“Three Years and Eight Months”: War Crimes Trials of Kempeitai Crimes in Postwar Hong Kong

Modern legal understanding of command responsibility has been largely informed by the 1946 case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita in Manila, which established the rules that commanders are responsible for their troops’ crimes. This article shifts focus to a segment of war crimes trials held by the British military authorities in Hong Kong, to examine three trials in relation to the issue of command responsibility of the commanders of the Japanese military police for crimes perpetrated by the Kempeitai during the Japanese military occupation. By examining the court transcripts of these trials, this article explores the various arguments surrounding the criminal responsibility of the accused commanders and how wartime responsibilities were constructed after the war. This article argues that the British legal personnel moved beyond approaching civilian war crimes in terms of individual misconduct alone to hold commanders liable for crimes arising from organizational and command failures. These trials also offer an interesting example of the wider debates over the skewed application of law vis á vis the lack of procedural clarity, lax rules of evidence, inaccurate factual determinations, and the limits of postwar justice. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong legal history and deepens our understanding of the British attempts to achieve colony-wide demand for retribution after WWII.