JAPAN: Bitter Fruit

In November 1948, the eleven-nation International Military Tribunal convicted and sentenced 25 top Japanese officials for conspiring to wage aggressive war and other crimes against humanity. Seven of these Class A war criminals were executed, five died in prison, six were paroled.

Three weeks ago, on his visit to the U.S., one of the paroled six called on General Douglas MacArthur at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Towers. Said the general to Japan’s Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu: “I think that Japan’s so-called war criminals should be released.” Shigemitsu thought so too and said so to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

One morning last week, by unanimous consent among the allied nations concerned, three of the last seven Class A prisoners walked out from behind the concrete walls of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison. Free after ten years, two days, ten hours (counting pre-sentence jail time) were:

¶ Okinori Kaya, 66, Finance Minister from 1937 to 1938 and 1941 to 1944.

¶ Teiichi Suzuki, 66, Tojo’s wartime planning board president and onetime lieutenant general.

¶ Kingoro Hashimoto, 65, the colonel who, on his own initiative, ordered the 1937 shelling of three British gunboats in the Yangtze River and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay. Near war’s end, Hashimoto exhorted his countrymen to make suicidal attacks. Incarceration did not ease the colonel’s bitterness. Grim-faced as ever, he rasped: “I am angry from the bottom of my heart at the injustice and irrationality of the war-crimes trials. I feel strongly my responsibility for our defeat. I apologize deeply to the Japanese people.”

Still in Sugamo Prison: four Class A war criminals. 530 Class B and C war criminals (murderers, torturers, etc.), many of whom may get no parole.