Research On Marunouchi Tribunal Of Japanese War Criminals

After world war II,the Allies established 51 military tribunals in the Asia-Pacific region to try Japanese war criminals.Among this 51 military tribunals,the Marunouchi Tribunal is the only "quasi-A-level trial",which was set up against the backdrop of the decision by the General Headquarters(GHQ)not to pursue further international military trials and to release a large number of the Class A war criminal suspects.Since the fall of 1945,GHQ had arrested 127 suspected Class A war criminals of Japanese,and 28 of them were tried in the International Military Tribunal for Far East(IMTFE).For the rest,the Allies had proposed to try them by following international military tribunal or domestic military courts.But all the remained Class A war criminal suspects were freed on December 24,1948 except Soemu Toyoda.Given this background,Marunouchi Tribunal prosecutors should have a greater conviction of the accused.But Toyoda ended in acquittal ten month later and Hiroshi Tamura was be confined at hard labor for eight years.As the former Japanese Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet and the former Naval of General Staff,Soemu Toyoda was the highest-ranking war criminal suspect except for the accused in IMTFE,and his acquittal surprised a lot in the context of severe punishing senior Japanese military commanders on the war responsibility.From the court proceedings,this verdict was because,on the one hand,the prosecution failed to provide strong evidences;on the other hand,the defense counsel had chosen an effective defense strategy: Cutting in Toyoda's command power at the time of the alleged crime,and proving that the accused had no administrative authority over his subordinate forces which meant that the accused was not liable as commander for the war crimes committed by his subordinate forces.The trajectory of Soemu Toyoda's and Tomoyuki Yamashita's fates intersected on the “Manila Massacre”.After comparing,the two trials' slightly extreme verdicts were based on the different standards on determining the command responsibility adopted by them.Toyoda trial made a reasonable correction of the Yamashita standard on the command responsibility.Set up on the same day,Tamura trial ended in nearly four months.According to the transcript of the trial,the reason of this prompt ending was that the accused choose to stand as witness in the defense phase and his lawyers decided to give up their evidences.Further study showed that there was a kind of plea bargain——Judge Green and the accused reached a guilty plea agreement.The compromise was also reflected in the verdict:guilty and confined at hard labor for eight years.There is a clear light sentencing tendency in the Marunouchi Tribunal which was the corollary of complying with the court procedure,but we should not ignore the influence of external factors: the willingness of the victorious peoples to punish war criminals waned over time;with the cold war,the United States' policy towards Japan had changed from punishing to supporting and Japan began to become the bridgehead of the United States against the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union in the far east.Anyway,because of the judicial practice of the military tribunals by the Allies,the laws of war which were thought unenforceable at the beginning of the 20 th century have become the rigid stipulation in modern international criminal law and based the post-war world peace and stability.