ON August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan after years of hostilities in the “Far East” (strange how we still refer to these Oriental labels after all the deconstruction of colonial discourse).
In our country, the end was a sudden termination of brutal memories. “Filipinos have a short memory” was then a common saying. The more positive side to this was that the people craved for peace.
Tales of guerillas fighting each other or Filipinos acting as spies persisted both as rumors and proven facts. The infamous Bataan Death March was also a heroic tale not easily forgotten.
But who remembers the Tokyo Trial? Who recognizes the name Justice Delfin Jaranilla, the judge who represented the Philippines in that trial in Japan?
From Netflix, one can access a riveting documentary, called Tokyo Trial. That I would one night view the said documentary is fateful no less. It was the 3oth of August, barely two days before the anniversary of the formal surrender of Japan.
The documentary is interesting from many angles. Its producer, to underscore what we can expect from this retelling, is NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, working with the FATT Productions of the Netherlands and Don Cormody Television of Canada. This is not, we are assured, a United States production.
The series begins with the arrival of justices and prosecutors from different allied countries. First there are 10 justices from Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They are joined later by a judge from the Philippines. It is Justice Delfin Jaranilla, who is sent to be the voice of all the Filipino war victims.
American and Japanese lawyers stand for defense.
On April 29, 1946, the The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) is convened. It is also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The aim is to bring to court the leaders of Japan to answer for the crimes committed during the war. But war for lawyers—because they are lawyers—is not simply “war.” They have to classify and categorize the wars into Class A, Class B and Class C. It follows also that the ones who committed the said crimes are ranged as either Class-A criminal, Class-B criminal, or Class-C criminal.
When the court convenes, it is barely a year after the war. The emotions are raw, if we are to paraphrase the words of the Filipino jurist.
The raw feelings are not only about the war but also the colonial experiences of the members of the team. There is the judge from England, Lord William Patrick, who, it seems, is always ready to bristle against the comments of the Indian lawyer, Justice Pal of India. On the surface, the two jurists are greatly at odds in the definition of war of aggression and war against humanity. Deep within, in the big picture of the country to which they belong, the Englishman stands for the harsh years of domination of India while Pal speaks for his county seeking independence from the England.
In the Tokyo trial, Lady Justice peeps through her pretend blindfold. Justice, after all, emanates from the rule of imperfect, opinionated men and never, as lawyers and judges would have us believe, from the rule of law. In the hands of lawyers, justice as well as the notion of right and wrong are never eternal; rather, justice is a putty malleable and open to manipulating and mystification by the best legal minds. History proves also that these s0-called legal minds are not always for the greater good of societies—in war or in peace.
It is the end of war but not the end of discrimination and imperial dependency. From the side of all the jurists, the Charter provided by MacArthur is enough. But not for Judge Röling of the Netherlands and India’s Pal. The immediate implication of this is the call of Pal to exonerate all the Japanese officials, the reason being that there was never a systematic order from these ministers and officials to massacre and pillage the conquered territories. At most, the soldiers are going to be tried for their individual crimes. For Jaranilla, it is an unthinkable solution to the end of war. On the one hand, testimony after testimony point to the cruelty of the Japanese in particular situations.
The jurists are supposed to preside over the fate of Japan but things are not easy. Pal walks out and spends his time drafting his own decisions without listening to others and watching the proceedings; Judge Röling is embroiled in a relationship that would put at risk his objectivity and moral ascendancy; and, Justice Webb of Australia, at some point, is booted out for flimsy reasons. All the while, the shadow of General MacArthur and the new power of the US loom over the tribunal.
There is one more question? Where is Emperor Hirohito when the decisions for war are reached?
For all the compelling content of this series, the technologies of the production are for the books. Using a generous amount of footage of the trial from the archives, the film seamlessly and in perfect color grading incorporates the actors with the real characters from that momentous event. At every juncture, it becomes an exciting game to distinguish the reel from the real, making Tokyo Trial a blend of documentary and feature film.
The performances are engaging: Paul Freeman as Lord William Patrick is imperial and subtly condescending; Marcel Hensema as Professor Bert Röling is human and conflicted; Jonathan Hyde, congenial in his characterization of Sir William Webb intrigues us with his weakness whose source we cannot pinpoint. Bert Matias, a US-based theater and TV actor, fleshes out a very passionate Filipino judge who, on the day of the testimonies on the abuses and violence committed in his country, refuses to be at the court. He tells his colleagues he is relying on his own experience of the war.
As Justice Pal, Irrfan Khan, a celebrated Indian actor, is a hardheaded yet clear-headed legal practitioner whose source of understanding is the intellectual practice of law. Ethics seems fuzzy to him as he steadfastly holds on to the legal rather than the moral. Could it be also that he, an astute scholar, believes the legal already shares the fount of the correct and proper?
When the tribunal was adjourned on November 12, 1948, two defendants were already dead. The guilty verdict was given to all the remaining defendants of at least one count each. The sentences varied from several years of imprisonment to execution. By the 1950s, the pressure to free some of those imprisoned was so strong that, one by one, they were released and integrated into the post-war Japanese society.
The series is codirected by Pieter Verhoeff and Rob W. King.
Tokyo Trial premiered on NHK in Japan in 2016. It was made available on the NHK On-Demand VoD service and subsequently by Netflix. The series premiered in 190 countries on Netflix in December 2016. The Netflix broadcast of the series includes subtitles in 20 languages.
Postscript: It is said that a memorial for the Indian jurist, Justice Pal, can be found in the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto sacred site honoring the kamikaze pilots and the war criminals at the same time. This is another story.
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