This is a provocative examination of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal that goes well beyond the familiar denunciation of sham proceedings and "victors' justice" to explore the assumptions and clashes of civilization that lay at the heart of this encounter. In this ambitious intellectual history, Ushimura draws on trial transcripts and memoirs to sketch fascinating portraits of some of those involved, including a judge, a defender and some of the accused.
In the first section, Ushimura skewers Masao Maruyama, one of postwar Japan's foremost intellectuals, for his 1948 analysis of the tribunal. Maruyama compared the testimony of the Nazi and Japanese leaders and criticized the latter for evading and quibbling about their responsibility for various atrocities carried out by the Imperial armed forces. Maruyama characterized Japan's political and military elite as "dwarfish" for not resolutely accepting their guilt and responsibility. Ushimura quotes extensively from the transcripts to show that they did not shirk their responsibility as comprehensively as Maruyama suggests. His close reading of the trial transcripts has its moments, but the blow-by-blow, point-counterpoint exegesis can be laborious.
Readers who are not quite as intrigued as the author is with this intellectual jousting may wonder what is the point of "rehabilitating" those prosecuted at the tribunal. The author puts a lot of energy into convincing the reader that Japan's wartime elite were not "dwarfish" and no more evasive than the Nazis, but to what end?