4 Japanese War Crimes during World War II Powers held trials in 49 locations in Asia between October 1945 and April 1956. Britain prosecuted the Japanese war criminals who had been involved in planning and constructing the Thai-Burma Railway due to which many British POWs died, and Australian prosecutors tried Japanese war crim- inals at several locations as well. Dutch judges tried Japanese people who were responsible for war crimes in the Dutch East Indies during the war, and the Soviet Union brought former members of the Biological Warfare Unit 731 to trial at Khabarovsk in 1949.27 In total, only 5,379 Japanese war criminals were tried, 4,300 of whom were convicted (almost 1,000 with death penal- ties).28 Considering the number of atrocities committed by the Japanese Impe- rial Army between 1931 and 1945, far too few people were tried after the war, and the longer it took to arouse public interest in the crimes, the easier it was for those guilty of murder, rape, and torture to disappear forever to lead a normal life. Additionally, most of them got away because documents that could have proven their guilt were destroyed before U.S. forces could reach Japanese soil. From when a ceasefire was announced on August 15, 1945, until August 28, 1945—when the first American troops arrived in Japan—the Japanese military and civil authorities invested a large amount of work in destroying compromising archival materials, especially those related to the war years between 1942 and 1945. Field units were ordered to burn materials that would have provided evidence of violence and torture against POWs, among other things. It is estimated that 70 percent of the existing sources were destroyed in these two weeks,29 leaving behind a gap in history that can never be filled again and providing former war criminals with a chance to lead ordinary lives. Regardless of this intense purge of Japan’s official docu- mentation of the war, the U.S. military was still able to collect more than 350,000 documents related to the war and the crimes committed during it.30 Although most historians today agree that the vast majority of the documents that could have incriminated more Japanese war criminals were destroyed due to orders from the military command during the aforementioned 13-day period,31 the remaining ones provide a glimpse of the cruelties that domi- nated the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Once the Allied Powers had concluded the trials, interest in Japanese war crimes faded quickly, as the Cold War demanded new allies in the region against the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Because Japan became important again, the harsh prosecution of war criminals might have complicated the new alliance against communism. In Japan itself, the situation remained dominated by right-wing powers. When in 1957 a group of returning veterans, who had spent years in a Chi- nese prison, published their own first-person accounts of war crimes32 that had been committed in China during the war, it generated great interest. How- ever, a reprint of the book, whose first edition sold out within three weeks,
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