S8 Ep293: CONSPIRACY CHARGES AND THE LEGALITY OF AGGRESSIVE WAR Colleague Professor Gary J. Bass. The prosecution focused on 28 Class A defendants, alleging a grand conspiracy to wage aggressive war. This conspiracy charge, borrowed from Nuremberg, fit awkwardly wi

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 10 January 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

CONSPIRACY CHARGES AND THE LEGALITY OF AGGRESSIVE WAR Colleague Professor Gary J. Bass. The prosecution focused on 28 Class A defendants, alleging a grand conspiracy to wage aggressive war. This conspiracy charge, borrowed from Nuremberg, fit awkwardly with the fractured reality of the Japanese government, where defendants were often bitter rivals. To prosecute "aggressive war," the tribunal relied on the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, despite it lacking criminal penalties for signatories. Ultimately, all surviving defendants received convictions, though verdicts were mixed; for example, Shigenori Togo was convicted of aggression but acquitted of conventional war crimes, while Kido was convicted of aggression but not held responsible for atrocities against POWs. NUMBER 6
1930 NATIONAL DIET TOKYO

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0:00.0	I'm John Batchel with Professor Gary Bass. His new book is Judgment at Tokyo, World War II on trial and the making of modern Asia.
0:12.7	As the professor has told us, 50,000 pages of transcripts, and it comes to these Class A criminals alleged to have waged aggressive war.
0:24.7	Sixteen military, I'm following Gary's reporting, 16 military, 13 of them from the Army,
0:30.0	three from the Navy, 12 civilians, five from the foreign ministry, one finance minister,
0:35.4	and then Quito of the palace itself. They are sitting through
0:39.9	these proceedings, the allegations, and then their defense attorneys, who are in general, I believe,
0:46.4	American defense attorneys, and a credit to them, Professor. I think you say the defense
0:50.7	attorneys wear down the judges. They do a very good job of scrambling in order
0:56.0	to make the case for their clients, even though they're mostly in uniform, I think. And one
1:02.7	particular argument turns over the conspiracy charge. Was this new in 19? It was new in Nuremberg.
1:09.9	It was also new in Tokyo. Was Tokyo borrowing from Nuremberg, or did they come to this understanding of conspiracy separately?
1:19.8	It was put in place at Nuremberg, and the charter at Tokyo is almost exactly the same as the charter at Nuremberg.
1:30.2	So conspiracy, which is something that, you know, is a part of American criminal law,
1:34.7	and it's kind of a prosecutor's dream.
1:38.5	So it's treated as a common criminal enterprise.
1:41.9	And this is something the lot of the judges are actually uncomfortable with, that it's not
1:45.6	a familiar part of their legal system.
1:48.2	Some of them are, you know, are outright against it.
1:53.0	Some of them are just uncomfortable.
1:56.2	But it is, it's something that makes more sense, whatever you think of conspiracy charges as law.
2:04.2	As fact, it makes a lot more sense when you're thinking about the very unified totalitarian government of Nazi Germany.
2:13.6	And it makes much less sense when you're thinking about a very splintered Japanese government,
	...

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