Post by Registrar on Apr 15, 2013 17:16:53 GMT 8
One of the fundamental differences between the War Crimes trials, and criminal trials, is that the former were designed for the express purpose of getting at the truth (as well as punishing the guilty) whereas trials in conventional American and English criminal courts are an adversarial competition between lawyers whose skill with legal artifice and argument are more important than establishing the truth. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that A. Frank Reel's book reads more like a legal brief by a counsel who lost before the Supreme Court and wouldn't leave it alone than as an effort to establish the truth of Yamashita's conduct. Ditto Allan Ryan's book. Yamashita’s Ghost - War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability is a legal book by a law professor, not a history book by an historian.
One of the issues which was not raised in the Yamashita War Crimes trial was that of "similar fact" evidence of his command responsibility role in other massacres in other places. One might say that there were an awful lot of inconvenient facts established about Yamashita that have never been put in either Reel or Ryan's books.
Shortly after the British forces surrendered in Singapore on 15 February 1942, the Japanese military began an operation, called Kakyo Shukusei or Dai Kensho in Japanese and known in Chinese community of Singapore as the Sook Ching (Purge through Purification), in which many local Chinese were massacred. Although the killings have been investigated extensively by scholars in Malaysia and Singapore, the sources available to them are limited, and Japanese documents have not been fully utilized in such research.
The role of Yamashita in the Sook Ching is at the heart of that massacre. He is also at the heart of other massacres in China, but I'll deal with that subject at another time.
As I consider the paper by Prof. Hirofumi Hayashi is so pertinent to an understanding of how the revisionists are lying to the general public and falsifying history, I have taken the liberty of republishing this paper.
This article also raises the issue of why the facts of these massacres are so little known in Japan that revisionists can mislead and misrepresent the history of the war with a high confidence of impunity.