Tokyo trial, the forgotten NurembergFrance 2, 23 hours
We would have liked to say more good about this documentary, but the form of work copy, the only document available until Monday morning, is so problematic that it causes fundamental problems.
The first being that the viewer may well not go to the end and therefore miss the essential, however interesting. It is indeed very difficult to follow the film by undergoing the two Robotic Voices generated by artificial intelligence: they strip words, come up against the dates, massacre names of cities and historical characters … As for the subtitles, undoubtedly born at the same source, they are very approximate with regard to English (honesty pushes us to write to us, but we fear the worse).
Dangerous misinterpretations
But there is worse. In this version, when the testimony of Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister and Minister of Japan was discussed from 1941 to 1944, the commentary is incomprehensible: “To believe his lawyer, it was not he who attacked Japan, but the opposite. »» Unless they believe that, in his frenzy, the one who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, the conquests of Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, etc., also wanted to turn against his own country? We had to hear “Who attacked the United States”but it would have been necessary to record the right country.
One cannot believe that the historian Jean-Yves Le Naour, who wrote the texts, watched the film before making available to journalists. In this case, we see how to rest on the AI is dangerous. Especially on the public service, which should ensure that the quality is there at each of its meetings-the program is nevertheless part of a “big event evening”.
A documentary in the image of its form: terrifying
However, the film has something to seduce. We follow a much longer and difficult process there than the Nuremberg trial, from May 1946 to December 1948, when its German counterpart lasted from November 1945 to October 1946. It is that the justice rendered on behalf of the victims of war crimes was biased there: the main fault could not be heard or accused, the emperor Hirohito, by his divine nature being untouchable.
As for the Americans, they did everything to save him, even if it means tampering with the debates, or even excluding deliberations the discordant voices. Because a puppet emperor to exhibit, as part of the reconstruction of a Japan subject to the economic and strategic interests of the United States, is more interesting than a martyr.
But that is not the only reason why the trial lasted. The eleven judges and eleven prosecutors (one of each by nation involved) also raised the thread of Japanese assaults on its neighbors: Manchuria, China, Indonesia … If the massacres in Indochina are not considered as war crimes, it is that soldiers, French and colonized, were no longer part of the regular army, the resistance fighters not considered as military. We also get to know Shiro Ishii, the “Japanese Mengele”, who will obtain the immunity of the Americans against the results of his work on prisoners of war. Terrifying, and devilishly instructive if we pass the pitfall from the form.
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