International Military Tribunal for the Far East

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on April 29, 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during World War II. The IMTFE was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany, which prosecuted the leaders of Nazi Germany for their war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.

Following Japan's defeat and occupation by the Allies, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, United States General Douglas MacArthur, issued a special proclamation establishing the IMTFE. A charter was drafted to establish the court's composition, jurisdiction, and procedures; the crimes were defined based on the Nuremberg Charter. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was composed of judges, prosecutors, and staff from eleven countries that had fought against Japan: Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the defense consisted of Japanese and American lawyers. The Tokyo Trial exercised broader temporal jurisdiction than its counterpart in Nuremberg, beginning from the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Twenty-eight high-ranking Japanese military and political leaders were tried by the court, including prime ministers, cabinet members, and military commanders. They were charged with 55 separate counts, including the waging wars of aggression, murder, and various war crimes and crimes against humanity (such as torture and forced labor) against prisoners-of-war, civilian internees, and the inhabitants of occupied territories of the Japanese colonial empire; ultimately, 45 of the counts, including all the murder charges, were ruled either redundant or not authorized under the IMTFE Charter. The Tokyo Trial lasted more than twice as long as the better-known Nuremberg trials, and its impact was similarly influential in the development of international law; international war crimes tribunals would not again be established until International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994.

By the time it adjourned on November 12, 1948, two defendants had died of natural causes and one, Shūmei Ōkawa, was ruled unfit to stand trial. All remaining defendants were found guilty of at least one count. Seven were sentenced to death: Kenji Doihara, Kōki Hirota, Seishirō Itagaki, Heitarō Kimura, Akira Mutō, Hideki Tojo, and Iwane Matsui. Another sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment; during which three died and the remaining thirteen were paroled between 1952 and 1958. Another 42 suspects, including Nobusuke Kishi and Yoshisuke Aikawa, were imprisoned awaiting an unrealized second trial, and released in 1947 and 1948.

Across Asia and the Pacific, domestic tribunals were held in Allied nations, with most concluding by 1949. These indicted a further 5,700 Japanese personnel, of which 984 were sentenced to death.

The trials were criticized on a range of issues. The U.S. occupation decided that Emperor Hirohito, and other members of the Imperial House, would not be prosecuted, called to testify, or incriminated by other evidence. Defendants were allowed to coordinate their stories to this end. Strategic bombing by Japan and crimes against its own citizens, including Koreans and Taiwanese, were not prosecuted. Some of the trial's judges and defense lawyers argued this was connected to the lack of prosecution of Allied strategic bombing in Asia, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Western imperialism in Asia. Due to a U.S. cover-up, Japanese leaders and scientists involved in its biological warfare against China and forced human experimentation, including Unit 731, were given immunity in exchange for assisting the United States biological weapons program. Some of these leaders were convicted by the 1949 Soviet Khabarovsk war crimes trials.