JAPAN: Flowers for the Prosecution

On the afternoon of Aug. 10, 1945, Osamu Satano’s superior officers took him to an open field near the Fukuoka crematory in northern Kyushu. There Satano had to “volunteer” to behead a captured U.S. B-29 airman. After he had swung the executioner’s sword, Satano watched one of his officers torture another prisoner to death by shooting arrows at him.

Last week, in a musty military courtroom in Yokohama, 27-year-old Satano rose to be sentenced by a five-man military tribunal. Just before the sentence was pronounced, the defendant’s mother presented the embarrassed U.S. prosecutor with a bouquet of flowers. The court had decided that there were mitigating circumstances in Satano’s case—mainly the fact that he had killed under orders. The sentence: five years’ imprisonment. The defendant sighed happily with relief.

Satano’s judges might well have sighed with him. Since the U.S. first began conducting war crimes trials in Japan late in 1945, 124 Japanese had been sentenced to hang, 62 to life imprisonment and some 650 to prison terms ranging from a few months to 50 years. More than 150 others were acquitted or dismissed. With the case of Osamu Satano, U.S. prosecutors closed their books. There would be no more war crimes trials in Japan.