As chief prosecutor, Keenan was not of the caliber of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who played that role at the first trial at Nuremberg, nor of Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at subsequent Nuremberg trials. Jackson and Taylor embodied the demand for justice, combining great eloquence and legal acumen. Keenan sometimes appeared in court under the influence of his heavy drinking. Nor were all of the 11 judges from countries that fought against Japan of top quality.
A number of the judges dissented from parts of the judgment of the tribunal. One of the more learned judges, Radhabinod Pal of India, dissented from all the convictions on all charges. In essence, Judge Pal took the position that the crimes committed by the Allies against Japan vindicated Japanese military commanders and political leaders of the crimes charged against them. Judge Pal is celebrated in Japan. There is a monument to him in the Yasukuni Shrine.
Judge Pal’s dissent and the failure of Japanese political leaders to accept political responsibility for the crimes committed by Japan in its conduct of the war seem to me to reflect the perception that Japan was as much a victim of war crimes as it was the perpetrator of war crimes. The Allies had also committed great crimes against Germans and their other European enemies during World War II. These included the firebombing of cities such as Dresden and Hamburg by Britain and the U.S., the great number of rapes committed by Soviet soldiers as they made their way through Eastern Europe and through Germany to Berlin, and the rapes committed by Moroccan troops under French command in the invasion of Italy. Though these gross abuses were never discussed at Nuremberg and were never punished, they were dwarfed in significance by the revelations of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
Moreover, the trials at Nuremberg were followed by literally thousands of trials of Nazi war criminals that have continued almost up to the present day in German courts. Those trials have both reflected German acceptance of the guilt of their fellow Germans for war crimes and, at the same time, contributed to that acceptance. They are an expression of the country’s profound sense of political responsibility for German criminality. There were never similar trials of Japanese war criminals in Japanese courts. Those trials and punishments that took place were in military tribunals convened by the Allies and in the courts of some of the countries where Japanese troops remained when the war ended.