The other Nuremberg : the untold story of the Tokyo war crimes trials 0688047831

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Other books by Arnold C. Brackman: A D ELICA TE ARRANGEM ENT TH E LUCK OF N IN EV EH TH E SEARCH FOR TH E GOLD OF TU TA N K H A M EN TH E DREAM O F TROY TH E LAST EMPEROR TH E COM M UNIST COLLAPSE IN IN D O N ESIA SOUTHEAST ASIA ’S SECOND FRO N T IN D O N ESIA N COM M UNISM

THE OTHER B B B EB IB EB B THE IM TOID STORY 01 THE TOKVO 111HR IRIHIES THIRLS Arnold C. Brackman

WI L L I A M MORROW A N D C O M P A N Y , I NC. N E W YORK

Copyright © 1987 by Arnold C. Brackman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, re­ cording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions De­ partment, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brackman, Arnold C. The other Nuremberg. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Tokyo Trial, 1946-1948. I. Title. JX5438.8.B72 1987 341.6'9'0952 ISBN 0-688-04783-1 Printed in the United States of America

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 BOOK D ESIG N BY B ER N A RD S C H L E IF E R

86-21834

For Helen J. Beattie, F. Fraser Bond, Gregory Mason, C. Hayes Sprague, and Leon R. Whipple, friends and mentors

Fo re w o rd

The research for the book spanned more than a quarter of a cen­ tury and over 100,000 miles. In the text and the notes I have iden­ tified many of the sources I have relied on. Written material on the Japanese war-crimes trial is thin, especially in comparison with that available on the Nuremberg trial. John R. Lewis’s Uncertain Judgment: A Bibliography o f War Crimes Trials (Santa Barbara, Calif., and Oxford: Clio Books, 1979) contains 1,290 entries relat­ ing to the tribunal at Nuremberg and a scant 231 on the Interna­ tional Military Tribunal for the Far East. This volume also contains 143 entries on the Vietnam War, chiefly on My Lai. At the IMTFE, a thousand My Lais emerged. Even Lewis’s list is misleading on the paucity of material on the Tokyo trial; as of this writing few books have appeared on the subject. Perforce, in my research I have been compelled to rely principally on the voluminous trial transcript (some 49,000 pages) and on other material in my own files covering the period 1946— 48: notebooks, official and unofficial documents, typescripts, copies of my original United Press stories, and articles published in the Japanese, U.S., and foreign press. I have bridged the gaps in this material by using the U.S. National Archives and Records Ser­ vice, which holds a selection of transcripts, court papers, court exhibits and rejected exhibits, and so forth, as well as using inter­ views conducted in person or by correspondence. 9

10 □ Foreword

In the present era of fabricating quotes—phony “ docudramas” on television, the-Janet Cooke affair in the press, and “faction” in publishing—I must stress at the outset that every quote in this book is genuine. The only liberties I have taken are in spelling, tense, and grammar, especially in reproducing the English tran­ script of the trial, which is often uneven (for example, the inter­ changeable use of “ fliers” and “ flyers” ). The exchange of ideas and the assistance in ferreting out in­ formation provided by hundreds of people have been invaluable in this work. Aristides Lazarus, defense counsel for Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, was of great help, not only in several hours of inter­ view but also through his voluminous letter writing and his zest in everything he does. Judge A. Frederick Mignone of Connecti­ cut took time out of his busy schedule to be interviewed in his chambers. Leslie S. Nakashima, prewar and postwar staffer in the United Press Tokyo bureau, worked as my translator. His was the first Japanese house I entered on my arrival in Tokyo in 1946, and there I had the honor and pleasure of meeting his wife, Yachiyo, and their baby daughter, Kazue. In 1981 Les accompanied me on my visit to Sugamo Prison and the site of the courtroom at Ichigaya. Among others who helped were Timothy P. Mulligan of the NARS Military Archives Division; Shozo Nakano and K. Okamura of the National Diet Library, Tokyo; J. Pavey of the Imperial War Museum, London; Frederick W. Pernell of the Gen­ eral Archives Division, National Archives. Judge B.V.A. Roling, now a professor at the Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen, the Netherlands, was generous in taking time to an­ swer the many questions I put to him. He was also kind enough to send me an English-language version of a lecture he delivered in Haarlem in 1978, which was published the same year in de Haarlemse Voordrachten, No. XXXVIII (English title, “ Some Aspects of the Tokyo Trial” ). In it, he makes the point that Nu­ remberg has been paid more attention than Tokyo because the accused there were well known in the United States and Europe. Also see his contribution in Buddhism and Culture (Kyoto, 1960), “The Tokyo Trial in Retrospect.” Roling also wrote the introduc­ tion to the unabridged edition of Judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, published in two volumes by the University of Amsterdam in 1977. (Astonishingly, this was the first time all six opinions of the justices were published together.)

Foreword □ 11

To this day no Allied government has printed a complete tran­ script of the trial. I am grateful to John Barton of the media service at Western Connecticut State University; Mary T. Brody, reference librarian at the New York Public library; Marilyn Bullock, my typist; Bar­ bara Burger of the National Archives audiovisual division; George Chalou, director of the reference branch, Washington National Records, Suitland, Maryland; and Edwin R. Coffee of the Military Archives Division. Michael T. C. Chen of Taipei, Taiwan, was invaluable as aide, liaison, and interpreter and in managing to lo­ cate Justice Mei’s brother, Professor Mei Ju-an of Cheng Chi Uni­ versity, Taiwan; S. T. Hsieh (Tjia) also provided help in this effort. I am also indebted to Beverly Coleman, Valentine Deale, and Robert Donihi, who were kind enough to be interviewed; to N. J. Flanagan and W. L. Fogarty of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra; to Robert Furlonger, to George A. Furness of Furness, Sato and Ishizawa, to G. Osmond Hyde, and to Charles C. Koh­ ler of the U.S. Army; to Mary Kohn, former chief reference li­ brarian at Western Connecticut State University, who always managed to come through on my requests, although at times the difficulties seemed insurmountable; and to my editor, Bruce Lee. Further help was provided by Sol Sanders; Masaei Sato, Jap­ anese curator at the University of Michigan’s Asian Library; Frank Joseph Shulman, director of the East Asia Collection the McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland, where I made use of some of the papers of Gordon W. Prange, and George W. Ware, Jr., then a graduate student there; Takeshi Sumitani of the National Diet Library, Tokyo; Raymond R. M. Tai, deputy director, Gen­ eral Government Information office, Taipei; John E. Taylor of the Military Archives Division, who unfailingly answered my numer­ ous letters and telephone calls: Ryochi Tobe of the National De­ fense Academy, Yokosuka, Japan; Kumao Toyada, who provided me with information regarding General Suzuki; and George Wag­ ner of the Military Archives Division. I also made use of the ar­ chives at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, especially Sir William Webb’s papers. Carrington Williams, defense counsel for Naoki Hoshino, sent a five-page answer to my inquiries that was most helpful and en­ lightening—worthy of publication in itself. I’m also grateful for the help of the late George Yamaoka, for many years associated with the law firm of Hill, Betts and Nash; Onuma Yasuaki, of the

12 □ Foreword

law faculty at the University of Tokyo, who tipped me off to an article he had written about the trial in the Asahi (December 18 and 19, 1980); and Major General Shih Mei-yu, chief justice of the war crimes court in China, who also consented to be interviewed. Where opinions and perspectives on the trial appeared to be lack­ ing, it is not for lack of effort. Among those from whom I was unable to get a statement was Professor J. English, who replied, “ As a matter of policy, I do not comment and have never com­ mented on the trial.” Also I wrote General Douglas Mac Arthur in 1963 for comments on the trial and did not receive a reply. For those interested in further reading, a superb listing of U.S. government holdings, compiled by Jarritus Wolfinger, is con­ tained in the booklet Preliminary Inventory o f the Record o f the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Service, PI 180/RG 238, General Services Administration). Another excellent source for material on the Tokyo trial is The Allied Occupation o f Japan, 1945-1952 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1972) by Robert E. Ward and Frank Joseph Shulman. An excellent source on links between prewar Germany and Japan is veteran foreign correspondent Nessell Tiltman’s Night­ mares Must End (London: Mayflower Press, 1940), which illus­ trates how Germany and Japan marched to the same drum. RussianJapanese relations are detailed by Leonard Mosley in Hirohito, Emperor o f Japan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). Mosley’s Hirohito comes out as a strong personality and a man of integrity. Otto D. Tolischus’ Tokyo Record (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943) covers the period from February 1941 to August 1943, when Tolischus was in Tokyo as a correspondent for The New York Times. Soon after Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was sent to prison. (I disagree with Tolischus on one point: He writes that the geisha is romanticized in the West but considered a prostitute in Japan; I would not class a geisha as a prostitute unless she was specifically identified as one.) Among sources in Japanese, particularly useful are Hiroku Itagaki Seishiro, by Seishiro Itagaki (Tokyo: Fuyo Shobo, 1972); Sugamo nikki, by Mamoru Shigemitsu (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1953); Heiwa no Hakken, by Shinsho Hanayama (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1949); and Kido Koichi nikki, by Koichi Kido (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1966). *

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Foreword □ 13

In the Japanese language a person’s family name precedes the given name, as Tojo Hideki. In this book I have followed the stan­ dard Anglo-American practice of placing the given name before the surname—Hideki Tojo. Also, the Chinese names in this book follow the pre-1978 Wade-Giles romanization system, which was used in standard histories of pre-Communist China and in which I was trained when I studied Chinese as a college student.

Contents

F o rew o r d

9

I n t r o d u c tio n

17

War Criminals at Bay 2. MacArthur in Tokyo 3. The Allied Prosecutors 4. The Judges 5. The Defense, the Prisoners, and the Charges 6. The Indictment: Tojo, Not Hirohito 7J The Trial Opens: Challenges and Decisions 8. The Missing Defendants 9. The Prosecution Begins tf0) Trouble in the Tribunal 11. The Army in the Dock 12. The Invasion o f Manchuria 13. Lawyers at War 14. The Emperor o f China Speaks 15: Holocaust in China 16. Unconventional Warfare: Drugs and Disease 17. The Axis on Trial 18. Trouble Among the Allies 19. Judgment at Nuremberg /.

15

33 45 54 63 72 83 88 WO 106 112 122 137 145 154 171 190 201 209 223

16 □ CONTENTS

20. Remember Pearl Harbor 21. Atrocities in the Philippines 22. POWs and Other Slave Labor 23. Defense Parry, Prosecution Thrust 24. The Defense Opens, and the Generals Shout 25. The Defense Stalls 26. Pearl Harbor Redux 27. Defendants Take the Stand 28. Sir William Webb Leaves the Bench 29. Togo, Tojo, and Umezu 30. Rebuttals and Summaries 31. Decision at Tokyo 32. The Verdict Is Read