Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (149 page)

The next day Webb informed the court that some of the judges “would like to hear the witness make a fuller statement on the emperor's position to clear up a contradiction, if there be one, in his own evidence.” Inukai partially retracted his previous day's statement by saying that when he and his father spoke of “withdrawal from Manchuria” they meant the ordering of the Korean Army back to Korea, and the Railway Garrison troops back to the railway zone. Ultimately Inukai failed to clear up the contradiction, however.
³⁹
Seven months later, when the prosecution completed its narrative of the conspiracy and closed its case, the question of Hirohito's role in events hung like a cloud over the proceedings. Not a single defendant had dared to discuss his war responsibility.

V

The defense took eleven months trying to establish the nonculpability of each accused—most of 1947, longer than the entire first Nuremberg trial. It presented, in addition to the defendants, 310 witnesses and written testimony by 214 others. The defense generally followed Japanese wartime propaganda in explaining why Japan had gone to war against the United States and Britain, and made use of numerous postwar writings critical of Roosevelt's foreign policy.
⁴⁰
When the defense concentrated on justifying Japan's actions in China and the Pacific, the prosecution pointed to the many gross errors of fact that riddled the defense presentation. The tribunal ruled again and again that the bulk of the defense material was irrelevant or immaterial. Rejected documents included details of Japan's efforts to
counter Soviet communism in Asia and the U.S. congressional investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack. When attorney Blakeney attempted to submit a summary of former secretary of war Stimson's account of the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, the tribunal, by majority, rejected that as well. Rebuttals and summations by both sides went on through the winter and spring of 1948.
⁴¹

The American and Japanese defense lawyers performed badly from the outset. In the words of leading defense lawyer and former member of the Diet Kiyose Ichir
, they tried “to disprove each and every charge of criminality lodged against” their clients but were unable to agree on a common strategy.
⁴²
Kiyose's long opening statement made the point that war atrocities “alleged to have been committed against the Jews in Germany [were] never present in Japan, [and] we are prepared to produce evidence to explain the difference between the war crimes of Germany and the alleged acts of the accused.”
⁴³
Next, defense lawyer Takayanagi Kenz
rose and attacked the legitimacy of the charter. A succession of Japanese senior army officers, some under investigation as possible war criminals themselves, were called as witnesses for the defense. Many defense attorneys claimed their clients had acted under superior orders and/or had fought to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. Many referred to the “Hull note,” a term introduced into the Japanese lexicon during the trial and charged with malevolent connotations ever since. The real villain, they insisted, had been the United States, which had forced Japan into a war of “self-defense.” The defense lawyers also pursued delaying tactics, hoping that the worsening ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would help Japan's militarists to make their case.

The highlights of the defense phase were the testimonies of ex–Privy Seal Kido, ex–Foreign Minister T
g
, and General T
j
. In cross-examination by Chief Prosecutor Keenan, all three inadvertently drew in the absent emperor.

During Kido's first two days on the witness stand, October
14–16, 1947, his defense lawyer, William Logan, read out the entire 297-page English text of his lengthy deposition, omitting nothing despite Keenan's complaint that it duplicated court documents. When Logan finished, ten lawyers questioned Kido in turn for nearly five days. Then Keenan began several days of cross-examination, designed to establish that “from the beginning of [Kido's] political career until the surrender of Japan,” he had (in Keenan's words) “constantly opposed any movement upon the part of the Emperor…in a practical way to bring about law and order…and stop the rule of lawlessness and violence….”
⁴⁴
Using the diary of Harada Kumao to question assertions in Kido's diary, Keenan showed that Kido had gone along with, rather than fought against, the militarists during the China war; despite his claims of having had nothing to do with politics, Kido had exercised enormous political power behind the scenes.

The chief prosecutor also charged Kido with constantly shifting blame onto his friends: Harada and Konoe—both conveniently deceased—and the elderly Makino Nobuaki. On the twenty-third several tense exchanges ensued between Keenan and Kido: focusing on what had been Hirohito's authority in military and diplomatic affairs on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, and on Kido's advice to the emperor, including his role in the making of the Tripartite Pact; his recommendation of T
j
as prime minister, and his handling of President Roosevelt's last-minute letter to the emperor.
⁴⁵
By the time Kido left the stand, the emperor's war responsibility was again at issue.

In late December 1947 former foreign minister T
g
took the witness stand and drew national attention by declaring that T
j
, Shimada Shigetars
, and Suzuki Teiichi had been the main advocates of declaring war in 1941. More important, T
g
also claimed, on December 26, that Secretary of State Hull had demanded an immediate and complete withdrawal of all Japanese military and police forces from China and French Indochina.