070033 UE Guided Reading Contemporary History - Coming to terms with the Pacific War (2022S)

War crimes trials mirror the war through the lens of legal procedures – and influence memory politics decades later. By analyzing battles, campaigns, occupation policies through memorials, films and trial proceedings after the conflict, narratives and national policies are shaped, and voices of victims get recognition or fall into oblivion.
After the Pacific war, the Allied powers held thousands of national war crimes trials to settle account with the Japanese Empire. In addition, 11 nations sat in judgment on Japan’s ruling elite in the Tokyo Tribunal, the equivalent of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: the United States, Australia, Great Britain, China, France, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the Philippines, and India. The Allied war crimes trials program was unprecedented; not only in its sheer numbers and in its complexity, range and geographical area, but also in the relatively short space of time in which the program was executed.
Additionally, the Allies faced a major challenge in the Pacific: the Japanese occupation of large parts of Asia fostered the rise of powerful independent movements who staunchly opposed the return of the colonial powers and contested the legitimacy of the Allied war crimes trials. Furthermore, the question of war crimes trials is intrinsically linked to the issue of collaboration. (De)colonization not only influenced the Allied war crimes trials, it also heavily affected the Allied collaborator trials that were convened at the same time. In former colonial states such as British Malaya, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, the question of to whom loyalty was owed during the war was by no means clear; could a colonial government request the same loyalty from its subjects – who were subjugated to colonial authority– as from its own citizens?

War crimes trials offer a rare chance to scrutinize both the decisions made by political and military leaders as well as the atrocities committed by the soldiers and agents of those leaders. However the trials not only deliver justice, their proceedings and judgments also shape the historical narratives of the conflict emanating from these courts. These narratives are often far from uncontested, as they are guided by the selection of individuals for prosecution, as well as the scope and meaning of categories of crime and culpability. Thus, what happens to history after its encounter with international law, and international law after its encounter with history? By taking this question as a common thread, this course will delve into the many intricacies of post-war justice in Asia.
In our course, we will focus on the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo as well as a wide-range of selected cases of national war crimes trials in Asia (for example on trials for forced labor (i.e. the Burma Siam railway), sexual slavery/“comfort women”, and for the crime of bacteriological warfare) in order to place the trials in their political and legal context. These findings will be intertwined with the issue of memory and transitional justice. We will use historical films and series, memorials and websites, to investigate the shadows of the Pacific War.