2016 marks 70 years since the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE).

In order to reassess its contents, the 3rd IMTFE research conference was held at Kokushikan University on December 19th, as part of a project presided by the University.

The keynote speaker was Henry S. Stokes, an internationally renowned journalist who has served as the Tokyo bureau chief of The Financial Times, The Times, and The New York Times.

The conference was well attended. Over 200 people gathered, including students, and some people even had to stand due to the full house. Despite his poor health, Stokes spoke on the falsity of the IMTFE and of journalism, with a strong determined voice.

The IMTFE Is Invalid

In his speech, Stokes said that for the victorious nations to pass judgement upon the defeated nations was an act not to be forgiven. The Military Tribunal was a revenge tragedy, and a crime.

Stokes made a reference to “Judicial Murder?: Macarthur and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial” a book by an Australian Doctor of Laws, Dayle K. Smith, in which Dr. Smith declares the invalidity of the IMTFE, pointing to the illegality of the IMTFE.

In addition, Stokes advanced that the Nanking Massacre was propaganda that the Chinese equivalent of the CIA created. One reason that the world is convinced the Nanking Massacre really occurred is due to the worldwide popularity of a book entitled “What War Means” by former newspaper journalist Harold J. Timperley. Timperley, however, was actually an agent of the Chinese Nationalist Party.

Stokes also said that the people who reported about the Nanking Massacre and the IMTFE were members of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. He expressed his desire as a journalist to correct these falsified facts about the Nanking Massacre and the IMTFE; to reignite pride in the people of Japan.

First, the People of Japan Must Change Their Historical Views

Many people have yet to grasp this truth.

International journalist Hiroyuki Fujita served as translator in the conference. In the Q&A session, he commented, “Being in The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan is like being in the Asahi Shimbun company in that almost everyone agrees with the IMTFE. But if the people of Japan change their views, the Club members will also start to change their views. There is hope for change.”

The people of Japan must reassess the Greater East Asia War, and adopt the correct historical view that ‘through the war, Japan emancipated Asia and Africa from European and American colonization’.

There is a need to first spread the correct historical view throughout Japan, and then to spread that even further to the rest of the world.

Only then can we really repay our forefathers, who lost their lives fighting in the war for Japan and the world.