Japanese War Crimes Trials and France: The Struggle over the Indochina-Saigon Trials and the Tokyo Trial
Writer Profile
Chizuru Namba
Faculty of Economics ProfessorChizuru Namba
Faculty of Economics Professor
The combination of Japanese war crimes trials and France may be unfamiliar to many. Among the Class B and C trials, the Saigon trials conducted by France are overwhelmingly minor, and the role played by French judicial officers in the Tokyo Trial is hardly known. While there are many studies on Japanese war crimes trials, these issues have been remarkably forgotten by history until recently. This is by no means because the theme is "insignificant." Rather, it contains many important points—especially the deep-rooted issue of colonialism that continued after the war—and the process of gradually unearthing them and bringing the overall picture into focus was a steady yet stimulating one.
Engaging with this theme was both inevitable and accidental. It was inevitable because I had been studying Franco-Japanese coexistence in Indochina during World War II while studying abroad in France, so this theme was an extension of that. It was accidental because, immediately after returning from France, I happened to get a part-time job at the National Archives of Japan in Tokyo, where I learned of the existence of the Saigon trial materials among a series of Class B and C trial-related documents that were beginning to be released at the time.
Speaking of inevitability and accident, when conducting historical research, one cannot help but think deeply about this issue. History is a discipline that explores the chain of past events and causal relationships from diverse perspectives, but inevitability and accident are not necessarily clearly distinguishable. What appears to be an accident may not be so if broken down and analyzed, and various small accidents often intervene in what appears to be inevitable.
As I delved into the historical records of the war crimes trials, I encountered several irrational facts. The trigger that separates life and death can sometimes be due to a mere trivial accident. On the other hand, there are cases where individuals seem caught in structures built over a long history, rendering them helpless against their own will. In living this given life, what can we call inevitable and what can we call accidental? I wrote this book while wondering how people have accepted such things throughout history.
Chizuru Namba
Keio University Press
256 pages, 2,860 yen (tax included)
*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of writing.