Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia, 1945-1956

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. War Crimes Trials in Asia: Collaboration and Complicity in the Aftermath of War

   • Kerstin von Lingen, Robert Cribb

   Pages 1-18

3. Koreans in the Trials of Japanese War Crimes Suspects

   • Sandra Wilson

   Pages 19-40

4. Defining Colonial “War Crimes”: Korean Debates on Collaboration, War Reparations, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

   • Deokhyo Choi

   Pages 41-59

5. Oaths of Allegiance in the Singapore Trials

   • CHEAH Wui Ling

   Pages 61-78

6. Puppets, Profiteers and Traitors: Defining Wartime Collaboration in the Dutch East Indies, 1945–1949

   • Esther Zwinkels

   Pages 79-104

7. Between Postoccupation and Postcolonial: Framing the Recent Past in the Philippine Treason Amnesty Debate, 1948

   • Konrad M. Lawson

   Pages 105-128

8. Japanese Medical Atrocities and the Collaboration of the Scientific Elites: Postwar Perspectives

   • Arnaud Doglia

   Pages 129-149

9. The Question of Complicity: Japan’s Early Postures toward War Crimes and War Responsibility in the Aftermath of the Second World War

   • Barak Kushner

   Pages 151-176

10. Erratum to: Oaths of Allegiance in the Singapore Trials

    • CHEAH Wui Ling

    Pages E1-E1

11. Back Matter

    Pages 177-185

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This innovative volume examines the nexus between war crimes trials and the pursuit of collaborators in post-war Asia. Global standards of behaviour in time of war underpinned the prosecution of Japanese military personnel in Allied courts in Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s contradictory roles in the Second World War as brutal oppressor of conquered regions in Asia and as liberator of Asia from both Western colonialism and stultifying tradition set the stage for a tangled legal and political debate: just where did colonized and oppressed peoples owe their loyalties in time of war? And where did the balance of responsibility lie between individuals and nations? But global standards jostled uneasily with the pluralism of the Western colonial order in Asia, where legal rights depended on race and nationality. In the end, these limits led to profound dissatisfaction with the trials process, despite its vast scale and ambitious intentions, which has implications until today.

• War criminals
• World War Two
• International law
• Second World War
• Colonial powers

• Heidelberg University , Heidelberg, Germany

  Kerstin von Lingen

Kerstin von Lingen is Researcher and Lecturer at Heidelberg University, Germany, in the ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ Cluster of Excellence. Since 2013, she has led an independent research group, ‘Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice within the East Asian War Crimes Trials, 1945-1954’. She is the 2016 laureate of the International Chair for the History of the Second World War, awarded by the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

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