Tokyo Trial

Good history, fine acting. The moral nuances become very real as the Justices deliberate. I expect my attorney friends will really like this. For the most part the film succeeds in avoiding black and white characters and draws out the complexities of personalities and values. This is not a thriller, more of a morality play based on real high-stakes deliberations. The casting for General MacArthur was a minus, not because of the acting, there was little meat in the role, but there must be thousands of actors who would look like MacArthur and could handle this role. No one else's likeness was relevant, who knew the judges? But...

I was in the United States Army, 1st Cav Division 8th Cav Regt. stationed in Tokyo when this trial was going on. I spent a lot of time with one of the defense attorneys. I attended the trial when I could. One of my interests while I was in Japan (for one and a half years) was to learn as much as i could about the war and the Japanese people. This series was very interesting to me, as it was seen through others eves, not just mine. The scenes of the city were not what I saw, and the General Mac Arthur character did not match up with the real General, who i saw many times. The Imperial Hotel sets brought me back to my first week in Tokyo, as one of my first stops in Tokyo was to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece, The Imperial Hotel. To tell a story as complex as this one was, would take as many years as the trial took and in the end, I am sure we would not know or understand what actually happened and who was at fault. We do know that the Japanese lost the war but in the long run Japan was given a new start and the people of Japan were smart enough to make the most of it.

Far less remembered than the Nuremberg trials, the Tokyo Trials were nonetheless a turning point in Asian history. This series brilliantly brings out the factors at play during the trial, not least the Colonial history of the Allies.

All characters are thoughtfully portrayed and excellently played, but it's Irrfan Khan as justice Pal who provides the philosophical backbone to the story. He's a last minute addition from India because the Allies wanted some (token) Asians, but ironically India was then still a British colony. The proud Philippine judge, the questioning Dutchman, the British judge who still has a case of colonial hangover: these traits are portrayed through nuance rather than caricature.

Asia still lives in the aftermath of the wounds that the war opened. While the trials drew a line under one traumatic incident, what has followed in the 80 years since almost directly follows those events.

I'm thankful for the show being made and for exploring dissenting opinions. In a time where infantile soaps like Stranger Things are the norm on Netflix, this series was a delight, and it should be to anyone interested in history in general, and Asian history in particular.

This miniseries starts off a little clunky, but any faults of the first episode, are forgotten by the end of the second episode. If it wasn't for one of the other reviewers who abandoned the series after watching just one episode, I would not have made this remark.

The series attempts to present the personalities and professional conduct of each Justice appointed to conduct the trails. It is not revisionist as some of the other reviewers have stated. We have had decades of documentaries about Japan's involvement in WW2, but none have attempted to cover the due judicial process to the extent of Tokyo Trial. And I think I would not have enjoyed the series if it was not dramatised, as I would have turned off to another narrated documentary.

For performances of the actors, the editing, and production are all good, especially from the end of the second episode. There is a lot to take in, I found myself enthralled by the story, and unexpectedly quite emotional at the end. I have worked on translation projects for academic material, related to this subject, but Tokyo Trial has a richer more human story to tell.

I've spent half a century as a professional historian and thirty as an international criminal lawyer studying, recording and engaged in commentaries on the history and jurisprudence of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. I've also closely studied the records of many, many hundreds of national war crimes trials that followed the Far East and Pacific Conflict, plus other national and international war crimes trials elsewhere from the late nineteenth century to more recent times. The 2 1/2 year Tokyo Trial (IMTFE) was much longer, more complex and covered a more extended period of events than its nine-month international counterpart at Nuremberg. Both of these two trials, however, were 'Class A' war crimes trials, meaning that their central focus was on an alleged conspiracy to plan, prepare, initiate and wage wars of aggression ("Crimes against Peace"). There was plenty on 'Class B/C" offences (violations of the laws and usages of war ("War Crimes" in the usual sense of atrocities against the laws and usages of war) and upon 'Crimes against Humanity' against civilians, but the bulk of those offences were tried in the so-called Minor War Crimes Trials that were held by individual countries and generally in the countries where those crimes had taken place. Only Nuremberg also dealt with Genocide.

This film concentrates on what was considered even at the time as the most important issue, what was called 'the master crime', Crimes against Peace, not only because that was the one thing that set Class A cases apart from others but because there was a deeply flawed general theory that without an aggressive war the other kinds of offences couldn't take place on an organised or systematic basis. But in a more particular sense the importance of this film is that it focusses on the very legality of having a trial concerning 'Crimes against Peace' which behind the scene was questioned by the judges at the Tokyo Trial in ways that didn't gain any traction at all at Nuremberg. The Judges at Nuremberg agreed never to discuss how their deliberations proceeded and how the trial almost collapsed due to the divisions between them. And this is the first time that their struggles over that issue have been aired in a major international film production. what is clear is that they understood that if the view held by the majority did not prevail, all that was achieved at Nuremberg in holding individuals criminally responsible for planning, preparing, initiating and waging wars of aggression would have fallen apart as a new rule of international law. If the couple of dozen defendants in the Tokyo Trial had to pay an heavy price in the process of turning a rule intended to bind states into a rule fit for holding individual leaders criminally responsible even to the point of losing their lives, then that ex post facto lawmaking was considered justifiable by the majority of members of the Tribunal. For others, that was a bridge too far.

Did the majority do the right thing? Judge for yourself. But did the upholding of the Nuremberg precedent really change the world as hoped? Sadly, no: the International Criminal Court has yet to claim its jurisdiction to try such cases. The architects of the most significant post-1945 aggressive wars have escaped justice, not least in the lands of those Members of the Tokyo Tribunal who were most keen to see that jurisdiction bedded down in national and international trials and in the conduct of states towards each other. As for the acting, the direction, the script and the fairness of this account: the film is awesome and as completely accurate as it is possible to be. This mini-series is a masterpiece.