Sentences Are Pronounced at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial

The Tribunal

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was set up in January 1946 by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in occupied Japan, to try senior Japanese leaders for crimes committed before and during the Second World War. It sat in Tokyo and had eleven judges, one from each of Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. Sir William Webb of Australia was the president. The trial began in May 1946.

The Charges

Twenty-eight Japanese military and civilian leaders were charged in the indictment with crimes against peace, including conspiracy to wage wars of aggression, and with conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two of the defendants died during the trial, and one was found unfit to stand trial. Emperor Hirohito was not indicted. The tribunal heard evidence for about two and a half years before it began to read its judgment on November 4, 1948.

The Sentences

The reading of the sentences took place on November 12, 1948. Seven defendants were sentenced to death by hanging: Hideki Tōjō, Kenji Doihara, Kōki Hirota, Seishirō Itagaki, Heitarō Kimura, Iwane Matsui and Akira Mutō. Sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment. The majority judgment ran to more than 1,200 pages. Shigenori Tōgō received twenty years and Mamoru Shigemitsu seven years. The seven men sentenced to death were executed at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo on December 23, 1948.

Dissents and Aftermath

Not all the judges agreed with the majority. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India wrote a separate opinion in which he found all the defendants not guilty. The French judge Henri Bernard and the Dutch judge B. V. A. Röling also wrote separate opinions, and Webb and the Philippine judge Delfin Jaranilla submitted their own statements. Those prisoners who survived their sentences were gradually paroled in the 1950s, and the last were released by 1958. The trial and its legal basis continue to be discussed by historians and lawyers in Japan and elsewhere.

Other Postwar Trials

The Tokyo trial followed the Nuremberg trial of German leaders, in which judgments were given on October 1, 1946. Japanese defendants charged with conventional war crimes were also tried separately by Allied courts in places such as Yokohama, Manila, Singapore and Hong Kong, and more than five thousand people were tried in these proceedings. In the Treaty of San Francisco of 1951 Japan accepted the judgments of the war crimes tribunals.