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.
