
Judgment at Tokyo
World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Gary J. Bass
About this listen
WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD FROM THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS • ACCLAIMED AS ONE OF THE YEAR’S 10 BEST BOOKS BY THE WASHINGTON POST • 12 ESSENTIAL NONFICTION BOOKS BY THE NEW YORKER • 100 NOTABLE BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES • BEST BOOKS BY THE ECONOMIST, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, AND AIR MAIL • 10 ESSENTIAL BOOKS BY THE TELEGRAPH • MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE FINALIST • CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE FINALIST • BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE LONGLIST • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • THE OBSERVER AND THE SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK • DAUNT BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg
“Nothing less than a masterpiece. With epic research and mesmerizing narrative power, Judgment at Tokyo has the makings of an instant classic.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.
For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.
From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.
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Critic reviews
“Comprehensive, landmark and riveting. . . . Bass employs the complexities of the trial as a fulcrum to sketch a wide canvas. . . . Fascinating.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, The Washington Post
“A magisterial history. . . . A grand account. . . . Bass . . . has done a great service by spending a decade researching and writing what will surely be the definitive history . . . . Authoritative. . . . Few studies will be so balanced. . . . The book is a well-crafted, warts-and-all account from which almost no one emerges unscathed.”
—Bill Emmott, Financial Times
“Exhaustive and fascinating. . . . Placing the trial firmly in the context of colonialism, racial attitudes, the Cold War, and post-colonial Asian politics, Bass argues, quite rightly, that the trial ‘reveals some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia.’ . . . Bass is right to keep returning to the question of race.”
—Ian Buruma, The New Yorker
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Good book, but has some issues
- By Mike From Mesa on 11-10-22
By: Max Hastings
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The Knights of Bushido
- A History of Japanese War Crimes During World War II
- By: Lord Russell of Liverpool
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo meted out the Allies' official justice; Lord Russell of Liverpool's sensational bestselling books on the Axis' war crimes decided the public's opinion. The Knights of Bushido, Russell's shocking account of Japanese brutality in the Pacific in World War II, describes how the noble founding principles of the Empire of Japan were perverted by the military into a systematic campaign of torture, murder, starvation, rape, and destruction. Notorious incidents like the Nanking Massacre and the Bataan Death March emerge as merely part of a pattern of human rights abuses. Undoubtedly formidable soldiers, the Japanese were terrible conquerors. Their conduct in the Pacific is a harrowing example of the doctrine of mutual destruction carried to the extreme, and begs the question of what is acceptable—and unacceptable—in total war.
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Not for the faint of heart
- By Amazon Customer on 07-25-13
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Revolusi
- Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
- By: David Van Reybrouck
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 22 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after WWII.
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Solid Historical Survey
- By DavidPrestonokwu on 06-05-24
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The Court at War
- FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made
- By: Cliff Sloan
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice. But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president. The Court at War explores this pivotal period.
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Fascinating history
- By Richard on 03-14-24
By: Cliff Sloan
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Retribution
- The Battle for Japan, 1944 - 45
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 27 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In his critically acclaimed Armageddon, Hastings detailed the last twelve months of the struggle for Germany. Here, in what can be considered a companion volume, he covers the horrific story of the war against Japan. By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama–that ended in Japan’s utter devastation–was acted out across the vast stage of Asia.
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A superb study by one of the world's finest histor
- By Easton Reader on 12-22-16
By: Max Hastings
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Japan's Holocaust
- History of Imperial Japan's Mass Murder and Rape During World War II
- By: Bryan Mark Rigg PhD, Andrew Roberts - foreword
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Japan's Holocaust combines research conducted in over eighteen research facilities in five nations to explore Imperial Japan's atrocities from 1927 to 1945 during its military expansions and reckless campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific. This book brings together the most recent scholarship and new primary research to ascertain that Japan claimed a minimum of thirty million lives, slaughtering more than Hitler's Nazi Germany. Japan's Holocaust shows that Emperor Hirohito not only knew about the atrocities his legions committed, but actually ordered them.
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Holocaust is not just about the Jews.
- By Terry Talley on 05-16-25
By: Bryan Mark Rigg PhD, and others
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Case Red
- The Collapse of France
- By: Robert Forczyk
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Even after the legendary evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 there were still large British formations fighting the Germans alongside their French allies. After mounting a vigorous counterattack at Abbeville and then engaging a tough defense along the Somme, the British were forced to conduct a second evacuation from the ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, and St. Nazaire. Case Red captures the drama of the final three weeks of military operations in France in June 1940.
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Not Forczyk's best offering
- By S.C. James on 01-30-18
By: Robert Forczyk
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Catastrophe 1914
- Europe Goes to War
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 25 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles - the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg - that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility.
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I thought I knew the battle of the frontiers
- By Anonymous User on 04-02-21
By: Max Hastings
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A World Undone
- The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
- By: G. J. Meyer
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 27 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War.
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A great book!
- By Jodi Bernard on 07-11-23
By: G. J. Meyer
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The Rise of American Democracy
- Jefferson to Lincoln
- By: Sean Wilentz
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 39 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this magisterial work, Sean Wilentz traces a historical arc from the earliest days of the republic to the opening shots of the Civil War. One of our finest writers of history, Wilentz brings to life the era after the American Revolution, when the idea of democracy remained contentious, and Jeffersonians and Federalists clashed over the role of ordinary citizens in government of, by, and for the people. The triumph of Andrew Jackson soon defined this role on the national level, while city democrats, Anti-Masons, fugitive slaves, and a host of others hewed their own local definitions.
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If you need to sleep...
- By HueDCypher39 on 08-04-20
By: Sean Wilentz
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The Party
- The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
- By: Richard McGregor
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor's eye-opening investigation into China's Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China's economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the US; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China's secretive political machine.
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The content is good but the narrator is terrible
- By Kit on 02-24-20
By: Richard McGregor
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De Gaulle
- By: Julian Jackson
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 41 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In a definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept Nazi domination of France, Julian Jackson captures this titanic figure as never before. Drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archive, he reveals how this volatile visionary put a broken France back at the center of world affairs.
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Extremely British approach to de Gaulle
- By Keith on 05-31-19
By: Julian Jackson
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Emperor of Japan
- Meiji and His World, 1852-1912
- By: Donald Keene
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 38 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first Japanese emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan's history. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest.
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Great book. Terrible narration.
- By Ken Snyder on 07-05-23
By: Donald Keene
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Assad or We Burn the Country
- How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
- By: Sam Dagher
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 19 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising - an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis. Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged....
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Good until final chapter
- By Amazon Customer on 02-24-21
By: Sam Dagher
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The Rising Sun
- The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
- By: John Toland
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 41 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."
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A political as well as military history
- By Mike From Mesa on 07-30-15
By: John Toland
Forgotten history
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Revealing
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Ironically, the only word mispronounced is the English word 'diet', meaning the parliament. It is pronounced like a Japanese word written in roman script.
I hope Audible records an audiobook version of another thought-provoking book, The Blood Telegram, by Professor Gary J. Bass, soon.
Extraordinary and timely
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The complexity of the is both unexpected and at times overwhelming.
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Reflecting and compelling 80 years out
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A good History
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A lot of details
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Excellent!
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Important and well-researched
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The subject. At times I got a little bit redundant and boring, but for the most part, I enjoyed the book.
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