Can trials heal the wounds of war?
A new book looks at the legacy of Japan’s war-crimes tribunal
THE WORLD IS still haunted by 20th-century crimes so grave that any attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice seems feeble. The trials at Nuremberg in 1945-46 did little to salve wounds left by the Holocaust. And the Tokyo trials of alleged Japanese war criminals, which lasted two and a half years from 1946-48, have not stopped outpourings of anger across Asia whenever, for example, a senior Japanese politician visits Yasukuni, a Tokyo shrine to the war-dead, including convicted war criminals.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The scales of injustice”
From the November 18th 2023 edition
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