WAR RESPONSIBILITY--delving into the past (16) / Keeping distance from Tokyo Trial

The Yomiuri Shimbun

At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo Trial, convened after World War II, 28 people including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were tried as Class-A war criminal defendants. However, two died during the trial and one was dismissed after being found mentally incompetent.

Setting aside the findings of the tribunal, The Yomiuri Shimbun's War Responsibility Verification Committee has empirically examined the responsibility of political and military leaders before and during the war. The list of figures that the committee deemed as being "mainly responsible" shows some similarities--and some differences--from those judged by the tribunal as being Class-A criminals.

First, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, Army General Staff Chief Hajime Sugiyama and War Minister Korechika Anami opted to kill themselves around the time Japan surrendered and were not defendants at the Tokyo Trial. Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka and Naval General Staff Chief Osami Nagano died from natural causes during the trial and thus sentences were not handed down to them.

Meanwhile, staff officers including Kanji Ishihara, who was a mastermind behind the Manchurian Incident; Navy Rear Adm. Shingo Ishikawa, who pushed for the advance into southern French Indochina; and military bureaucrats including Shinichi Tanaka of the Army General Staff, who insisted on waging a war against the United States, are seen as bearing heavy responsibility. They were not even suspects in the Tokyo Trial.

However, military officers and bureaucrats pointed to by the Yomiuri Shimbun committee as being responsible were "representatives"--others were just as responsible for the war as they were.

The Yomiuri Shimbun committee focused not only on the "responsibility for starting the war" but also the "responsibility for continuing the war." Koshiro Oikawa and Soemu Toyoda, chiefs of the Naval General Staff, surfaced as officers who should bear some responsibility for their roles.

The Yomiuri committee decided Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso and Army General Staff Chief Yoshijiro Umezu, who received life sentences at the Tokyo Trial, were heavily responsible for the war as they had insisted on the final battle on the mainland.

Heitaro Kimura, a pro-Tojo group member and vice war minister, and Iwane Matsui, army general and the commanding officer responsible for the Nanjing Incident, also were responsible for the war, but did not play major roles in directing the war, according to the findings of the Yomiuri committee.

Kimura and Matsui were sentenced to death by hanging.