By Fang Yuan
The year 2026 marks the 80th anniversary of the opening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). From 1946 to 1948, the Tribunal convened in Tokyo, Japan, to conduct a collective trial of Japanese Class-A war criminals from WWII, commonly known as the Tokyo Trial. Following the Nuremberg Trials, it was another large-scale, multinational judicial proceeding in human history to try crimes of aggression and war crimes.
Over two and a half years, judges from 11 countries heard the case and found all 25 defendants guilty. Among them, seven war criminals, including Tōjō Hideki were sentenced to death by hanging, sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment, and two received determinate sentences.
The Tokyo Trial can be described as an unprecedented trial of the century. With 818 court sessions, 419 presented witnesses, 4,336 pieces of evidence, and more than 48,000 pages of trial records, it preserved, with overwhelming and irrefutable evidence, one of the darkest chapters of aggression in human history. During the proceedings, heinous atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the "Bataan Death March" were brought to light. The criminal acts of Japanese militarist aggression were systematically exposed and brought to justice.
However, as the Tokyo Trial took place at the outset of the Cold War, a considerable number of Japanese war criminals did not receive due punishment, and the root causes of Japanese militarism were not completely eradicated. The responsibility of Emperor Hirohito for the war was exempted, war criminals such as Kishi Nobusuke were released, and the crimes committed by Unit 731, including human experimentation and bacteriological warfare , were effectively covered up. These unresolved historical issues enabled right-wing forces in Japan to persist and gradually expand, fostering the growth and spread of historical revisionism.
Over the past 80 years, Japanese right-wing forces have never ceased their attempts to deny and overturn the Tokyo Trial. From veiled questioning in the immediate post-war years, to open debate following Japan's economic rise, and to intensified efforts at wholesale revision amid the country's rightward political shift after the end of the Cold War, such forces have continuously sought to blur responsibilities for the war and shake off the Tribunal's verdicts. Fallacies such as the "victors' justice" argument and the claim of "ex post facto law" have been propagated to whitewash the history of aggression and remove legal and public-opinion constraints on military expansion. They have questioned the legitimacy of the Tribunal as a unilateral judgment by the victorious nations, portrayed themselves as "victims", and falsely alleged that the Tokyo Trial ignored Japan's own wartime suffering, including the Bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have even claimed that Japan's war of aggression was an act of "self-defense" in response to sanctions imposed by the US and Britain, and have persistently distorted facts by glorifying the war of aggression and touting the so-called "Greater East Asia Liberation", thereby misleading the international community.
In present-day Japan, historical revisionism is converging with neo-militarism, posing a tangible threat to regional peace and stability. Successive Japanese prime ministers have paid visits to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, where Class-A war criminals are enshrined, in an attempt to glorify them as so-called "heroic spirits". Right-wing forces have systematically distorted history by tampering with textbooks and producing misleading films and television works. Meanwhile, Japan's defense budget has increased for 14 consecutive fiscal years, the ban on the exercise of the right of "collective self-defense" has been lifted, and restrictions on arms exports have been relaxed, rendering the "pacifist Constitution" nominal in name only. Such actions constitute a blatant provocation against the just verdict of the Tokyo Trial and a grave affront to the shared commitment of humanity to peace.
As Mei Ju-ao, the Chinese judge at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, once observed that forgetting the sufferings of the past may cause a calamity in the future. Eighty years on, this warning remains profoundly relevant. No matter how time passes, the just verdicts cannot be shaken, the irrefutable historical evidence cannot be distorted, and the legal foundations cannot be undermined. Only by upholding historical truth with a shared will and defending the conscience and justice of humanity can the specter of militarism be denied any refuge, the torch of peace be passed on from generation to generation, and human civilization be spared from repeating the tragedy of war.
(The author is an international affairs observer)
Editor's note: Originally published on people.com.cn, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.