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Will he or won’t he? In the summer, people around the world will be hearing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s latest take on Japan’s wartime history and what many prefer to term “victor’s justice.” Against this backdrop, readers are certain to find Eric Jaffe’s account of the only Japanese indicted at the Tokyo major war crimes trial to escape punishment a nuanced and important work.
Jaffe has written an ambitious, carefully researched account of the life of the fiery nationalist Shumei Okawa intertwined with the parallel biography of U.S. medic Major Daniel Jaffe. Jaffe was the author’s grandfather who was the psychologist responsible for the initial medical ruling that stated that Okawa should be excluded from the Tokyo trial on grounds of an inability to “distinguish right from wrong” and therefore unable to testify in his own defense.
At the heart of the book is Okawa’s career - if it can be called a career given that by the time he was indicted on the emperor's birthday of April 29, 1946, he had led a remarkable existence. Okawa was nearly 60 years old and had been variously a prolific author, translator, rabblerouser, plotter of planned coups, think tank director, determined advocate of kicking the West out of Asia, and according to the prosecution, a sinister propagandist behind Japan’s “Messianic Mission against an unwilling world.”
The contrast between an aging and syphilitic Okawa and the much younger Jaffe could hardly be greater. One had considerable influence amongst the junior officers, politicians and generals of interwar Japan, while the other was a relatively inexperienced combat psychologist who had been itching to leave occupied Japan and return to his family in the States. One appears as a highly self-confident linguist, who was reading Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” before indictment, while the other was a modest doctor who in later life seems to have avoided discussion of his key role in the Okawa affair even within his family circle.
The question as to whether Okawa was genuinely insane or was able to make an extraordinarily successful bid to fake madness is unlikely to be ever conclusively resolved. Major Jaffe gave his opinion that some psychiatrists supported but others disputed. Contemporaries would always associate Okawa with making the infamous slap on the bald head of Major General Hideki Tojo on the opening day of the Tokyo trial in May 1946 but this act was hardly conclusive. Later, Okawa’s mental state did apparently improve.
Why he was not therefore brought back to court again is far from clear - Eric Jaffe goes so far as to claim that if Okawa “had remained on trial, he would have been convicted with the others, and very well might have been hanged.” Perhaps but obviously we will never know. What is clear, though, is the undoubted sense among the public in Japan and overseas that the Allied nations who were trying Japan’s leaders had themselves in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries been running the imperialist show in the Asia-Pacific in their own interests. Hypocrisy on such a massive scale may not be a legal term but it continues to linger in the minds of many in the region. It is not about to go away whatever Mr Abe may or may not say on the subject.
“A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unresolved Mystery from World War 2.” (Scribner, NY, 2014) $30. Kindle price $16.95.
© Japan Today
5 Comments
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1glenn
The allies were guilty of hypocrisy? The Japanese leadership (and the German Nazis) were clearly guilty of intentional crimes against humanity; not just against Westerners, but also against fellow Asians. That a few of the worst leaders were convicted and sentenced was not hypocrisy, but constrained justice. That the Japanese people as a whole (and the West German people) were not punished after surrendering was, historically, an act of unusual benevolence, perhaps unprecedented in history, and completely different from how the Japanese leadership treated conquered peoples in Manchuria, Korea, Okinawa, China, Burma, Sumatra, the Philippines, and in Oceania.
Playing the victim after behaving like barbarians is unattractive.
Manish Prabhune
Just for reference, the Japanese have enshrined someone whom they feel called out the victors justice... http://experiencetokyo.net/discover-india-in-japan-indian-judge-enshrined-at-yasukuni-shrine-dr-radha-binod-pal/
bullfighter
The headline for this article is moronic. As described in this review, the book is about someone who did NOT stand trial, not about someone who stood trial and not about the trial itself. Moreover, in point of fact, the criticism that the IMTFE was "victor's justice" originated with Richard Minear, an American historian, who wrote a book by that title.
Mocheake
It WAS victor's justice and CORRECT justice. The Nazis and the Japanese military were extremely cruel and brutal. Did the British or the U.S. kill six million innocent people in gas chambers, use people's skin to make lampshades, lead death marches or disembowel pregnant women in the streets? Stop it already with this bull.
frenchosa
I also thought the title had something to do with Richard Minear. He was a professor at my alma mater, I loved the classes that I had with him.