Date: November 12, 1948
On this day with SHAC, an international war crimes tribunal in Tokyo passed death sentences on seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, who served as premier of Japan from 1941 to 1944.
Just eight short days before the sentences were announced, the trial which had lasted 30 months, ended, finding all 25 Japanese defendants guilty of breaching the laws and customs of war. In addition to the death sentences charged to Tojo and other principals—such as Iwane Matsui, known for organizing the Rape of Nanking, and Heitaro Kimura for brutalizing Allied prisoners of war—16 others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The remaining defendants were sentenced to lesser terms in prison, but were found guilty nonetheless.
Unlike the widely known, very infamous, Nuremburg trial of German war criminals, where there were four chief prosecutors representing Great Britain, the United States, and the U.S.S.R., the Tokyo trial featured just one. American Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant to the U.S. attorney general, was the chief prosecutor in the trial, however, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings. Australian judge Willian Flood Webb presided over the main Tokyo trial, while various tribunals sitting outside Japan judges some 5000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.
—Alexandra Grant