The Tokyo Tribunal’s Legal Origins and Contributions to International Jurisprudence as Illustrated by Its Treatment of Sexual Violence

When my generation of international legal scholars came of age, efforts to research the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (‘IMTFE’) turned up remarkably few resources, at least in the English-language literature. Those we found invariably began by noting how little attention the Tribunal had received compared to the International Military Tribunal (‘IMT’) in Nuremberg. And when legal scholars did acknowledge the Tokyo Tribunal, they typically did so by adding “and Tokyo” to their reflections on Nuremberg’s legal legacy. Thus in the legal academy as in other disciplines, the Tokyo Tribunal was widely treated as “a sister institution, nothing more”.In consequence, the Tribunal’s distinctive contributions to the field of international criminal law were long obscured, with important exceptions to be sure. Writing as recently as 2010, one scholar noted that some experts in this field “completely overlook the IMTFE’s existence” or misstated key features of its operation and legacy. This is notable. After all, the Tribunal played a foundational role in international criminal law, a field whose explosive growth in the early 1990s was one of the signal developments in international law in the latter half of the twentieth century. What, then, accounts for legal scholars’ relative neglect of the Tokyo Tribunal? This chapter explores several key reasons, and then considers how the resulting gap in knowledge diminished the generally rich body of scholarship in the field of international criminal law