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...

The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941-45 analyzes the Pacific War with a focus on America’s participation in the conflict.

Fought over a great ocean and vast battlefields using the most sophisticated weapons available, the Pacific War transformed the modern world. Not only did it introduce the atomic bomb to the world, it also reshaped relations among nations and the ways in which governments dealt with their own peoples, changed the balance of power in the Pacific in fundamental ways, and helped to spark nationalist movements throughout Asia. This book examines the strategies, technologies, intelligence capabilities, home-front mobilization, industrial production, and resources that ultimately enabled the United States and its allies to emerge victorious. Major themes include the impact of war, conceptions of race, Japanese perspectives on the conflict, and America’s relations with its allies. Using primary documents, maps, and concise writing, this book provides students with an accessible introduction to an important period in history.

Incorporating recent scholarship and conflicting interpretations, the book provides an insightful overview of the topic for students of modern American history, World War II, and the Asia Pacific.

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.

As colonial Japanese subjects, about 240,000 Korean men took part on the Japanese side during the Second World War. Of that number, 3,016 had been recruited to work as civilian guards in prisoner-of-war and internment camps outside the Japanese home islands. The Allied war crimes trials of 1945–1951 specifically targeted camp personnel, and the great majority of the Koreans convicted as ‘Japanese’ war criminals were former guards. The standard scholarly view in recent years has been that Korean Guards and other junior military personnel suffered disproportionately heavy retribution in the war crimes trials. Examination of the documentary evidence on the apprehension, investigation, prosecution, sentencing and release of suspected and convicted war criminals, however, shows conclusively that claims that Koreans were over-represented among war criminals, or that they suffered the heaviest penalties, are wrong. The records relating to Koreans indicate that prosecution, and subsequent deliberations over sentencing and clemency, took strong account of the implications of having a subordinate place in the Japanese military. Far from being the group upon whom the greatest punishment was visited, Koreans were singled out only when their distinctive individual initiative as brutal guards drew attention to them.

Before 1945, Japan built a colonial empire with large non-Japanese populations. It annexed Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), established a client state in Manchuria (1932) and occupied parts of northern China (from 1933). Japan’s expansion drew on its initial success in persuading other Asians that would defend Asia against Western imperialism. War with China in 1937 led, in December 1941, to war against the West. Japan then occupied much of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, but could not stop the Allied counter-offensive and had to surrender in September 1945. New scholarship has emphasized both the complexity of Japan’s imperial rule and the engagement of Asian people in the imperial venture. Scholars have paid close attention to consequences of imperialism for domestic Japanese society and have shown a growing recognition that Japan’s colonial rule should be treated as part of mainstream Japanese history.