At 2:10 in the morning, a US military convoy carrying seven casketed bodies left Tokyo's Sugamo Prison. Near four o'clock, they arrived at a Graves Registration Platoon in Yokohama for a final check before being taken on to the municipal crematorium.

As the dead were carried toward the flames, Japan awoke to this historic Thursday, December 23, 1948, a country still in ruins, and only beginning to shed the ghosts of its militarist past. Just after midnight, Hideki Tojo and six other senior Japanese wartime leaders had gone to the gallows. Shortly after eight, their bodies were committed to the fire.

The procedure was carried out in strict secrecy, as at Nuremberg just over two years earlier, to prevent the creation of any "martyr shrines" or pilgrimage sites for future sympathizers.

Their executions came after 31 months of charged proceedings at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, where the indictment was announced in open court on May 3, 1946, 80 years ago today. The tribunal's judgment would help shape postwar Asia and revolutionize the international legal order governing war crimes and aggressive war.

From the tribunal's very conception, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. Its architects understood that the judgment had to stand as an unimpeachable legal reckoning with the bloodiest conflict in human history.

The scale of the evidentiary record was staggering. In the case against 28 Japanese Class A defendants, the tribunal sat through 818 court sessions, heard testimony from 419 witnesses, received affidavits and depositions from another 779 individuals, and admitted 4,335 exhibits into evidence. Published court transcript ran to 49,858 pages.

By laying bare the wartime conspiracy of Japan's leaders to dominate Asia, the tribunal's painstaking documentation of atrocity sought not only to condemn the men in the dock, but also to shatter the ideological spell that had carried Japan into war. It aimed to leave no fertile ground in which denialism could take root. Yet that ambition came under attack almost as soon as the proceedings ended, and the assault has continued well into the twenty-first century.

Conception and preparation

Across the Allied world, vengeance had been in the air throughout the war. Even in the final stage, trials for Axis leaders were not inevitable.

Winston Churchill himself had been an advocate of summary execution. As late as the Yalta Conference in 1945, he still feared a tribunal might let the accused slip through the cracks of legal procedure. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, only recently converted from retributive justice, and Joseph Stalin who together persuaded him that the Nazi leaders should stand trial.

The man who helped turn Roosevelt toward trials was Henry L. Stimson, the US secretary of war from 1940 to 1945. Stimson argued for an international tribunal to try the leaders of the "Third Reich," insisting on a "well-defined procedure" embodying "at least the rudimentary aspects of the Bill of Rights." Such trials, he believed, should do more than punish: they should build a documentary record of Nazi crimes substantial enough to withstand future denial. That ideal would find its Pacific counterpart in Tokyo, through the promise embedded in the Potsdam Declaration that stipulated "stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals."

On September 11, 1945, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, ordered the arrest of the first group of suspected Japanese war criminals. The most notorious name on the list was Hideki Tojo, Japan's militarist prime minister from 1941 to 1944. As American officers arrived at his home, Tojo shot himself in the chest to avoid capture. He survived.

On January 19, 1946, MacArthur issued a special proclamation establishing the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and approved its charter. Modeled closely on the Nuremberg Charter, the document empowered the tribunal to try individuals for three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The tribunal was initially conceived with nine judges from the Allied powers that had signed Japan's surrender instrument. Judges from India and the Philippines were later added, partly to avoid the appearance that the court was an instrument of white victor's justice.

The tribunal begins

The tribunal sat in the former Japanese War Ministry building in Tokyo's Ichigaya district, once the nerve center of the country's war effort. Journalists were penned into a fenced section along one wall, while space was set aside in the courtroom for ordinary spectators, Japanese and foreign alike.

On April 29, 1946, Chief Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan lodged the indictment against 28 Class A defendants, a roster shaped by Allied compromise.

To many observers, the most glaring absence from the indictment was Emperor Hirohito, in whose name Japan's imperial war of expansion had been fought. American officials, led by MacArthur and backed by Washington, kept him out of the dock from political calculation: the emperor, they believed, was indispensable to surrender, occupation and the remaking of Japan. That omission left a poisonous ambiguity in Japan's postwar reckoning. If the sovereign at the apex of the wartime state could be preserved as a symbol above judgment, what lesson would be drawn by those who had killed crying "Banzai" in his name?

Drawing on pre-existing international law from the Hague and Geneva Conventions to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact which outlawed war, prosecutors charged the 28 defendants with Crimes Against Peace by forming a criminal conspiracy to prepare and wage aggressive wars. The indictment further accused them of conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, the latter defined as 'murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts' committed against civilians in connection with the conflict.

As the indictment was first read in court on May 3, 1946, a grotesque interruption broke the tribunal's solemnity. Shumei Okawa, the ultranationalist ideologue sometimes called the "Japanese Goebbels," sat behind Hideki Tojo and slapped the former prime minister's bald head. Okawa was later declared unfit to stand trial after doctors found signs of tertiary syphilis. Proceedings against him were suspended, a decision that has never entirely escaped suspicion.

On May 6, after the indictment was read, Sir William Webb, the Australian president of the tribunal, called on the defendants to enter their pleas. One by one, the accused answered: not guilty.

Nanjing

For three somber weeks, the tribunal heard evidence about the Nanjing Massacre.

On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army entered Nanjing, then the capital of Nationalist China. What followed was a campaign of mass killing, arson, looting and sexual violence that lasted for six weeks. More than 300,000 were killed.

The testimony of Chinese survivors, American missionaries, and other foreign eyewitnesses pieced together, beyond any dispute, the most notorious atrocity committed by Japanese forces in China.

To hold Japan's wartime leaders accountable, prosecutors sought to show that the massacre was not merely battlefield excess, military indiscipline and official failure to restrain violence, but part of a broader pattern of organized terror that reached its most notorious expression in Nanjing and would recur across Japanese-occupied China. They mounted a painstaking investigation to gather evidence. The obstacles were formidable. Searching for incriminating records in a China left in ruins after 14 years of war was exhausting work.

The greatest obstacle, however, was Japan's systematic destruction of wartime documents, both in Japan and overseas. As defeat approached, military and civilian authorities began burning files; the destruction continued into the early days of the Allied occupation. Many of the records that might have illuminated Japan's operations in China had gone up in smoke. As Japanese forces withdrew from China, they tried to erase living evidence as well, killing eyewitnesses and prisoners of war who might otherwise have testified.

Feeling secure in the belief that incriminating communications were unlikely to surface, the senior defendants tried to plead ignorance of the massacre. But that defense was torn open in court.

Dr. Miner Searle Bates, an American eyewitness and a key member of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, testified that US Embassy records in Nanking showed that Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo had discussed reports of the killings with officials of Japan's Foreign Ministry, including Foreign Minister Koki Hirota.

In the dock, Hirota, now one of the Class A defendants, reportedly sat up "as if a live wire had fallen on him."

The courtroom often fell into a stricken silence as witnesses delivered their horrifying testimony. Many Japanese readers were shaken when newspaper reports of the hearings began to appear, detailing crimes against civilians, especially women and children. The wartime cocoon of belief that Japan had fought a "righteous war of self-defense" was beginning to crumble.

Judgement

On April 16, 1948, the Tokyo tribunal adjourned. Judgment was not delivered until November 4. The 11 judges, drawn from strikingly different legal traditions, spent seven months completing their final opinions. By comparison, the entire Nuremberg trial had lasted only 10 months.

The delay was caused not only by deep philosophical divisions among the judges, but also by longer cross-examinations and the vast geographical and temporal sweep of the case. Together, these complications stretched the trial to 31 months.

From November 4 to 12, Sir William Webb delivered the majority judgment, a document of more than 1,200 pages that set out the legal and historical basis for the verdicts and individual sentences.

The judgment affirmed the tribunal's jurisdiction under the Charter, especially its authority to try crimes against peace. It held that Japan, having signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, was bound by its prohibition on war as an instrument of national policy.

The judgment rejected Japan's claim that its war had been "defensive." Instead, it found that Japan's leaders had conspired to dominate Asia through aggressive wars. The atrocities committed by Japanese forces against civilians and prisoners of war were not incidental, but a known and systematic consequence of that campaign.

It traced a long chain of Japanese aggression, from the seizure of "Manchuria" in 1931 to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, showing what the tribunal regarded as a consistent policy of expansion and coercion. To preserve its gains in China and extend its reach into Southeast Asia, Japan turned its war machine toward Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Under the heading "The Rape of Nanking," the judgment set out the atrocity in harrowing detail. "Even girls of tender years and old women were raped in large numbers throughout the city," it recorded. The murder of male civilians, meanwhile, was described as "organized and wholesale."

The judges also found that large-scale violence extended far beyond Nanjing as Japanese forces drove deeper into China and across Asia. Massacres of prisoners of war were widespread, often carried out under orders or tolerated by commanders up the chain of command.

On November 12, 1948, the defendants were taken from Sugamo Prison to hear their sentences. They were thoroughly searched to prevent a repeat of the Hermann Göring episode: two years earlier, Göring had escaped the gallows by swallowing a cyanide capsule only hours before his scheduled execution.

Two Class A defendants had died of illness before the judgment day: Yosuke Matsuoka, a former foreign minister closely tied to Japan's Manchurian project and the architect of its Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; and Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staff at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack.

All 25 remaining defendants were convicted, though not all on the same counts. Seven were sentenced to death, including Tojo Hideki and Hirota Koki. Iwane Matsui, the commander held responsible for the Japanese forces that laid Nanjing to waste in 1937, was also sent to the gallows on December 23. Sixteen received life sentences; the remaining two were sentenced to 20 years and seven years in prison.

Hanging was chosen to strip the condemned men of any martial dignity. They were to die not as soldiers before a firing squad, but as criminals on the gallows.

Their bodies were cremated shortly after the executions, following the precedent set at Nuremberg. But the fate of the ashes remained a mystery until 2021, when declassified US military documents surfaced in the National Archives. One secret report recorded that US Army Maj. Luther Frierson had "personally" scattered the cremated remains over a "wide area" of the Pacific Ocean, about 30 miles east of Yokohama. The Allied purpose was clear: to prevent the remains from being enshrined or turned into relics of pilgrimage.

Major Frierson's narrow mission succeeded. The Allies' larger ambition, to secure Japan's atonement, did not.

From prisoner to politician

On March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech. From the beginning, the Tokyo tribunal unfolded under the lengthening shadow of the Cold War.

As the trial proceeded, the rebuilding of Japan as an anti-communist bastion rose steadily on MacArthur's agenda. A consensus hardened in Washington that there would be no second Tokyo tribunal. Further prosecutions, too, were increasingly subordinated to the demands of reconstruction. The occupation authorities needed a functioning Japanese bureaucracy, and GHQ believed it could not staff the postwar state while placing too many of its incumbent officials in the dock.

As Tojo and his co-conspirators moved toward the gallows, other suspected Class A war criminals remained in Sugamo Prison, waiting for a trial that would never come.

They were released while Tojo's ashes were scarcely cold. Among them was Kishi Nobusuke, who had helped turn "Manchukuo" into an industrial base for Japan's war before joining Tojo's cabinet as minister of commerce and industry and later vice minister of munitions.

Kishi had obvious reasons to despise the Tokyo Trial. Yet in postwar Japan he became a crucial figure in unifying right-wing nationalists and consolidating the conservative forces that formed the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955. In 1957, he became Japan's prime minister. By then, efforts to secure parole for the surviving convicted war criminals were already well underway.

For the surviving Japanese nationalists, the war was not over even after the cannon had fallen silent. The battlefield had merely shifted to places like Yasukuni Shrine. Severed from state sponsorship by the Allied Occupation's dismantling of State Shinto, Yasukuni became a "private" religious corporation in 1946. Under that legal cover, it would continue to serve as a sanctuary for the Japanese right's unrepentant dogma: to redeem in memory what it had failed to win by force of arms.

The enshrinement of convicted war criminals at Yasukuni began in 1959, when Class B and Class C offenders were gradually absorbed into the shrine's sacred register. In 1978, 14 men convicted, charged, or tried as Class A war-crimes suspects were secretly added, including Tojo.

Japan's right-wing politicians have never shied away from paying tribute at Yasukuni Shrine. Shinzo Abe, the late prime minister and grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, was one of them. Sanae Takaichi, Japan's current prime minister, has long been associated with Yasukuni and in April 2026 sent a ritual offering. Critics see her push to loosen Japan's postwar security restraints as part of a broader nationalist effort to rehabilitate the wartime past.

Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge at the Tokyo Tribunal, seemed to anticipate such distortions when he later wrote:

"I am not a revanchist. I have no wish to charge the Japanese people with the blood debt incurred by Japanese militarism. But I believe that forgetting the suffering of the past may invite future calamity."

Research for this article drew on Gary J. Bass's Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.