By Liu Wenzhang, People’s Daily
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the work of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo trials”). This landmark trial represented humanity’s moral reckoning, delivering justice for wartime atrocities through an internationally recognized legal process.
Yet in contemporary Japan, the memory of the Tokyo trials is fading — not merely due to the passage of time, but as a result of deliberate downplaying and selective amnesia by certain forces.
The Ichigaya Memorial Hall, the original site of the trials, exemplifies this erasure. Few exhibits directly reflect the trials. The defendants’ podium, maps once displayed on the walls, and the 11 national flags representing the judges from 11 countries appear marginalized, almost like afterthoughts.
Instead, the spotlight falls on wartime artifacts such as military uniforms and swords, which still carry the shadow of militarism. The dissenting opinion of Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, which argued for acquittal, is prominently highlighted, while explanations focus on what is described as Japan’s “modern military history,” with only cursory mention of the trials’ background and significance.
What may appear to be a matter of curatorial choice in fact reveals a deeper distortion of historical understanding. In narratives promoted by Japan’s right-wing forces, war is repackaged as a matter of “national honor” or a “inevitable product of its era,” while acts of aggression are reduced to vague “historical events” or mere “background.” This site intended to preserve memory has instead become tools to obscure history and mislead the public.
In the eyes of the Japanese right-wing forces, Pal occupies an almost “sacred” position. Not only is his dissenting opinion given prominence, but a statue of him has even been erected at the Yasukuni Shrine. Such efforts appear aimed at creating an alternative narrative to justify the history of aggression.
The overwhelming guilty verdicts delivered by eleven judges based on extensive evidence remain conspicuously absent from the memorial, while isolated dissenting views are amplified as if repetition alone could invalidate established historical conclusions.
But historical truth does not change with selective remembrance. Attempts to reshape the past ultimately amount to self-deception. Eighty years ago, the Tokyo trials delivered a just judgment, grounded in extensive evidence, on the responsibility for wars of aggression. Its historical significance and legal conclusions cannot and will not be arbitrarily distorted or dismantled.
Another historical site, Sugamo Prison, has been erased entirely. Once the place where Class-A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo, were detained, and where seven were ultimately executed, it was demolished in the 1970s and replaced by a 60-story commercial skyscraper. It is as if the history it bore witness to has been buried beneath concrete and steel.
Today, only a faint inscription on the back of an inconspicuous “peace monument” in a nearby park marks the former site. Passersby, including dog walkers and playing children, move through the area, few pausing, fewer still aware that this ground once witnessed the final reckoning of those responsible for aggression.
For Japan’s right-wing forces, the Tokyo trials symbolize defeat and humiliation. They reject not only the criminal nature of aggression but also refuse to acknowledge the outcome of defeat. Others in Japan deem the era too painful to confront, opting to let history recede into abstraction rather than face its lessons.
Yet without confronting history, closure remains impossible. Only by facing squarely the immense suffering inflicted on Asian countries by aggression, and by fully recognizing the devastating consequences of militarism, can Japan truly emerge from the shadows of its past and return to the international community with dignity.
History does not fade fade. Justice does not expire.
