Despite killing nearly six million people how come Imperial Japan wasn’t held accountable like Nazi
Germany for the second world war? The answer to this question is not as simple as one might think!
Welcome to Nutty History and today let’s find out what happened to Japanese Imperialists
after the surrender in the Second World War.
Discovering the Holocaust was sickening for the allied powers. They found people pushed to the
brink of humanity in every concentration camp they found. The shock of the Nazi’s lack of morality
made Japanese crimes of Genocide, Biological Warfare and Cannabilism at Nanjing, Bataan, and
other parts of Asia look trivial in comparison. In the dark hours of midnight on August 9th, 1945,
Japan’s Emperor Hirohito sat down with the Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki and the Supreme
war council to discuss the absolute surrender. The burden of hundreds of thousands innocent civilian
deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki cornered Japan to accept the Potsdam Declaration without condition.
On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito declared the surrender to his subjects on a national broadcast
through the radio. United States accepted it immediately and deployed the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Power, General Douglas MacArthur to commence the end of the war. He was also
debriefed to prosecute Japanese War Criminals, but sadly that turned out to be just a formality.
Immediately after declaring surrender on August 15th, the Japanese government and military acted
swiftly to destroy evidence that could have helped to indict and prosecute Japanese authorities
for war responsibility or war crimes. Obviously, saving the Emperor was of prime importance.
The surrender was formally signed at Tokyo Bay on September 2nd, 1945, and by then,
vast quantities of incriminating evidence had been burnt. Japanese administrators who were
likely to face the music of the courtroom went into hiding as a last resort to save themselves.
This systematic destruction of war records proved useful later on, as successive Japanese
governments continued to refuse or acknowledge Japan's guilt of committing war crimes.
The destruction of war-related records made the work of those investigating and prosecuting
Japanese war crimes nearly impossible. Japanese soldiers and officials had discarded their
uniforms and blended into civilians long before Allied leaders reached the shores of Japan.
That created the need to rely on cooperation from hostile Japanese administration and police,
which made the duty of tracking down suspected war criminals particularly troublesome.
But the trials moved swiftly onto those who had nowhere to hide. The allies set
up the International Military Tribunal of the Far East in Tokyo to try war criminals,
known as the Tokyo War Crime Trials. There was a list of several hundreds
of prospective defendants who were classified as Class-A war Criminals.
These were the top brass of Japan’s government and were accused of conspiring to wage aggressive war
and permitting brutal treatment of prisoners of war. However, out of these several hundreds,
only twenty-five were actually tried between 1946 and 1948. Seven of these twenty-five trials
ended with a death sentence. General Hideki Tojo who was Japan’s Prime Minister for most of the
second world war was executed alongside one of his predecessors and the then foreign minister,
Kōki Hirota at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. Former War Minister Seishiro Itagaki and four Military
Generals also faced the shooting squad with those three. The other 18 defendants were sentenced to
varying terms of imprisonment but that didn’t last long. The Class B and Class C criminals
were those who were charged with the accusation of ordering, committing, or allowing atrocities.
A whopping total of over three hundred thousand Japanese were charged under these crimes!
But… Allied powers only managed to capture 5,472 of them. Nearly four thousand were convicted and
about 922 of them were given the death sentence. The rest managed to elude until the USA called
off the hunt and these war criminals lived the rest of their lives peacefully in Japan itself.
Apart from those who escaped conviction by hiding, some imperialists escaped trial by
performing favors for the USA. Unit 731, a top-secret military team was
responsible for field testing biological and chemical warfare on Chinese people.
They were perhaps the worst of the lot to get the free pass by the US. General MacArthur,
the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, who offered immunity to the military commander and
staff of the biological unit in return for their research with the American Government’s approval.
Many of the Unit 731 scientists were able to secure research appointments later at
prestigious Japanese universities. The USA also enlisted the very same Japanese Imperialists
to rule Korea after liberating Korea from them and then colonized it for themselves.
Despite the presence of strong evidence that the Emperor was making decisions regarding the actions
of the army and its leaders, Japan deliberately projected Hirohito as only a nominal head of
power. Right before the massacre of Nanjing, the emperor himself had appointed his cousin Prince
Asaka as the commander of the imperial forces in China. Prince Asaka, like Hirohito, was also never
charged for his war crimes. General MacArthur believed that the administration of a defeated
Japan would be greatly facilitated if the emperor appeared to be cooperating with the occupying
Allied powers. This could not happen if the emperor was charged and convicted of war crimes.
Not to mention, among all the Allied powers, Japan was most salty about the USSR for not
honoring their pact. Following the execution of seven Class A criminals in 1948, General MacArthur
released several other Class A perpetrators who later transitioned back into politics,
bureaucracy, and economy despite the imposed ban restricting them from such activities. So tell us,
do you think the lack of punishment of the Japanese Imperialists was a means
to a gain for the Western allies? Tell us in the comments. And thanks for watching Nutty History.