Justice and Reconciliation: Postwar Philippine Trials of Japanese War Criminals in History and Memory
Open AccessAt the close of World War II, the United States and its allies made a commitment to mete out "stern justice" to all Japanese guilty of war crimes. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, established to try Japan's military and civilian leaders, has been the focus of considerable debate; some have criticized it as a classic case of "victors' justice," fraught with legal and procedural flaws. Much less well known or studied are the roughly concurrent trials, by individual allied governments, of Japanese charged with "ordinary" war crimes--violations of the laws and customs of war. As one of the conveners of these trials, the Republic of the Philippines, newly independent and still reeling from three years of a harsh Japanese occupation, put 155 Japanese on trial, convicted 138, and sentenced 79 to death.This dissertation, relying extensively on archival research in the Philippines, Japan and the United States, traces the process by which the Philippine government assumed responsibility for trying war crimes suspects, the course of their trials, and the outcomes for individual Japanese. It focuses directly on issues of justice, memory construction, and reconciliation, and ultimately concludes that, as important as the question of the essential fairness of the trials may be in legal terms, the trials' deeper significance lies in the larger purposes they served and the separate narratives they engendered in both Japan and the Philippines. Such narratives solidified, for both countries, divergent views of the trials but were not allowed to impede the eventual restoration of a bilateral relationship. These judicial proceedings were a necessary, if insufficient, component of progress toward any sort of "reconciliation."
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