Lenox Library to Host Award-Winning Author Gary Bass
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LENOX, Mass. — The Lenox Library will welcome award-winning author Gary Bass to discuss his book, "Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024 at 5:30 p.m.
Books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of The Bookstore.
Acclaimed as one of 2023's best books by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, New York Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Air Mail, and more, Judgment at Tokyo is a landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan's leaders as war criminals—the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg.
According to a press release:
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.
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.
Gary Bass is the author of "The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bernard Schwartz Book Award from the Asia Society, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, and the Lionel Gelber Prize, among other awards.
He is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His previous books are Freedom's Battle and Stay the Hand of Vengeance.
A former reporter for The Economist, Bass writes often for The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and other publications.
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