Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions

Description

This book explores a cross-section of war crimes trials that the Allied powers held against the Japanese in the aftermath of World War II. More than 2,240 trials against some 5,700 suspected war criminals were carried out at 51 separate locations across the Asia Pacific region. This book analyzes fourteen high-profile American, Australian, British, and Philippine trials, including the two subsequent proceedings at Tokyo and the Yamashita trial. By delving into a large body of hitherto underutilized oral and documentary history of the war as contained in the trial records, Yuma Totani illuminates diverse firsthand accounts of the war that were offered by former Japanese and Allied combatants, prisoners of war, and the civilian population. Furthermore, the author makes a systematic inquiry into select trials to shed light on a highly complex - and at times contradictory - legal and jurisprudential legacy of Allied war crimes prosecutions.

Yuma Totani is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She is a recipient of the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Japanese Studies granted by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, Massachusetts in 2005-6; the Abe Fellowship granted by the Social Science Research Council in 2010-11; and the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars in 2012-13, during which time she took up residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, California. She is the author of The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (2008) and rendered its Japanese-language translation, Tokyo saiban: dai niji taisengo no ho to seigi no tsuikyu (2008).