai,” in United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, XIV (London: HMSO, 1949), 1–7.
- 31.
Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).
- 32.
See especially Gavan McCormack, “Apportioning the Blame: Australian Trials for Railway Crimes,” in: Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 85–115.
- 33.
Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
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von Lingen, K., Cribb, R. (2017). War Crimes Trials in Asia: Collaboration and Complicity in the Aftermath of War. In: von Lingen, K. (eds) Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia, 1945-1956. World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53141-0_1
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