Gary J. Bass Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia-东京审判

东京审判的正式名称是远东国际军事法庭，其持续时间比纽伦堡审判更长，规模也更大。正如加里·J·巴斯在这部详尽而引人入胜的书中指出的，这次审判产生了严重后果，并在现代亚洲继续发挥作用。巴斯将这次审判牢牢地置于殖民主义、种族态度、冷战和后殖民亚洲政治的背景下，并指出，日本在东京审判的历史中尚未解决的问题，触及了该国当今最大困境的核心。

书名：Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia《东京审判》

作者：Gary J. Bass

简介：A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, and their fellow victors, the questions of justice seemed clear: Japan’s leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against citizens in China, the Philippines, Korea, and elsewhere; rampant abuses of POWs. For the Allied Forces, the trial was an opportunity to achieve justice against the defendants, but also to create a legal framework for the prosecution of war crimes and to prohibit the use of aggressive war, and to create the kind of liberal international order that would prevail in Europe. For the Japanese leaders facing trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the US and Europe. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to destabilize the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought division and complexity; these tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded, from China’s descent into civil war to India’s independence and partition to Japan’s first successful democratic elections and the rewriting of a new, liberal constitution.