LESSONS LEARNED OF WAR CRIMES TRIBUNALS: 7/8: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia Hardcover – by Gary J. Bass
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Judgment-Tokyo-World-Making-Modern/dp/1101947101
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.
1945 Hiroshima
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelors with Professor Gary Bass. The book is judgment at Tokyo, World War II on |
| 0:09.2 | trial and the Making of Modern Asia. The judges include one particular scholar, international law scholar, |
| 0:16.7 | Rabhabinoed Powell, born in 1886 in Bengal province, then part of the British Empire, the British Raj, now part of Bangladesh. |
| 0:27.9 | He is extremely well educated as a young person. |
| 0:31.2 | Strikingly, his father leaves the family and he's raised by a determined mother with |
| 0:37.4 | his two sisters. |
| 0:39.2 | He has gifts in many directions and goes to law school in Calcutta. He's a Hindu, but he's a man way before |
| 0:46.9 | the 20th century, way before his time in the 20th century. |
| 0:52.1 | Professor, spending time with Paul in your book is a pleasure because it's a glimpse of |
| 0:56.5 | another world of a man who understood here in the 21st century we're going to struggle with tolerance. What do we need to know |
| 1:04.4 | about his education and his skills and why he was chosen for the court? |
| 1:10.9 | So he's, I'm so glad that you liked him because he's one of my favorite figures and one of the one of the great pleasures of writing this book was spending time with his children and grandchildren in Calcutta who very generously shared memories of their father and their grandfather. |
| 1:26.6 | He is from an absolutely self-made man who brought himself up from rural poverty in Bengal, part of British India, |
| 1:40.0 | to rise to be at the pinnacle of academia in in Bengal at the time. He's the head of a great |
| 1:50.0 | university in Calcutta and is a very impressive legal scholar. |
| 1:58.1 | He's not actually trained in international law, although it is universally believed, not universally, but it is widely believed in Japan that he was the only real legal expert there. |
| 2:09.0 | He's a national hero in Japan to this day because of his dissent. |
| 2:15.0 | That he says that all of the defendants should be acquitted. |
| 2:18.0 | He questions the legitimacy of the court. |
| 2:22.0 | And writes this remark, spends most of the trial writing this remarkable |
| 2:27.0 | dissent which runs to sort of 1,200 pages, where he complains about the biases and legitimacy of the court. |
| 2:38.8 | It's a very complicated but very powerful dissent with a bunch of different elements, |
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