Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (148 page)

The Philippines had lost more than one million noncombatants and suffered enormous damage during the war. Most Filipinos held Hirohito responsible. The Philippine government nominated judge Delfin Jaranilla, a participant in the Bataan “death march,” as its representative on the bench, and later appointed Pedro Lopez as associate prosecutor. During the Philippines stage of the trial, Lopez introduced 144 cases of atrocities committed by Japanese forces against Filipino non-combatants and American and Filipino POWs, thereby laying a basis for later reparations claims. On the payroll of the American government, Lopez, like Jaranilla, never made an issue of Hirohito's absence from the list of indictees.
²⁸

The Indian appointee to the court was sixty-year-old Radhabinod Pal of the High Court of Calcutta. Pal had been a supporter of the pro-Axis Indian nationalist, Chandra Bose, and a longtime Japanophile. Unlike most Indian elites, who condemned both British and Japanese imperialism and never embraced the ideology of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, Pal was an outright apologist for Japanese imperialism. Arriving in Tokyo in May, he accepted his appointment under the charter in bad faith, not believing in the right of the Allies to try Japan, let alone judicially sanction it any way. Determined to see the tribunal fail from the outset, Pal intended to write a separate dissenting opinion no matter what the other judges ruled. Not surprisingly he refused to sign a “joint affirmation to administer justice fairly.”
²⁹

Thereafter, according to the estimate of defense lawyer Owen Cunningham, Pal absented himself for 109 of 466 “judge-days,” or more than twice the number of the next highest absentee, the president of the tribunal, Sir William Webb himself (53 “judge-days”).
³⁰
Whenever Pal appeared in court, he unfailingly bowed to the defendants, whom he regarded as men who had initiated the liberation of Asia. Pal, the most politically independent of the judges, refused to let Allied political concerns and purposes, let alone the charter, influence his judgment in any way. He would produce the tribunal's most emotionally charged, political judgment. Many who repudiated the Tokyo trial while clinging to the wartime propaganda view of the “War of Greater East Asia,” believed that the main cause of Asian suffering was Western white men—that is, Pal's “victors.” They would cite Pal's arguments approvingly. So too would others who saw the war primarily in terms of the “white” exploitation of Asia.

Throughout the process of selecting among those accused, the prosecutors worked feverishly, their eyes peeled to the clock and to Nuremberg, fearing that world interest would vanish once the German trial of twenty-two major war criminals ended.
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Nuremberg was both their legal model and a source of psychological pressure. MacArthur, through Keenan, exerted pressure to wind up the preparatory stage and begin the proceedings. He denied the prosecution the right to interrogate Hirohito; he also determined that Hirohito would neither give testimony as a witness nor be asked to provide his diary or other private papers.

Diaries and prison depositions, both formal and informal, played a crucial role in the decisions to indict because so many of the incriminating Japanese documents had been burned or otherwise disposed of by cabinet decisions transmitted orally to avoid a written trail.
³²
Secret records of the Japanese armed forces were also hidden away. Most though not all of the depositions were completed by April 9—one week after Keenan had ordered them
stopped. All deponents sought to protect Hirohito and to lay blame for the war on a very small number of army officers, singled out by name. Participating in the trial behind the scenes, through their depositions, the pro-Anglo-American “moderates” now took their revenge on the army elite for having lost the war. The senior statesmen, Adms. Yonai Mitsumasa and Okada Keisuke, who like others in the court milieu had served as informants for the prosecution, defended the navy, exaggerated the army's influence, and minimized that of the emperor and his entourage.
³³

IV

On May 3, 1946, the trial opened in the large, newly renovated auditorium of the War Ministry Building in Ichigaya, near the center of Tokyo. Keenan had had this nerve center of Japanese militarism converted into a courtroom, refitted with dark wood paneling and a long, highly elevated mahogany bench for the judges. One microphone was provided solely for the use of the tribunal president. A witness box was set near the center of the room with tables and benches nearby for the lawyers and court stenographers. Carpenters built high lecterns for the chief prosecutor and chief defense counsel, and platforms for the Allied movie cameramen and still photographers who filmed the entire proceeding. Special galley areas were set aside for the domestic and foreign press, radio broadcasters, and some thirty translators who worked in the two official languages of the trial, English and Japanese.
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Seats in the rear upper balcony accommodated 660 spectators, while first-floor seats increased the total to nearly 1,000. Clerks moved around the courtroom with traveling microphones, and large klieg lights, hung from the ceiling, brightly illuminated the whole scene.
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Three days later, at the third open session, defendants, judges, lawyers, white-helmeted military policemen, and hundreds of diplomats and journalists from all over the world packed the court
room at 9:15
A.M
. to hear the pleas of the defendants. First the defense lawyers were introduced, then a dispute arose over a mistranslation in the indictment. Once that was cleared up, the indictees, starting with Araki Sadao, stood up as their names were called in alphabetical order. All pleaded not guilty to each and every charge. A show trial in the best pedagogical sense—that is, a major criminal trial intended to teach not lies, as in Stalin's show trials, but positive lessons about the criminality of war—was now off to a slow start, with the courtroom packed and the Japanese nation looking on, still in the middle of a food crisis.

The prosecution team presented its case in phases over a period of nearly eight months, starting with Keenan's dramatic opening statement on June 4. The Tokyo tribunal was trying men who had “declared war upon civilization” itself, and should therefore be viewed as part of a just “battle of civilization to preserve the entire world from destruction.” He then proceeded to outline the theory of the prosecution.
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Thereafter the prosecutors daily introduced treaties, agreements, and other documents in order to establish what American and Japanese foreign policies had been. The prosecution called 109 witnesses who testified orally, and entered written testimony (in the form of statements, affidavits, and interrogations) from 561 others. Step-by-step the evidence against the accused accumulated. The first story to emerge was of Japan's preparations for war through propaganda, censorship, and centralized educational indoctrination; next the narrative of its conduct of aggressive wars was constructed, with the spotlight on the war crimes of the imperial forces in different countries.

As early as the second week, American defense attorney Maj. Ben Bruce Blakeney challenged the participation of the Soviet judge on the bench because the Soviet government had earlier been expelled from the League of Nations for its limited war of aggression against Finland. The defense had raised the issue of Allied behavior in the just-concluded era of global repartition (1938–45);
thereafter it began raising
tu quoque
(“you did it too”) arguments, intended to weaken the accusations of the prosecution without actually refuting them. On each occasion the bench rejected them—in effect telling the defense which acts of violence were “aggression” and war crimes and which were not.

On June 13 the Australian associate prosecutor, Alan Mansfield, introduced documents that clarified both the various Hague treaties to which Japan had been a party, and the Japanese political and bureaucratic systems. The life history of each defendant was read out, and the prosecutors summarized how the war was prepared. Japanese witnesses Shidehara Kij
r
and Wakatsuki Reijir
, among others, described a virtually autonomous army, a “police state,” and the ethos that informed its politics during the 1930s. The impression deepened that the “militarists” had staged “incidents,” challenged the authority of successive cabinets, and gradually consolidated power. But whenever the question arose of who was constitutionally and morally responsible for the army high command, no answer could be given, for Hirohito was being kept “hidden behind a
Sh
ji
screen.”
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After a short summer recess, during which air-conditioning was installed in the courtroom, the tribunal reconvened and began hearing testimony on Japanese aggression in China, starting around the time of the Manchurian Incident. On June 27, Inukai Takeru, the son of assassinated prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, took the witness stand for the prosecution. In giving evidence, he made a direct and unexpected reference to Hirohito, claiming that his father, for whom he had worked as secretary, had been granted an audience at which he had asked the emperor directly to order the army to withdraw from Manchuria. Rather than state outright that the emperor refused, Inukai declared that the prime minister “failed to achieve his aim.” In later cross-examination of Inukai, Hozumi Shigetaka, lawyer for defendants Kido and T
g
, asked why the emperor had not granted Prime Minister Inukai's request for an imperial rescript
ordering the army out; furthermore, whether read in English or Japanese, the witness's “statement can be taken to mean that the emperor had responsibility for the expansion of the Manchurian Incident.”
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Inukai tried to correct his statement, but the bench had been stirred by the dramatic, unexpected way in which responsibility had been attributed to the emperor.