“Against Invisible Enemies”: Japanese Bacteriological Weapons and China's Cold War, 1949-1950

Japanese soldiers and scientists perpetrated horrific war crimes across Asia from 1931-1945, but the investigation of, and trials for, these crimes occurred almost wholly within the politically-charged environment of the Cold War. Just as Cold War tensions colored the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, ideological competition deeply inflected the manner of Allied prosecution of Japanese war crimes. The victorious parties in the World War – the United States, the Soviet Union, and two divergent Chinese regimes – each brought its own particular political needs to the postwar war crimes trials of Japanese defendants. Having swaggered into Tokyo's undestroyed buildings in September 1945, the American occupation regime used war crimes trials to convince the Japanese people (and skeptical American observers) that only a small clique of militarists had been responsible for the cataclysm of the Pacific War, absenting Emperor Hirohito from culpability.