Sandra Wilson

Kayoko Takeda's Interpreters and War Crimes deals with the situation of interpreters operating during violent conflict and analyzes the implications of their work for the theory and practice of interpreting. She uses as her major case study thirty-nine Japanese military interpreters who were tried as war criminals by British authorities between 1946 and 1949, together with the interpreters who appeared in the British trials as witnesses...

In the Korean War of 1950-53, U.S. authorities were determined to pursue atrocities perpetrated by North Korean and Communist Chinese forces through legal channels, in keeping with the standards they believed they had set after the Second World War. Yet, their plans foundered in Korea, despite extensive groundwork for prosecutions. Four factors were responsible. First, it was difficult to find reliable evidence and to identify and apprehend suspects. Second, U.S. officials rapidly lost confidence in the idea of prosecuting national leaders. Third, the lack of clear-cut victory in the conflict necessitated a diplomatic solution, which was incompatible with war crimes trials. Fourth, the moral standing of the West, and hence its authority to run trials, was undermined by the large number of atrocities committed by the United Nations side. Thus, the U.S. plan for war crimes trials was dropped without fanfare, to be replaced by an anti-Communist propaganda campaign.

Considerations of justice and of politics were closely interconnected in the post‐1945 Allied pursuit of Japanese war crimes suspects. Recent scholarship deals with the issue in broad terms, but this article shows the potential effect on individual cases, by examining the British pursuit of Lieutenant‐General Kinoshita Eiichi, held responsible for cruel torture of wartime prisoners in Shanghai. Using archival sources from Britain, Hong Kong and the U.S., parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers, the article demonstrates that Allied authorities performed delicate and sometimes contradictory balancing acts in their pursuit of retributive justice for war crimes between 1945 and the late nineteen‐fifties.

Katō Tetsutarō was a suspected Japanese war criminal tried by US military commissions in Yokohama after the Second World War. He was convicted of murdering an escaped American prisoner of war, and was originally sentenced to death. In a highly unusual move, however, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, ordered a retrial, in which Katō received a sentence of 30 years. He was ultimately released in March 1958. Katō’s case provides an especially effective illustration of the tension in Allied thinking about war crimes trials between a desire for justice or vengeance, on the one hand, and recognition of the political pressures of the Cold War on the other, and of the varied forms this tension took as prosecutions progressed.

When Allied governments passed sentence on Japanese war criminals from 1945 onwards, they expected that those convicted would stay in prison for their full terms. Within a comparatively short time, however, each government controlling Japanese war criminals’ sentences had granted them some form of clemency, and by the end of 1958, the last remaining war criminals, including those sentenced to life imprisonment, had been released with the agreement of the prosecuting governments. This article examines the ethical, political and pragmatic considerations that led to the granting of parole and clemency to convicted Japanese war criminals between 1945 and 1958, the bureaucratic processes through which clemency was arranged, and the shifting political positions of the Japanese and Allied authorities in regard to war criminals. In so doing, it contributes to the extension of studies of war crimes justice to the post-sentencing phase, and highlights the role of the Japanese authorities and the Japanese public in determining the fate of war criminals in the Pacific theatre of the war.

Aaron William Moore’s study of some 200 diaries of Japanese, Chinese, and U.S. soldiers participating in the Asia-Pacific War is a tour de force. To have brought together and analyzed so many sources, written in three languages and now widely scattered, is impressive enough. Few scholars writing in English can deal expertly with documents in both Chinese and Japanese, and researchers on World War II who cannot read either or both of these languages will be grateful to Moore. The author’s larger contribution, however, is his analysis of the experience of combat, occupation, victory, and defeat in the conflict of 1937–45 from the soldiers’ point of view...

In 1950s Japan, films about the Second World War, especially the conflict in the Pacific, were very popular. Though some of them concentrated on misery and suffering, others were surprisingly positive in their portrayal of Japanese soldiers. The 1950s have the reputation of a pacifist decade in Japan, when people were only too glad to forget the war as they turned instead to the future. This orthodox view is undermined, however, by the undeniable fact that a great many people wanted to see cinematic dramatizations of the war. The movies they watched left room for pride, dignity, the recognition of Japanese military power and even nostalgia for the war years. They were an important means by which people explored the meanings of the recent conflict. In particular, they explained and dramatized what had happened; presented examples of heroic soldiers and sailors; and contributed to the reintegration of ordinary soldiers who had been convicted as war criminals back into Japanese society. In doing so they played a vital role in reclaiming and validating the actions of military men, and in promoting the idea that there had been positive aspects of the war experience, despite the suffering the conflict had undoubtedly brought.

Using official materials and media commentary, this article examines two large-scale spectacles and their implications for post-war Japanese nationalism. Discursively, the Olympics and the World Exposition presented a clear vision of Japan: as a nation at the forefront of the international scene, fit to act as a champion of the non-Western world and firmly unified internally. In concrete ways, the two events strengthened the process of national integration that was gathering pace in the nineteen-sixties, especially through the provision of new networks of transport and communications. They also helped to rehabilitate the post-war Japanese state, so that it could more readily be seen as a benign entity devoted to the national interest and the people's welfare. The article illuminates a key moment in the emergence of new national self-images and in the construction of national life in post-war Japan.

This essay examines the ceremonies surrounding the enthronement of Emperor Showa in 1928 and their implications for Japanese nationalism. The 1928 celebrations displayed the contours of official nationalism at the time and furthered national integration, principally because they took advantage of the great technological and cultural developments of the 1920s. Though official versions of nationalism were powerful. people participated in the celebrations for a variety of reasons. The enthronement events were intimately related to the mass culture and consumerism of the 1920s and were a reflection and expression of urban life in that decade, not a predictor of foreign aggression in the 1930s.