After the Trials: Class B and C Japanese War Criminals and the Post-War World

Abstract

‘Lesser’ Japanese war criminals, or those in Classes ‘B’ and ‘C’, were prosecuted by the various Allied powers in courtrooms around Asia after the Second World War. They were then executed or imprisoned in the places in which they had been tried. By the end of 1953, however, all surviving prisoners had been repatriated to Japan to serve out the remainder of their sentences, and by the end of 1958, all had been released. The decision to repatriate or release prisoners was made by the governments that had tried the war criminals, even after Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, since the San Francisco Peace Treaty stipulated that the prosecuting countries retained the right to decide on any variation of the prisoners' sentences. The fate of convicted war criminals, therefore, was subject to diplomatic negotiation between Japan and the original prosecuting countries. These negotiations played an important role in the post-war reconfiguration of international relations in the East Asian region. Discussion about the repatriation and release of prisoners constituted one of the first topics of major international negotiation among a reconstructing Japan, the newly independent or decolonising nations of the region, the departing European imperial powers, a United States which was in the process of defining its Cold War aims in the region, and Australian governments seeking to establish a new foreign policy stance in the post-war world.

Notes

¹I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to my fellow contributors to this issue for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

²See Awaya, Tōkyō saiban ron; Higurashi, Tōkyō saiban no kokusai kankei; Ushimura and Higurashi, Tōkyō saiban o tadashiku yomu; Minear, Victor's Justice; Maga, Judgment at Tokyo; Boister and Cryer, The Tokyo International Military Tribunal; Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

³See, for example, Bloxham, ‘British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany, 1945–1957’.

⁴Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 1.

⁵Kosuge, ‘Kaisetsu 1’, 1–4; Utsumi and Nagai, ‘Kaisetsu’, ix. For one version of the supposed difference between ‘B’ and ‘C’ classes, see Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial, 33.

⁶Kosuge, ‘Kaisetsu 1’, 1, 3; Ginn, Sugamo Prison, Tokyo, 33.

⁷On Korean prisoners, see Utsumi, Kimu wa naze sabakareta noka; Utsumi, Shikei kara mieta futatsu no kuni. For a map showing locations of courtrooms see Utsumi and Nagai, ‘Kaisetsu’, xi.

⁸Utsumi and Nagai, ‘Kaisetsu’, xii, xiv.

⁹Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial, 130.

¹⁰Cited in Utsumi and Nagai, ‘Kaisetsu’, xii.

¹¹Dower, Embracing Defeat, 447. For various reasons, different sources give slightly different numbers in each category.

¹²The articles in this issue are based on research funded by the Australian Research Council in the Discovery Project ‘Repatriation and Release of Japanese War Criminals 1946–1958: Southeast Asia, Japan and the Great Powers’.

¹³See Wilson, ‘War, Soldier and Nation in 1950s Japan’, 202–203.

¹⁴Treaty of Peace with Japan, in Maki, Conflict and Tension in the Far East, 136–137.

¹⁵Bloxham, ‘British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany’, 114.

¹⁶Jones, ‘Nazi Atrocities Against Allied Airmen’, 565.

¹⁷Bloxham, ‘British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany’, 117.

¹⁸Ibid., 113–116; Herf, Divided Memory, 294–295; Knischewski and Spittler, ‘Memories of the Second World War and National Identity in Germany’, 242–243; Lingen, Kesselring's Last Battle.

¹⁹Pedaliu, ‘Britain and the “Hand-over” of Italian War Criminals to Yugoslavia, 1945–48’.

²⁰‘Treaty of Peace with Italy’; Pedaliu, ‘Britain and the “Hand-over” of Italian War Criminals to Yugoslavia’.

²¹Utsumi, Sugamo Purizun, 190.

²²See Wilson, ‘War, Soldier and Nation in 1950s Japan’, 196–204; Utsumi, Sugamo Purizun, 161–178; Utsumi, ‘Changing Japanese Views of the Allied Occupation of Japan and the War Crimes Trials’. Memoirs and testimonies include Nogi, Kaigun tokubetsu keisatsutai; Fukutomi, Minami jūjisei ni idakarete; Kadomatsu, Kōshukei; Ōmori and Watanabe, BC-kyū senpan gokusō kara no koe.

²³Hayashi, Sabakareta sensō hanzai; Hayashi, Senpan saiban no kenkyū; Nagai, Firipin to taiNichi senpan saiban 1945–1953 nen; Utsumi, Shikei kara mieta futatsu no kuni; Utsumi, Kimu wa naze sabakareta noka; Utsumi, Sugamo Purizun; Tanaka, BC-kyū senpan; Spurlock, ‘The Yokohama War Crimes Trial’; Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial; Pappas, ‘Law and Politics’; Carrel, ‘Australia's Prosecution of Japanese War Criminals’.

²⁴Notable exceptions include Hayashi, Sabakareta sensō hanzai, 281–292; Nagai, Firipin to taiNichi senpan saiban 1945–1953 nen. For an overview of the fate of Japanese BC criminals generally, see Tanaka, BC-kyū senpan, 205–211. For discussion of the post-trial fate of Japanese war criminals convicted by the British, see Pritchard, ‘The Gift of Clemency Following British War Crimes Trials in the Far East, 1946–1948’.

²⁵Simpson, Law, War and Crime.

²⁶See, for example, Dower, Embracing Defeat; Ward and Sakamoto, Democratizing Japan; Schonberger, Aftermath of War; Iokibe, Japanese Diplomacy in the 1950s.

²⁷Kushner, ‘Pawns of Empire’; Chen, ‘The Trial of Japanese War Criminals in China’; Cathcart and Nash, ‘War Criminals and the Road to Sino-Japanese Normalization’; Cathcart and Nash, ‘“To Serve Revenge for the Dead”’; Guthrie-Shimizu, ‘Occupation Policy and Postwar Sino-Japanese Relations’; Yang, ‘Resurrecting the Empire?’.