MAY 3, 1946 to NOVEMBER 12, 1948
All Japanese Class A war criminals were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo. The prosecution team was made up of justices from eleven Allied nations: Australia, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The Tokyo trial lasted two and a half years, from May 1946 to November 1948. Other war criminals were tried in the respective victim countries. War crime trials were held at ten different locations in China.
Of the eighty (80) Class A war criminal suspects detained in the Sugamo prison after 1945, twenty-eight (28) men were brought to trial before the IMTFE. The accused included nine civilians and nineteen professional military men:
Four former premiers: Hiranuma, Hirota, Koiso, Tojo;
Three former foreign ministers: Matsuoka, Shigemitsu, Togo
Four former war ministers: Araki, Hata, Itagaki, Minami
Two former navy ministers: Nagano, Shimada
Six former generals: Doihara, Kimura, Matsui, Muto, Sato, Umezu
Two former ambassadors: Oshima, Shiratori
Three former economic and financial leaders: Hoshino, Kaya, Suzuki
One imperial adviser: Kido
One radical theorist: Okawa
One admiral: Oka
One colonel: Hashimoto
Two (Yosuke Matsuoka and Osami Nagano) of the twenty-eight defendants died of natural causes during the trial. One defendant (Shumei Okawa) had a mental breakdown on the first day of trial, was sent to a psychiatric ward and was released in 1948 a free man. The remaining twenty-five (25) were all found guilty, many of multiple counts. Seven (7) were sentenced to death by hanging, sixteen (16) to life imprisonment, and two (2) to lesser terms. All seven sentenced to death were found to be guilty of inciting or otherwise implicated in mass-scale atrocities, among other counts. Three of the sixteen sentenced to life imprisonment died between 1949 and 1950 in prison. The remaining thirteen (13) were paroled between 1954 and 1956, less than eight years in prison for their crimes against millions of people.
Two former ambassadors were sentenced to seven and twenty years in prison. One died two years later in prison. The other one, Shigemitsu, was paroled in 1950, and was appointed foreign minister in 1954.
http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMTT.html
http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/...japan/twct.htm
Tojo in trial
