Japan's Imperial Conspiracy [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The work at hand resurveys an area of history which I once explored in a judicial capacity. Whilst Chief Justice of the Australian state of Queensland and later a justice of the High Court of Australia, I headed the bench of eleven judges from eleven nations known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which sat in Tokyo from May 1946 to November 1948. After that two-and-a-half-years' trial, which was commended for its fairness even by the Japanese vernacular press, the Tribunal sentenced twenty-five Japanese leaders to death or imprisonment for having conspired to wage aggressive war and for being responsible for the conventional war crimes—the atrocities—which had been committed by their subordinates. When David Bergamini's manuscript, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, arrived in my mail I picked it up with alacrity. I had been led to expect much from the author because of his journalistic and scholarly qualifications and his years of research with source documents. Now, on reading the result of his labors, I find that my expectations have been exceeded. Japan's Imperial Conspiracy is a tremendous achievement. I have read few histories which weave so many intricate situations into an engrossing story and at the same time present, with logic and lucidity, a challenging thesis as to the nature of the historical process. The author's insistence upon dealing with'history as the deeds of men and women, and not as the dark workings of complex sociological and economic pressures, is refreshing. It may take years for this work to find its proper place in the evaluation of scholars. More than half the information in it is new to the English-speaking public and some of the interpretation is sure to be controversial. I would judge, however, that the book has the highest importance and will cause a major readjustment in Western views of Oriental history. To a large extent, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy supplements and comple- ix