Gary J. Bass Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?

Surprising and humbling. It's an honour to be alongside these other amazing books by brilliant authors, all of them much more worthy than me. The other authors are an inspiration.

How did you conduct your research?

The research took years and years, and in the end, it took a full decade to research and write the book. It was by far the hardest project I’ve ever done. Because the book was meant to represent so many different perspectives, I dug through eighteen archives in seven nations, in Taipei, Delhi, Canberra, London, Paris, Washington, and more. The biggest challenge was the crushing weight of documentation about World War II and the early Cold War. The courtroom transcripts alone were just under 50,000 pages. Although the characters in the book are all dead, I tracked down their families in China, Japan, and India—interviewing the children of the Chinese judge in Beijing, and the children and grandchildren of the Indian judge in Kolkata. To try to better understand the legacy of World War II in Asia, I interviewed people across the region, including officials and activists in China and Japan, Japanese and Allied war veterans, and survivors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the American firebombing campaign. It was an honour to hear their stories and to learn from their experiences.

How do you see the impact of the Tokyo Trial on Japan reflected in its relationship with Allied powers today?

Japan today is a remarkably different country from what it was during World War II, breaking from imperialism and militarism to become a deeply peaceful, democratic, and responsible country. Yet many Japanese right-wingers still carry toxic opinions about wartime history. Japanese leaders have been more forthcoming about apologising to Americans and Australians for the wartime abuse of their prisoners, but the so-called “history issue” is still a major problem in Japan’s foreign policy in East Asia. Bad memories of the colonial past loom over Japan’s tense relationship with South Korea, and they allow an increasingly nationalistic China under Xi Jinping to hammer away at Japan.

What was the process of balancing the narrative between historical documentation and storytelling like?

That balance is always hard, but it was particularly difficult with so many documents from all these archives. The goal was for the book to be comprehensive and definitive so that it would satisfy the best historians, but also as dramatic as these events deserve. If you look at the endnotes, a single paragraph will be stitched together from papers in Taipei, London, The Hague, and Canberra. But the idea is to make that seamless for the reader, so that they’re just immersed in the unfolding narrative, not noticing what’s going on under the hood.

How do the themes explored in the book resonate with current global issues related to war and justice?

This book bites off more than it can chew just by talking about justice for World War II, but debates about the prospects for international justice are uncomfortably current. After a thirty-year statistical downturn in conflict after the end of the Cold War, there’s a global resurgence of violence and war—in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen (where Saudi Arabia is often heavily backed by the United States), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and more. So these debates after World War II about how to prevent war or to make it less damaging remain inescapable to this day. If only they weren’t.