Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (147 page)

By this time, Hirohito was also preparing for his second meeting with General MacArthur, which he wanted to have before the Tokyo trial opened. A tentative date had been set for the meeting, April 23. Terasaki was to serve as the interpreter. But on the twenty-second, Terasaki had to ask Fellers for a postponement due to the unexpected resignation of the Shidehara cabinet. The cancellation deprived Hirohito of the chance to see MacArthur prior to the trial and to explain in person his purposes during the first twenty years of his reign. In this situation (as NHK documentary writer Higashino Shin hypothesized), Terasaki made available to Fellers his own brief (undated and untitled) summary, in English, of key points from the emperor's previous dictation sessions. Terasaki had intended to use this material as reference in interpreting for the cancelled meeting. As Fellers was personally duty bound to keep MacArthur informed of precisely such matters, “there is a very strong possibility that MacArthur read the English version.”
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He may also have read Terasaki's longer version of the “Monologue,” though that document has not, so far, turned up in the papers of MacArthur or other American participants.

In the longer Japanese version, the emperor addressed thirty topics; the shorter English version contains only ten and puts emphasis on the emperor's powerlessness, omitting completely his role during the China war. The aim of both documents is clearly to present the argument that Hirohito had not been able to prevent the opening of war, and to explain why he could act independently only when the cabinet was not functioning.

III

During February and March 1946, while the Japanese public was learning about the new constitution, the work of the IPS continued. The executive committee of the IPS was composed mainly of “associate counsels” from each of the countries comprising the tribunal. Chaired by Chief Prosecutor Keenan and assisted by the most experienced lawyers on his staff, the IPS focused on interrogating and selecting those suspects who would be charged with “crimes against peace.” Thirty names appeared on the Class A suspects list compiled by American prosecutors, but only eleven on the British list; neither mentioned the emperor. The Australians, however, presented a “provisional list of 100” possible indictees, including Hirohito for “crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.” The Australians also furnished a detailed memorandum supporting the charges against the emperor. Never “at any time,” it stressed, was Hirohito “forced by duress to give his written approval” to any aggressive military action. The memorandum asked rhetorically, “[I]s his crime not greater because he approved of something in which he did not believe?”
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The executive committee whittled the number of indictees down to twenty-eight. Excluded, among others, was Ishiwara Kanji, the mastermind of the Manchurian Incident. Ishiwara had not been interviewed during the preparatory stage. His removal from the indictees list was probably owed to Keenan's positive
image of Ishiwara as one who had opposed T
j
and tried to overthrow his regime. But it may also have reflected the American prosecutors' mistaken belief that middle-echelon staff officers, like their American counterparts, were never prime movers in initiating aggression.
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In the end only twenty-six defendants were indicted. There were no businessmen, no university intellectuals, no Buddhist priests, no judges, and no journalists who had preached militarism and racial fanaticism. When the Soviet delegates tardily arrived on April 13, they tried to include three businessmen who had played leading roles in organizing the economy for war, but succeeded in adding only Gen. Umezu Yoshijir
and diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru. Former foreign minister Matsuoka Y
suke and former naval chief of staff Nagano Osumi died before the trial was concluded. One defendant—
kawa Sh
mei—was declared mentally incompetent.

A serious distorting effect on the selection of the Tokyo defendants, and later on the trial itself, arose from the overwhelming U.S. military and economic domination of the Asia-Pacific region, and from MacArthur's excessive power. But above all, distortions stemmed from the subordination of international law to
realpolitik
by
all
the Allied governments. Those governments tended to rank their national interests first, law and morality second. So did Hirohito and his advisers, working covertly behind the unfolding legal drama.

Thus the Soviet delegation, on instructions from Stalin, chose to follow the leader and call for Hirohito's indictment only if the Americans did. The representatives of the only three Asian countries that participated in the tribunal—China, the Philippines, and India—also sought to avoid conflict with American policy as much as possible and to pursue their own lines of inquiry.

No country had suffered more from Japan's aggression than China; and no Allied war leader understood the close connection
between the Japanese monarchy and militarism better than did Chiang Kai-shek. But Chiang also believed Hirohito to be a check on the spread of Communism, and so opted not to indict. Although his own military courts indicted and tried 883 Japanese for war crimes in ten different cities, he did not accord high priority to the Tokyo trial. Chiang's war with the Communists was about to resume. He needed American financial aid and military assistance, and hoped to persuade Japanese military personnel to stay on after surrender so that he could use them in his war against the Communists.

The small legal team Chiang dispatched to Tokyo reflected these priorities: one judge (Mei Ju-ao), one prosecutor (Hsiang Che-chun), and only two secretaries. Later Chiang sent more personnel and had materials collected pertaining to war crimes, but never enough to allow the Chinese to take the initiative. During the China stage of the prosecution's case, in the summer of 1946, American prosecutors did the main work of investigating accusations of Japanese criminal behavior, Prosecutor Hsiang merely assisting. On the other hand Hsiang energetically probed the Nanking atrocities and the killing of civilians and disarmed soldiers in many other Chinese cities. He also presented evidence on the crime of rape, though without treating it as a crime against humanity.

Nationalist China chose not to hand over to IPS investigators the vast amount of data on Chinese war casualties that Chiang's “Commission on Reparations” had been accumulating ever since 1938. Nor did it pursue Japan's forced recruitment of civilian laborers, the “kill all, burn all, steal all” (
sank
sakusen
) campaigns in North China, and the use of poison gas. These “crimes against humanity” (with the exception of the last) had taken place mostly in the Communist base areas, so Chiang Kai-shek was not interested in them.
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This may explain why Chiang's chief of staff, Gen. Ho Ying-ch'in, treated Gen. Okamura Yasuji, architect of the liquidation campaigns, and Okamura's subordinate officers “in and around Nanking…like honored guests instead of defeated enemies.”
²⁶
When a Chinese military court in Nanking convicted Okamura of war crimes in July 1948, Chiang protected the general, first ordering Okamura released so he could recover from tuberculosis in a Shanghai hospital, then allowing him to return safely to Japan. A year later, while GHQ turned a blind eye, the Nationalist high command, operating through their Tokyo mission, secretly enlisted Okamura's services in recruiting high-ranking Japanese officers as military advisers to go to Taiwan and aid in the reconstruction of Taiwan's armed forces.
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