The Tokyo Trial, Justice, and the Postwar International Order

New Directions in East Asian History

Fully utilizing the latest archival material, this book provides a comprehensive, multi-dimensional and nuanced understanding of the Tokyo Tribunal by delving into the temporal aspects that extended the relevance and reverberations of the Tribunal beyond its end in 1948. With this as a backdrop, this book contributes to the study of Japanese postwar diplomacy. It shows the Tokyo Tribunal is still very much an experiment in progress, and how the process itself has helped Japan to quickly shed its imperial past and remain ambiguous as to its war responsibilities. From a wider vantage point, this book augments the existing scholarship of international criminal law and justice, offering a clear framework as to the limits of what international criminal tribunals can accomplish and offers a must-read for academics and students as well as for practitioners, journalists and policymakers interested in international criminal law and US-Japanese diplomatic history.

Aleksandra Babovic is Assistant Professor at Osaka University Graduate School of Human Sciences, Japan. She holds a PhD from Kobe University Graduate School of Law with a specialization in Diplomatic History and earned her MA degree from Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po (France). She is a lecturer at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies (Japan) and Osaka University (Japan). Her research interests include Japanese postwar history, international criminal law and justice, and more specifically the Tokyo Tribunal.