In the Japanese naming convention, family name comes first, followed by given name. For the sake of consistency, this book adopts the Western order of given name before family name as it largely draws on archival documents written in English. The only exceptions are the names of Dutch interpreters in nineteenth century Japan, which are presented in the traditional Japanese name order because they are historical figures. There are slight inconsistencies in how the names of some Japanese defendants are spelled within the relevant documents of the British military trials for Japanese war crimes. The standard spelling for trans literated Japanese names is used in those instances. The spelling and name order of Chinese and other non-Western names found in the archival documents are preserved. For Japanese-language titles of works cited, translations are provided by the author of this book. There are a number of references to the Asia–Pacific War, Kenpeitai and Nisei throughout this book. The Asia–Pacific War refers to the wars Japan engaged in covering the period from the Manchurian Incident (1931) through the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945). The Kenpeitai (sometimes spelled as Kempeitai) was the military police of the Japanese Army. In Japanese-occupied territories during the Asia–Pacific War, the Kenpeitai was notorious for its brutality in the name of maintaining public order. The Kenpeitai is referred to as Military Police, MP or Gendarmerie in some archi val documents in English. For consistency, the term Kenpeitai is used in this book. Nisei (literally, second-generation) refers to individuals born in the United States and Canada to parents who immigrated from Japan in the context of this book. Kibei is a subgroup of American Nisei who received some schooling in Japan and then returned to the United States. Interpreters are generally expected to be “invisible”. Metaphors to describe them, such as conduit, ghost, air and kuroko (stagehands dressed in black in Japanese traditional performing arts), indicate a societal supposition of interpreters being nothing but automatons receiving words in one language and rendering them in another. There is even a narrative that the more skilled interpreters are, the more they disappear into the background. Despite this common expectation of inter preters to be faithful language converters hidden in the shadows, over a hundred wartime interpreters came under the spotlight as key actors in the courtroom during war crimes trials against the Japanese in the aftermath of the Asia–Pacific War (1931–1945). On 26 July 1945, towards the end of the war, the United States, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, calling for Japan’s surrender and laying out terms of the surrender. Included was a forewarning of “stern justice” against “all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners”.1 Following the defeat of Japan, thousands of Japanese were pros ecuted for war crimes in international and national courts. The most promi nent was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (more commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial or Tokyo Trial)—the Japanese coun terpart of the Nuremberg Trial. The Tokyo Trial took place from May 1946 to November 1948, with 23 former Japanese military and political leaders as the accused,2 and was presided over by judges representing 11 nations. In addition, there were separate military trials administered by individual Allied nations: Australia, China, France, the Netherlands, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. Excluding those held by China under the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, there were a total of 2,244 trials against 5,700 defendants in 51 locations in the Asia Pacific over the period between February 1946 and April 1951.3 They are referred to as minor trials or Class BC trials as they dealt with Class B (war crimes) and Class C (crimes against humanity) crimes as opposed to Class A (crimes against peace), which were addressed at the Tokyo Trial.
