The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convenes and indicts former Prime Minister of Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders for war crimes.
Hideki Tojo ( , Tj Hideki , December 30, 1884 December 23, 1948) was a Japanese politician, general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and convicted war criminal who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association for most of World War II. He assumed several more positions including Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army before ultimately being removed from office in July 1944. During his years in power, his leadership was marked by extreme state-perpetrated violence in the name of Japanese ultranationalism, much of which he was personally involved in.Hideki Tojo was born on December 30, 1884, to a relatively low-ranking samurai family in the Kjimachi district of Tokyo. He began his career in the Army in 1902 and steadily rose through the ranks to become a general by 1934. In March 1937, he was promoted to chief of staff of the Kwantung Army whereby he led military operations against the Chinese in Inner Mongolia and the Chahar-Suiyan provinces. By July 1940, he was appointed Minister of War to the Japanese government led by Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe.
On the eve of the Second World War's expansion into Asia and the Pacific, Tojo was an outspoken advocate for a preemptive attack on the United States and its European allies. Upon being appointed Prime Minister on October 17, 1941, he oversaw the Empire of Japan's decision to go to war as well as its ensuing conquest of much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. During the course of the war, Tojo presided over numerous war crimes, including the massacre and starvation of civilians and prisoners of war. He was also involved in the sexual enslavement of thousands of mostly Korean women and girls for Japanese soldiers, an event that still strains modern Japanese-Korean relations.After the war's tide decisively turned against Japan, Tojo was forced to resign as Prime Minister in July 1944. Following his nation's surrender to the Allied Powers in September 1945, he was arrested, convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the Tokyo Trials, sentenced to death, and hanged on December 23, 1948. To this day, Tojo's complicity in atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, and human experimentation entailing the torture and death of thousands have firmly intertwined his legacy with the fanatical brutality shown by the Japanese Empire throughout World War II.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on April 29, 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity leading up to and during the Second World War. It was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) formed several months earlier in Nuremberg, Germany to prosecute senior officials of Nazi Germany.Following Japan's defeat and occupation by the Allies, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, United States General Douglas MacArthur, issued a special proclamation establishing the IMTFE. A charter was drafted to establish the court's composition, jurisdiction, procedures; the crimes were defined based on the Nuremberg Charter. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was composed of judges, prosecutors, and staff from eleven countries that had fought against Japan: Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the defense comprised Japanese and American lawyers.
Unlike its counterpart in Nuremberg, the Tokyo Trial exercised broader temporal jurisdiction, beginning from the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Twenty-eight high-ranking Japanese military and political leaders were tried by the court, including current and former prime ministers, foreign ministers, and military commanders. They were charged with fifty-five separate counts, including waging aggressive war, murder, and various war crimes and crimes against humanity (such as torture and forced labor) against prisoners-of-war, civilian internees, and the inhabitants of occupied territories; ultimately, 45 of the counts, including all the murder charges, were ruled either redundant or not authorized under the IMTFE Charter.
By the time it adjourned on November 12, 1948, two defendants had died of natural causes and one was ruled unfit to stand trial. All remaining defendants were found guilty of at least one count, of whom seven were sentenced to death and sixteen to life imprisonment. Thousands of other "lesser" war criminals were tried by domestic tribunals convened across Asia and the Pacific by Allied nations, with most concluding by 1949.
The Tokyo Trial lasted more than twice as long as the better-known Nuremberg Trial, and its impact was similarly influential in the development of international law; similar international war crimes tribunals would not be established until the 1990s.